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…

Here is a great interview on America’s innovation shortfall-and what to do about it? What should be America’s National Innovation Policy?

I talk about shifting R&D away from bioscience to making, materials and manufacturing. “We need to become makers again." 

"Bring back shop.”

“Art and shop should be central to education." 

"Memorization in an age of Search is ludicrous.”

“I would make David Kelley, who is the founder of the D-School and IDEO,  the head of the Department of Education.”

And we need to bring a lot more entrepreneurs and startup people to Washington. Wall Street and big business dominate Washington.

We need to be more creative about student debt.

http://ec.libsyn.com/p/7/2/b/72b1677bcb851595/342__Solving_Americas_Innovation_Crisis.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d01ce8530d6c155e1a4&c_id=5468342

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

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

I am taking the Acela up to Harvard today to attend the X Design Conference put on by its B-School students. Yes, the design club of the HBS has put together a remarkable 2-day conference. Together with Harvard’s new I-Lab, Innovation Lab, they are bringing  together people from all over the university to listen to some great speakers and actually do design together. http://www.harvardxdesign.com/

Teams will compete on a design challenge on Saturday and a panel will assess their work and give gold stars. I’m on the panel and  look forward to seeing what these Harvard folks can do. 

With the I-Lab up and running and Harvard B-School students now committing to design, innovation and creativity instead of just mathematics, and efficiency, I’m prepared to change my mind about the place. Sounds like Harvard is building up its Creative Intelligence–and bolstering the creative capacities of its students. Now maybe they’ll become more entrepreneurial and build new companies instead of just managing old ones. 

President Obama will speak about the State of the Union soon and he will talk about many things except, perhaps the most important–the state of innovation in America. In my book, Creative Intelligence, I argue that for the past 30 years, there has been lots of innovation but it has been narrowly focussed in Finance, IT and social media.

In fact, only 9% of all public and private companies in the US do any sort of innovation at all. Think about that. Look at the profits of all US corporations over the past few decades and you can see that where innovation has occurred, profits have done particularly well. Finance, surprisingly to many of us in the Design/Creativity/Innovation space, has seen its profits soar from about 10% of the total of all profits to 40% of the total in the past 20 years because of financial innovation. I would argue that this has been a disaster for the economy as a whole but the fact remains. 

What policies do we need out of Washington to spur innovation and creativity?  How do we generate a million-fold increase in startups? How do we push entrepreneurial capitalism over finance capitalism?  These are the key questions that the President should address in his State of the Union.

Why are Republicans anti-city? One of the reasons for their loss that us not getting attention is the anti-urban policy stance of the Republican Party. Anti-mass transit. Anti-high speed train. Anti-support for education & museums. Anti-intellectual. Anti-immigrant. Anti-bike. The GOP is anti-Jane Jacobs. Add it up and the anti-city stance of Republicans is anti-creativity and anti-innovation.

Gen Y voters went mostly for President Obama on Tuesday for his social policies. But the Republicans could just have easily attracted this rising demographic with new business policies– if they had taken time to learn about Gen Y culture.

Gen Y may be the most entrepreneurial generation in a century but neither party appears to understand that. In this election neither party put forth an economic policy that bolsters economic growth through start-ups, crowd funding, local sourcing, additive manufacturing (3D printing), venture capital or scaling creativity into new creative companies that employ hundreds of people in the US. This is the stuff of an entrepreneurial capitalism, an Indie Capitalism, that Gen Y is trying to build that could replace the disastrous Finance/Shareholder Capitalism that has led to the immiseration of the middle class.

The talk now in Washington is about going over a “fiscal cliff.” We need to talk about more fundamental economic issues–How to promote economic growth through innovation and creativity. The Democrat and Republican parties need to tune more into the rising Gen Y and less into the fading Boomers.