CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

I watched The Normal Heart on HBO and loved every minute of it. Finally, after decades, Larry’s dream of getting it to the screen is fulfilled. And beautifully done.

 I first met Larry Kramer in the late 80’s when I was researching my book, Good Intentions, I knew him in his second act, as leader of ACT UP, which he started AFTER he was thrown out of the Gay Mens Health Clinic (which he also helped found). 

ACT UP did many things but the most significant was to change the way drugs are tested in America. In its drive to speed up drug-testing to save the lives of people dying with HIV, it sped up the way drugs are tested for everyone. Even as thousands of men were coming down with AIDS and dying every day, the FDA and NIH insisted that possible treatments be tested the conventional way, over many years. They rejected appeals to change their methods until ACT UP put tremendous public and private pressure on them. 

An underground  drug treatment underground was created by the gay community to test drugs and speed treatment. The Community Research Initiative–CRI- tested new, alternative drugs. 

Larry led the fight against the NIH to change and speed up its drug-testing procedures. And, in the end, he succeeded. The treatments available today, promising a normal life for normal hearts, is due in large part to Larry’s angry pushing and shoving.

I haven’t read Good Intentions for many years but I did today in preparation for The Normal Heart movie. The stuff on ACT UP is pretty ggod. And the cast of characters in the book are wonderful. Not many are still alive, except for Larry, but they are all heroes. They helped save their community–and all communities.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Intentions-Business-Establishment-Corrupting/dp/0871133857/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401077345&sr=1-1&keywords=bruce+nussbaum+good+intentions

Lisa Kay Solomon is one of the smartest strategic thinkers that I know. She and Chris Ertel have book coming out in the Spring that you want to read if you manage people. 

The most common complaint I get from managers is “I’m so booked i don’t have time to….” Then fill it in. “Think.” “Prioritize.” “Innovate.” Whatever. 

This complaint personally drives me nuts. It means people are too busy being busy to be effective. But they use being busy as a metric of effectiveness. Longer hours, meetings, ever always being tired are markers of sacrifice.

But not necessarily results.

Lisa is a scenario planner, professor of innovation in the great MBA program in Design Strategy at CCA and coach. She was a terrific source when I was doing research for Creative Intelligence.

Now I’m going to pile into the proof of her book.

I recently gave a speech that makes the case for Progressive Education teaching the right kind of creativity skills that startup entrepreneurs need. Take a look at the case and let me know what you think.

The Power of Progressive Education: Can Creative Thinking be Taught?

                         Bruce Nussbaum. 1/10/14

                          City & Country 

Some years back, IBM did one of its annual global CEO surveys. It asked 1500 chief executives around the world what was the single most important leadership ability. The majority answered “CREATIVITY.”  They didn’t say “Strategy,” or “Operations” or “Marketing.” They said “CREATIVITY.”

I was running the editorial page at Business Week at the time and I was absolutely stunned. Never before had creativity been seen as so central to generating economic value by so many leaders of big global businesses.  So, being a good business journalist, I asked three questions:

First, why now? Why were a lot of middle aged white guys trained in B-Schools in the of efficiency and problem-solving suddenly interested in CREATIVITY, which they usually associate with art, fashion, music, interior design, films and writing?

Second, what the heck is creativity anyhow?

And third, where do you go to get more creativity? How do you actually learn to increase your creative capacity?

In fact, how do you even measure creativity?

The answer to why is creativity is so hot in business today is VUCA. We live in an unusual historical moment of constant, cascading change.  We live in a VUCA moment—a time of VOLATILITY, UNCERTAINTY, COMPLEXITY AND AMBIGUITY. VUCA.

We had a VUCA moment at the turn of the 19^th century and we’re in one today.  Most of historical time is spent slowly adjusting to one or two big technological or social changes over a period of many decades.

But when you have huge technological, demographic, social and global changes happening all at once, the problems are ever-changing and the solutions are OPEN-ENDED. Indeed, the most important problem-solving capability is learning to identify the right problem and then selecting the best of many possible answers.  

As we will see today, that is precisely what PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION does.  In fact, the blocks associated with progressive education are called OPEN-ENDED MATERIALS.  Startup entrepreneurialism, of course, is also about open-ended challenges and solutions. The twin streams of entrepreneurialism and progressive education are merging. It is no accident that

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin went to progressive education schools where they were taught to be creative.

So what is creativity anyhow?  I recently wrote a book called Creative Intelligence, CQ–as in IQ, EQ and now CQ In it, I define creativity as simply the making of the new  that has value. Often, that originality has ECONOMIC VALUE.  In stable times, making the same thing more efficiently squeezes out economic value. In VUCA times, making the new can generate huge economic value.  Just look at the stock market valuations of Apple, Facebook and Twitter.

Let me tell you what Creativity is not. Creativity is not rare. It is not about individual genius. And it is not about brain waves. Creative skills and values and can be taught and we can ALL learn them.  Creativity is mostly social—we do it in dyads, triads and teams—even as we often connect the dots alone taking that shower, running or spacing out over coffee.  Above all, Creativity is about knowing what is meaningful in culture and harnessing technology to amplify that meaning.

