CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

I’ve been signing a lot of books lately and it’s a warm, wonderful ritual that people find rewarding. You would think that in an age of ebooks, the actual physical act of an author signing a book that a stranger has purchased would disappear. But no–just the opposite. Signing that book, with a personal message and your unique signature, creates an intimate bond between writer and reader. People smile, laugh a little self-consciously, open the curtain of privacy with their requests and tell you stories in the brief moments of the signing. It’s immensely satisfying and meaningful. 

Ritual and ceremony are critical to creativity. We recognize them in book signings as punctuating and celebrating creativity but they are important in the process of creating itself. Play is a ritual process that has rules that help lead us to surprising, new outcomes. It is a game that we can create ourselves, writing and rewriting the rules, framing and reframing the playing. These are all key creative competencies. 

The research lab where a few people meet every day at the same time and “play” at science and engineering is a place of ritual. The morning meeting that we go to, where ideas are proposed and discussed and chosen, is a ritual activity.

The inkjet printer that we use so often came out of an HP lab where two researchers met daily and went through the ritual process of discovery. The most important thing Steve Jobs did as CEO was to visit nearly every day with his chief designer Jonathan Ives in Ives’ studio where they slowly walked around products and prototypes, touching, handling them, seeing how they worked, talking about them. That daily conversation was ritual. As was Jobs long walks by himself. 

Rituals and ceremonies play two critical roles in creativity. They are a process that can get us to originality and new value. And they are windows into what is deeply meaningful to people. That so many people still buy physical books and want the ceremony of connecting with the author shows something significant about our culture. We demand the immediacy and ease of digital delivery but still desire the warmth and tactility of the “book.”

As an author, it’s just wonderful to be part of all of this. As an author of a book on creativity, its wonderful to participate in what you are writing about.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

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I once spent a drunken evening with the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who died mysteriously in London recently. Berezovsky had fled Russia many years ago and feared for his life during his exile. The former mathematics professor had made billions of dollars when the Soviet empire collapsed and state assets moved into private hands opaquely. I met him at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a year or two after he fled Moscow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/world/europe/boris-a-berezovsky-a-putin-critic-dies-at-67.html?ref=world&_r=0

This is how I remember the key part of that long dinner. After many, many drinks,   Berezovsky said in Russian-accented English, “"Bruce, I pay taxes to those who protect me and the government doesn’t protect me. So I pay taxes to those who can.”

Framing and Reframing are essential Creative Competencies in my book and Boris’ startling words were among the strongest to cause me to begin thinking about the concept. Why? Like everyone else, I had always thought of Russia after the fall of communism as a corrupt place where the KGB, Russian Mafia and ruthless political players ruled. That was my narrative frame of Russia after communism.

Boris presented me with a simpler yet deeper and more sophisticated story. That narrative frame for Russia was one of a power-vacuum opening with the collapse of the state and Boris, like so many other businessmen, paid protection money to whomever could provide security. He would pay taxes to the government if it could provide safety but since it couldn’t, he paid “taxes” to tough guys in and out of government who could. Nothing more, nothing less. It was a story devoid of morality or moral lessons–just practicality.

Boris’ frame of Russian business life was so startling different from mine that it always stayed with me. It informed my analysis of creativity and my book on it. Knowing the narrative frame of the people we engage is vitally important to understanding the meaning of their culture and their place in it.

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Keith Sawyer, the author of Group Genius, has another great book out–Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Creativity.  Keith is a giant in the field of creativity research. His Group Genius blew up the notion that brainstorming led to more creativity. 

Zig Zag will show you how creativity happens.

Check out his book site: 

http://ascc.artsci.wustl.edu/~ksawyer/zigzag/

Buy the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118297709/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1118297709&linkCode=as2&tag=keitsawy-20

I’m about to start the second unit of my Creativity and Capitalism course at Parsons which will focus on ritual and play as the paths to understanding the existential and the deep meaning of cultures.

For the business folks, we will focus on Branding and how the successful brand succeeds in mining the existential–how it succeeds in understanding and representing what is meaningful to the culture of its audience. 

Its not about satisfying needs or even wants. A great brand speaks to the higher order desires of people. No focus group or marketing research can get to these higher order desires of people because they are usually tacit and unexpressed–yet real and meaningful.

