CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Whether it is the HP ink jet printer or the writing of “To Kill a Mockingbird” the role of the patron–the provider of resources–is often key in the creative process. We can identify the role of creativity patron ( I call this person the “Wanderer” in my book Creative Intelligence) today among angel investors and VCs in our tech startup economy but they are everywhere, from the Medicis in Florence to the people who financed a year in the life of the writer who had the time to write To Kill A Mockingbird. 

http://bit.ly/1kCWvHL

Leadership in the creative process is a poorly understood social phenomenon. It isn’t taught in engineering, business or design schools. But it is a key element of success in innovation and creativity. The amazing success of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard in the early years of HP had a lot to do with their management style–Managing by Waling Around. They walked around the many labs, curated the science and technology advancements being made in them, and choose which to nurture.

Of course, Kickstarter shows that we can now crowd source the curating and resourcing of creativity and innovation. Each one of us can now play the role of Hewlett and Packard. 

This ability to curate and nurture creativity is at the heart of successful startups and breakthrough art and music. It is probably the most important leadership quality we need today.

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. 

 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.

Read the Financial Time’s Edward Luce’s insightful piece on the failure of MOOCs and the need for Liberal Arts to foster innovation and jobs in the US. Brilliant. The MOOC movement is falling apart because its pedagogical premises are false. It transmits data in a 19th century methodology through a 21st century delivery system. We focus on the delivery when it is the skill set and value systems in education that are key to raising our creative intelligence.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/141591a0-5399-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2lczTmcTe

In the US, IT jobs are crashing but creative work is soaring. We need to move away from an exclusive focus on STEM towards a Humanities-based education fostering creativity. Progressive education–Montessori, building with blocks, John Dewey, learning by doing, not memorizing, is the future. 

 Facebook has growing problems with framing its engagement with customers. This is very important. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/02ec9e24-41a0-11e3-9073-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl&siteedition=intl#axzz2jFDKrkJK

The latest quarterly results show two big trends:

1- Younger tens are tuning out to Facebook and using it less. My guess is that they are moving to chat apps on their Androids and iPhones.

2- The average Facebook user clicks on an ad once a week. This is being lauded by founder Mark Zuckerberg as “a great sign that people are finding ads useful.” Really? They click on an ad ONCE a week and that’s considered a success? 

What do they actually buy?  How long do they linger? And why–again–only once a week? What are the measurements of this deeper, longer engagement? 

Framing your engagement with customers is key to business success in this world of social media. It is is one of the key Creative Competencies. Facebook needs to get it right.

One of the biggest changes in the past decade is the rise of participation in nearly all of our social and economic relationships. Social media technology and value shifts have enabled us to actively participate in our entertainment, education, health care and work practices. We can and we want to participate and not simply passively “experience our lives.” So the concept of “Engagement:” is super-big today. It is one reason why Walter Benjamin is hot again and why I teach him at Parsons. Aura is the epitome of engagement.

Smart people at Google and Facebook and elsewhere in ecommerce are trying to assess engagement. But educators pushing MOOCs are not. We now have enough data to know that 90% or more students in a MOOC drop out entirely and barely 1%-5% complete the entire course. Why? Because MOOCs are not designed to engage. They merely push information at you and you stare, passively at a screen. The educators pushing MOOCs are mostly engineers and mathematicians who see learning as absorbing data and facts and throwing them back on a test. It’s typical teach-to-the-teach pedagogy and it’s awful. 

If MOOCs are to succeed, we need much more interactive technologies employed to engage students. But that means more professorial time–which increases the cost of online education. The true cost of MOOCs that really work has yet to be determined. It’s time to reign in the hoopla surrounding MOOCs coming out of Stanford, MIT and other universities.

We live in an Engagement Society. MOOCs need to be designed to engage.

http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/for-moocs-to-work-we-need-to-talk/

I have just seen the first museum exhibit that would make MOMA’s Paola Antonelli jealous. It is at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC and it about the amazing work being done in fashion, art, jewelry, furniture, sculpture and other stuff with 3D printing technology. It’s not replication–it is creation. unbelievably beautiful creation.  We have new tools to create new things in new ways and the MAD exhibition is exuberant in showcasing how glorious that can be.

http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/out-hand

One entire floor is over to museum goers participating in and using the new tools. And there is something special about playing with 3-D machines in a museum setting with artists who show you what they are doing and why. There will be artists in residence throughout the months of the exhibit. 

So congratulations to Ron Labaco, curator at MAD, for putting this on. It took him two years. It’s just wonderful.  And thanks to Shapeways, which just bought MakerBot, for providing the financing, the tools and people too.