So where do we go to get more of this creativity?  Well, I teach graduate and college students how to boost their creativity right here at New School. We do Personal Creativity Mapping, Design Narratives and deep readings of  Tanazaki and Cziksimahli. Around the block, City & Country, as we shall see, is coaching children to be more creative.  What goes on in C&C classrooms is similar to what happens in the best high-tech labs or the smartest startups or on the hottest business development teams. They are all MAGIC CIRCLES OF CREATIVITY.

For example, the era of wearable technology was born not with Google Glass on the West Coast but here in New York, in Chelsea, at RG/A which developed Nike Plus in a creative process that mirrors what happens at City & Country.

Whether it is MIT, Stanford, Parsons or City & Country, learning 4 or 5 key creativity skills will boost your CQ, your Creative Intelligence.

Let me offer my version of these creative skills. The first is Knowledge Mining. In a world of VUCA, the most important thing in business – in life – is knowing what is meaningful to people. Not just their NEEDS but what Frank Knight, Chicago School economist, calls “higher order wants.” 

You can Mine for these higher order wants two ways. First, through immersion—those 10,000 hours of study that makes you expert, but, more importantly, shows you the deep patterns. Once you get the patterns, you can see the new, create the new.

I am a birder. I am trained to look for the odd duck. It’s not an anomaly, not unusual. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours in the field and always look for what is NOT there. When I saw a Black Swan in Singapore, I was not surprised. I mined the patterns.

The other way to mine for meaning is mining OURSELVES—what we embody as a generation, a gender, a region, a religious  group. Look at the young entrepreneurs who have given us Facebook, Google, Airbnb (founded by a RISD grad,  BTW).  Why are they successful? They mined what is meaningful to their generation– the values, technology, and aspirations of their friends.

 How do you get ZipCar? Connect the dots of wanting a cheap ride, a value system of sharing, not owning, and  new online technology. Very simple. Instagram? Connect the dots of a value system of sharing to new technologies of easy image taking and posting online. Spotify? Match.com? The same. Mining what we ourselves embody as a group.

A second creative skill and perhaps the most important is Framing and Reframing. We frame our narratives—the story of our lives—in different ways to different people. And we frame our social engagements—how we relate to people—differently in different social mediums. Knowing this—you can reframe and change and generate the new. To my 95-year old mother, medicine is about disease and cures, with the doctor at the center. To me, medicine is about wellbeing and maximizing my abilities to do what I want. I am at the center of my health care. Very different frames.

A third creative skill is Play. Play is serious. Entrepreneurs, scientists, jazz musicians, stand-up comedians—all MESS AROUND. They use the processes of Play to generate the new. And what is that process of Play? You follow a game, with rules and constraints, doing it with people you trust. You succeed or fail in any number of ways—it is OPEN ENDED. You try and try again—you iterate. Serious Play is a 21^st Century creative competence.

So is Making, my fourth creative skill.  Thanks to new low-cost social systems like Kickstarter, technologies like 3-D printing, and networks like Etsy and Amazon,  each of us can be makers not only of things but of global businesses as well.  The cost of being creative in America is plummeting.

The final creative skill is Scaling. Taking creativity and scaling it to actual creation of things and services is the heart of generating economic value.  The skills of Scaling are different from the skills of Creativity—but to me, they are essential to the process.  I call the people who scale Wanderers but they are really CURATORS—the  General Managers, the coaches, the teachers, the angel investors, the gallery owners, the bloggers—the people who decide what is truly creative for their circle. Steve Jobs, Peggy Guggenheim, Mrs. Hewlett and Packard, Fred Wilson, Mark Pinney—all great curators of creativity.

Now let me show you a clip from City & Country that shows nearly all these Creative Skills in action in the classroom. For those of you in the audience who haven’t been over to look at what happens inside a Progressive Education classroom, this will blow you away.  ROLL VIDEO—CLICK.

So what have we seen? We see children learning by doing, not memorizing. We see them mining for meaning, framing and reframing, PLAYING and MAKING. The store is real at City & Country. The kids really run it.

Let me end with question I am frequently asked – Isn’t it impossible really to measure creativity. Well, really, you can.  Many of the best companies, the best schools, the best sports programs and the worst TV reality shows assess creativity all the time and pretty much in the same way. They do it through Portfolio, Performance and Expert Juries.

I call it the Julliard School methodology.

The smartest companies and the most cutting-edge startups don’t care if you went to Harvard, Stanford or Yale. They want to see what you can do and how you do it. They want to see your portfolio of projects first. And then they want you to actually perform in front of them—to work a challenge with others in real time. The outcome is open-ended and the result doesn’t matter. They want to see how you play.

And they judges? Research shows that an expert jury in the specific field does a great job of identifying excellence and exceptionalism. Whether its Dancing with Stars, the Olympics, or Google, you can assess creativity—but first you must value it.

Thank you.