So we read the following together and talk about stuff:

Readings Unit Two:

for March 18:
Lewis Hyde “The Bones of the Dead” from The Gift
David Foster Wallace “Federer as Religious Experience”

following, in yet-to-be-determined order:

Dreyfus and Kelly, “Our Contemporary Nihilism” from All Things Shining
Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics”
Barthes, Selections from Mythologies
Cowbird, especially the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project
to be read in prep for April 1st (Annie Correal guest)
Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development”

I have a piece in the Wall Street Journal that shows how employees in large corporations can reframe their jobs and careers by getting more creative. It offers up 10 specific ways for people to increase their value to their employers–and to themselves.

Check out the entire WSJ piece here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/03/11/how-to-become-the-creative-employee-of-the-month/

Here are:  10 Fast Ways to Boost Your Creative Intelligence

1) Find a creative friend. The social aspect of creativity cannot be underestimated. Spending time with creative peers can  boost your energy and help you identify your own creative skills.

2) Map your creativity. Keep a daily journal about the places and activities that inspire you. Add something new one every month. Just changing the way you go to work every day can help.

3) Go for a long walk–or run or bike ride. Give yourself  “zone-out” time to let your mind integrate all the new ideas you’re taking in. Creativity is social but still requires “alone time” too.

4)  Conduct a “creativity audit.” Take a weekend to think about the knowledge and skills you have that you might be underutilizing. Dive deep into yourself. Bring a close friend to help.

5)  Play the “reframe game.” Is your business or industry stagnating? Change the conventional wisdom about the way things have always been done and create something entirely new by connecting two previously unrelated ideas.

6) Find a wanderer. In their heyday, the labs at HP were hugely creative thanks to the founders’ policy of “managing by wandering around.” They choose promising research and championed it. Seek out the person at your organization who can help you bring your ideas into the world.

7) Become a wanderer.  Find out what your colleagues and employees are thinking about and ask yourself: how can you help support their ideas? Can you become the person who makes things happen, whether by partnering with them or hooking them up with the right people?
8) Slow down. The rise in social media has left many of us longing for deeper, more meaningful experiences and engagements. There is an increasing need for people and organizations who can devise ways to help people simplify their lives.

9) Venture past the possible. We are often so accustomed to seeing things in a certain way that we’re blind to the possibility of something we can’t yet imagine. Set aside time each week to think about why things are the way they are, and imagine them differently.

10) Embrace uncertainty . There is so much change in our lives and in our work that it scares us, even paralyzes us. Yet uncertainty offers the greatest opportunities. With the right creative skills, you can make uncertainty a place of discovery for you.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

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Dan Pink’s new book, To Sell is Human, is on all the best-seller lists. It’s terrific. I noticed a while back that nearly all my students at Parsons are incredible performers. They can switch on a stage persona that  "sells" whatever they are pitching at that moment. They grew up with participative video, they don’t just watch but act. Fits right into what Dan is talking about in his book.

Dan did a Q & A with me for his blog site. Here it is. 

http://www.danpink.com/2013/03/be-mindful-meaningful-and-masterly-3-questions-for-bruce-nussbaum

Here’s the part about “Donut Thinking." 

It took me about 10 years to become a decent birder. Birding is all about seeing the “odd duck.” You spend years in the field training to look for what’s NOT there. In Singapore four years ago, I saw a black swan. It didn’t surprise me. I was looked for what didn’t fit the pattern. That’s what “Donut Knowledge” or “Donut Thinking” is about. You spend the time to learn the patterns and then you train yourself to look for what doesn’t fit.”

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On Thursday at around 4PM, I’ll be talking to the designers at Frog in their great Chelsea digs about the ideas in my book, Creative Intelligence. It will be cool since the founder of Frog, Hartmut Esslinger, was the first designer I put on a Business Week cover back in 1990. I can’t find an image of that cover anywhere. There’s Hartmut, fresh from giving Apple its first design language, in leathers, straddling a big motorcycle. Readers loved it.

I hear there’s an image this cover hanging on the wall of Frog in San Francisco. If so, send it to me. I’ll put it up. 

