Have we programmed our employees to not be creative
‘‘The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up and doesn’t stop until you get into the office’’
Robert Frost
Over the last 25 years I have been involved with eight software and digital services companies as either a chairman, CEO or non-executive director. Along the way I have witnessed three events that threatened those companies, along with millions of others.
The first was in 2000, when a computer flaw known as the Millennium Bug led to the Y2K (Year 2000) scare. In the late ‘90s, many experts believed there would be serious computing problems — conceivably bringing down worldwide infrastructures in industries ranging from banking to air travel — when dealing with dates beyond December 31, 1999.
In the end, there were fortunately very few problems. Yet, millions of companies pumped incalculable time, effort and money into contingency planning for potential computer issues as the calendar rolled over to the new millennium.
The second event, which turned out to be very serious indeed, was the financial crash in 2008. The crisis, when a housing market bubble fuelled by reckless lending led to mass loan defaults, was the greatest jolt to the global financial system since the Great Depression of the ‘30s. The losses led many financial institutions to fail, pushing the world’s banking system to the edge of collapse.
At the time, I was the director of a software company that banked with Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). On the morning of 8 October 2008, RBS was about to collapse. To prevent this from happening, the UK government stepped in with a £45.5 billion taxpayer-funded bailout. If this had not happened, my company and thousands of others would have faced the very real problem of having no bank facilities and unavailable funds.
Fortunately, with the government’s intervention, that did not happen. The third, and by far most serious, existential threat to enterprises has been the coronavirus. Millions of businesses have been significantly affected by the pandemics, which persists as I write this. Unfortunately, many companies have not survived, others have had to furlough staff, a significant number are now making employees work from home, and most all have been forced to find new ways to do business and change the way they operate.
What links these three big events together?
As described, all posed very serious threats to businesses of every shape and size. From what I’ve witnessed over the last quarter-century, times when a business is threated are when leadership and staff look for innovative solutions. Times of crisis are when they start wearing their ‘creative hats.’
COVID has forced companies to come up with creatively innovative ways of trying to survive, work differently and smarter, keep their customers and attract new ones. Becoming creative under fire has made many of these companies more resilient and determined, as we also saw them do to prepare for the Millennium Bug and survive the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
But I have also observed that when the immediate threat has been managed or eliminated, businesses revert back to being less creative and innovative. And the question is, why?
The importance of creativity
Let’s look at COVID again, from a different perspective. The vaccine. Just think of the fantastic things humans have invented. They range from electricity, writing, the steam engine, bicycles, cars and antibiotics to the mobile phone, the world wide web, flight, the microscope,mathematics soap… and the vaccine.
The last few years have been a terrible time because of COVID-19. As I write this article, the World Health Organization reports that more than 6.5 million individuals worldwide have died of the virus. The sorrow, pain and misery of each victim’s death has caused their family and friends has been truly horrific. And, all evidence seems to indicate, the pandemic will continue to wreak havoc over the coming months and years.
Through all of the despair, there is now a glimmer of light at the end of this very dark tunnel. In December 2020, a 90-year-old woman, Margaret Keenan, was the first person on earth to receive the new COVID vaccine. What is remarkable about this is that it normally takes 10 years to develop, test, approve and distribute a vaccine, at an average cost of some £500 million or more. There are normally four stages:
1. Research / drug discovery (2-5 years)
2. Pre-clinical trials (2 years)
3. Clinical development
Phase 1: Is it safe? (1-2 years)
Phase 2: Does it activate an immune response? (2-3 years)
Phase 3: Does it protect against the disease? (2-4 years)
4. Regulatory review and approval (1-2 years)
The vaccine that Margaret received went through this entire process in a single year. So, how did the scientists who worked on creating a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine pull it togetherso quickly?
That success is in large part attributable to new vaccine technologies being used for the first time. Immunologists were being innovative by doing things in a slightly different way, which provedto be faster and safer than the traditional method of creating a vaccine. And, mobilisation against a new pandemic should be even quicker next time, because scientists have subsequently developed even more innovative ways to create and roll out new vaccines… and the innovation will continue.
Through creative thinking coupled with innovation, the COVID vaccine and follow-up boosters have saved countless lives. That is the power of creative thinking in action.
So, here is the million-dollar question: If we can solve massive problems like this, why don’t we put creativity at the centre of everything we do in life? By doing that, we can open up our imagination to brilliant things, create groundbreaking technologies and solve vexing business challenges. The potential benefits are endless.