Let me now get my friend and mentor Tucker Veimeister up here…

There was a packed house at the Tishman Auditorium Friday night for an amazing panel on how Progressive Education promotes the kind of creative skills that people need to make them more entrepreneurial. I gave a speech and hosted the event which you can see here:

http://new.livestream.com/TheNewSchool/progressive

My friend and mentor, the great designer Tucker Viemeister, was the first to show me the connection between Progressive Education and Design Thinking (they are almost identical) and he brought me on board to help City & Country school celebrate its 100th anniversary. 

New School President David Van Zandt was kind enough to lend C & C its Tishman Auditorium (New School’s roots are in Progressive Education as well, thanks to John Dewey) and he gave a wonderful, funny, introduction.

There were amazing talks by Charles Adler, co-founder of Kickstarter, Lori Brewslow, Director of the Teaching & Learning Lab at MIT, David Rockwell who designs everything, including playgrounds, Mark Pinney, CFO of Vimeo, Eric Freitag, Director of Product Innovation at RG/A, Kate Turley, the Pincipal of City & Country, an extraordinary person, 

We’ve all been to lots of big events like this but this, for me, was one of the very best.

So take  moment to think about the connection between Progressive Education and Innovation and Economics. It’s critically important to get away from memorizing answers to problems and testing for them to move on to teaching people how to think creatively about understanding what is meaningful in a situation, being open-ended in facing challenges, and making the new. 

Creative Intelligence made this short-list for best books in 2013 on innovation and creativity. CEO-Read focuses on books for businesss execs and managers who want to raise their creativity game. Is that you?

http://blog.800ceoread.com/2013/12/13/the-2013-800-ceo-read-business-book-awards-shortlist-innovation-creativity/

I’m in good company on the list. David and Tom Kelley’s Creative Confidence is on the list as well.

Back in 2010, IBM did a global survey of 1500 CEOs. For the first time, the CEOs said that creativity was the most important leadership ability. Creativity is more important today for senior managers than operations, marketing or strategy.

Leadership plays two central roles in promoting creativity. First, CEOs must understand what is meaningful to their companies’ customers. This is not the same thing as conventional strategy. Knowing what Frank Knight, the Chicago School of Economics founder called “higher order wants,” not just needs, is key in orienting your business. Lou Gerstner saved IBM in the 1980s by talking with its customers and discovering that they wanted help, not heavy metal big computers, from IBM. He turned it into a service company.

Knowing how to mine meaning is a key creative competency.

Second, curating creativity and then scaling what offers the most value and the greatest chance of success is a key CEO/leadership capability. Nearly all the great labs and great companies that innovate well have terrific curators of creativity who supply finance, markets and the making stuff to what they believe will provide value. In the art world, these curators are patrons. In sports, coaches. In startups, venture capitalists (or crowdfunders as in Kickstarter).

My thanks tot he curators at CEO-Read for including Creative Intelligence in their list of Best Books for 2013.

 A huge reaction against teaching to the test is underway and the US is desperately seating for a new educational curriculum to promote creativity in its children. Ironically, there is already a 100-year old methodology that is a wonderful way for K-12 children to increase their creative capacities–Progressive Education. It is no accident that Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin all went to Montessori school. Many other startup founders majored in Design or Art in college, learning in very similar classroom environments.

Creativity can be learned. We can all learn to be more creative. And many of us can learn to be exceptionally creative.

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I show how creativity is directly linked to entrepreneurialism. We can all learn creative competencies that increase economic value, whether it is in the starting up of a new company or the launch of new services and products that engage customers. 

In early January, City & Country, one of the earliest Progressive Education-based schools in New York City and in the US is celebrating its centennial birthday and if you can, you should come.  The event will be in the beautiful modernist Tishman Auditorium, designed by Joseph Urban,  at The New School (also founded as a Progressive Education style school with John Dewey as its leader).

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-power-of-progressive-education-can-creative-thinking-be-taught-tickets-9448038337

There will be great speakers, from Kickstarter, the Rockwell Group, Vimeo, RGA, MIT, Kid-O and yours truly. 

Progressive Education=Creativity=Entrepreneurship

US students did not do as well as Shanghai students on global math tests–yet again. And we beat ourselves over this fact.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-cant-we-do-better.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

At the same time, Chinese parents are increasingly turning against their education system which gives them high PISA scores and sending their children to the US to be educated. Why? They want more US-style creativity.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324328204578570990992580254

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/opinion/china-education-jiang-xueqin/

The truth is that innovation and entrepreneurship are not correlated with test-taking and high scores in math or science.  A start-up culture is correlated with a culture of creativity–of learning how to discover and take what is original and turn it into something of value, economic value. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ffb146e6-5d16-11e3-a558-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2mt8wynEN

The best K-12 schools in the US in both the private and public spheres know this and teach kids how to be creative. Montessori and other progressive education schools teach kids how to be innovative and creative. They teach children how to become founders of new companies. 

Ironically, tens of thousands of Chinese parents know this and are sending their children to the US for creativity education. We should learn from these Chinese.