I’ll be talking “Old Model” vs “New Model” at Frog, throwing out my new creative competencies of Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting to the pros to see how their clients can use the new ideas. Very casual and fun. I have a weird Keynote presentation that I may or may not show, depending on the vibe. It has  clip of Zero Dark Thirty, which shows how the CIA analyst, Maya, used Creative Intelligence to get Osama.

Did you know that the CIA has long been involved in creativity research?

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I went back to the June 2006 cover of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly supplement I founded at BusinessWeek to look at Marissa Mayer’s 9 Notions of Innovation. The subtitle was "Marissa Mayer, The Talent Scout.“  Mayer has Stanford U degrees in symbolic systems and computer science and patents in Artificial Intelligence.  She was the first female engineer at Google, its #20 hire and took charge of search products and the user experience.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-18/marissa-mayer-the-talent-scout

Here are her "9 Notions of Innovation:

1-Ideas comes from everywhere. Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team

2- Share everything you can. Every idea, every project, every deadline–it’s all accessible to everyone on the internet

3- You’re brilliant,  we’re hiring. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience.

4- A license to pursue dreams. Employees get a "free” day a week. Half of new launches come from this “20% time.”

5- Innovation, not instant perfection. Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely.

6- Don’t politic, use data. Mayer discourages the use of “I like” in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics.

7- Creativity loves restraint. Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines.

8- Worry about usage and users, not money. Provide something simple to use and easy to love. The money will follow. 

9- Don’t kill projects–morph them. There’s always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.“

The controversy surrounding Mayer’s decision to end remote working and have everyone be physically present in the office is reflected in these notions of how you generate innovation. It is a very Silicon Valley, techie model of brilliant engineers coming up with new techie functions that are then tossed out into the world to see if there is an audience for them. It often works. It more often fails.

There is a much better way–understand what is culturally meaningful to people and THEN generate the innovation that satisfies their aspirations. Or do both simultaneously and have engineers and designers work together to design new products and services.

Either way, what Google and Yahoo need right now is to get the cultural meaning  part right. They need to move beyond the engineer-centric reliance on numbers and data to tell them about the world and get into the world itself to understand it. They might find that the employees  staying home and raising their children have important ideas for the products and services that are meaningful to millions of people.

I talk about Knowledge Mining and Framing in Creative Intelligence. It just may be that Mayer and her old bosses at Google need to rely less on the "best” intelligence of their engineers and more on the creative intelligence of people who embody the lives of their customers. Then they could reframe who and how they employ and what they actually offer up in the marketplace.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

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I did a cover story on Marissa Mayer in 2006 for IN: Inside Innovation and spent time with her. She was many things at Google, but her most important role was as a designer. There was pressure from Google’s engineers to put all the functions they could dream up on that page but Mayer kept Google’s engagement with its audience simple, clean and clear. It beckoned us to use it. Google’s search page had aura and still does.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/06_25/B39890625innovation.htm

Mayer’s other big role was innovation. She did much of the hiring and shaped much of the way innovation happened at Google. Mayer knows that creativity is social. Creativity comes out of the interplay of people and ideas. Which is why, as head of Yahoo, she wants everyone to be physically present. 

But  simply “being there” may not be the kind of social interaction that generates the creativity Mayer seeks. I write in Creative Intelligence that “As much as we love stories about serendipity,” seeking out the right people may be as important, if not more so, than accidentally bumping into them. It’s very hard to play with strangers that you can’t trust.“

Creativity tends to flow out of small teams of people who trust each other and  know how to play with one another to puzzle out  new challenges. They also tend  share deep knowledge of specific fields. I believe that this is the "magic circle” that generates the best creativity.

And if that is true, then it just might be possible to use the great new videoconferencing technologies like HALO and Telepresence  to bring these small teams together wherever they are, including home. I’ve personally used them and you can talk to people anywhere and its like chatting across the table. They are emotionally powerful.

Cisco is putting Telepresence into apartments in Korea. Yahoo should consider putting them into the apartments and houses of those potential creators who are now working at home. If serendipity isn’t all that its cracked up to be and sociability is the key to creativity, then you just might be able to build those magic circles with people tending to their kids at home.

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