The creative gap
But, here is the nub of the problem: We don’t put creativity at the centre of what we do as leaders, even though we think we do .
If you asked 100 people whether they’re creative, how many wouldsay yes? Well, in 2012, the Silicon Valley software firm Adobe surveyed 5,000 people the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan on that question. There findings were published a report titled ‘Global Creativity Gap.’
According to the findings, the vast majority of people around the world know creativity is crucial to economic expansion, the development of society and their personal growth. Yet, only one in four actually feel they’re living up to their creative potential. Why the discrepancy? Let’s explore the key findings.
1. Creativity is important: The study found that 80% of those surveyed believe creativity is key to economic growth and 64% feel it is valuable to society. And, 75% thought that being creative enables them to make a difference in their own lives, while another two-thirds believe it helps them make a difference in the lives of others. In a world in which innovation drives the economy, and more people than ever have the opportunity to be creative, this is not surprising. That’s good news, but there’s a huge gap in terms of creative application.
2. Creativity is not happening anywhere near as often as it could or should. While 80% of respondents felt we all have the potential to be creative, they also stated that they spend only a third of their time being creative, and only 25% felt they were living up to their creative potential.
Now, imagine if we can move that 25% figure up to 50%. Think what we could achieve — things like the fantastic, world-changing innovations. More importantly, what to others might seem like small innovations could for you could be life-altering. What is stopping us achieving this 50%?
Inhibiting business creativity.
The simple answer is us as leaders!
First, some context. As noted, the crash of ‘08 forced leaders to get creative in order to weather the crisis. Two years later, IBM published the results of a global survey of more than 1,500 CEOs, titled ‘Capitalizing on Complexity.’ A majority of respondents said they found creativity to be the single most important leadership trait for success at that point in time.
That was followed in 2016 by a report from the global consultancy PwC, titled ’The talent challenge: Harnessing the power of human skills in the machine age.’ PwC interviewed 4,446 chief executives in 89 countries and territories, and found that the top priority for their organisations at the time was innovation. Yet, 77% of these leaders reported struggling to find the creativity and innovation skills they needed.
How do we square this circle? If, as we’ve said, people are saying they are not living up to their creative potential and business leaders say mobilising creativity and innovation is their top priority, how is it that they can’t seem to find the talent necessary to drive their business forward? As noted, when there’s no longer a significant threat, most conventional leaders go back to ‘the norm’ in terms of how they operate. Taking risks, a key ingredient in creativity, is no longer encouraged, and the innovative impulse gets tamped down.
For the most part, this isn’t because leaders are somehow opposed to creativity. On the contrary, as the IBM and PwC reports showed, most believe in the value of innovative new ideas. At senior and middle management levels, though, creativity is unintentionally undermined every day in work environments that were established to maximize profit, reduce costs and facilitate coordination, teamwork, productivity and control.
The journalist Pilita Clark, a business columnist at The Financial Times, wrote a fascinating 2019 event where ad agency founder Roger Mavity and design guru Stephen Bayler talked about their recently published book, How to Steal Fire, which looked at creativity in the business world. One of their main arguments was that creativity was being inhibited by the design of the modern office. They asserted that big, open-plan workspaces — which proponents say encourage collaboration and productivity— actually kill creativity because a key creative catalyst is solitude. The creative process, they say, is essentially an individual activity rather than a collective undertaking.
The authors said that while most leaders believe that teamwork, brainstorming and ‘away days’ help their employees become more creative and innovative, this is one of the great myths of modern business. In a group dynamic, they argued, when people try to figure out a problem, they tend to either show off to impress or politely back each other’s thoughts, no matter how poor they are. Either way, because responsibility is shared, the pressure to come up with solutions is reduced.
This phenomenon even has a name, the Ringelmann Effect, after French engineer Max Ringelmann, who in 1913 observed that individual productivity — and, logically, creativity — falls as group size increases. It is also called Social Loafing.
Being around others can be helpful when you’re trying to gather background information or understand the dimensions of a problem, but not when it comes to doing really complex, innovative work. Brainstorming and teamwork are mainstays of modern business life, driving endless meetings and other bureaucratic distractions that conspire to interrupt focused thought, creative or otherwise. These practices persist, despite their obvious drawbacks.
Is it time as leaders to look finally, and rethink, why your staff are not being able to be become more creative? It is probably one of the most important challenges we all currently face.
Neil Francis is the author of ‘The Creative Thinking Book – how to ignite and boost your creativity’’ and Director of Pogo Studio.