Stuff To Ponder: Cultivating Creativity For Corporations

I frequently advocate for arts organizations to find ways to help for-profit companies instill creativity and energy in their employees. Last month, the Partnership Movement of Americans for the Arts posted an essay with some case studies illustrating how this might be accomplished.

The Partnership Movement post talks about the benefits of partnering with arts organizations in the context of employee retention and engagement, providing statistics about how companies with engaged employees tend to have better revenue growth and lower employee turn over.

In general, the case studies provide some conceptual starting points for identifying a need and designing partnership programs to meet them.

The Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, NC created a Cultural Leadership Training (CLT) program to help cultivate new board leaders for the non-profit organizations in the region. At one point in the year long program, they hold a “speed dating” session to match participants with arts organizations seeking new board members.

Over the last 10 years participation in the program has become highly competitive and is a tool that the businesses themselves have used to identify potential leaders.

This self-selection process sometimes helps companies to identify ambitious and talented employees whom they might otherwise have overlooked. “Firms absolutely use CLT to identify potential leadership candidates,” says Mooring. “We had one law firm tell us that they would not have picked a certain employee as leadership material, but they transformed their opinion of that employee’s potential within the firm after watching that person go through our program and serve successfully on an arts board.”

Alternatively, companies can use CLT as a low-risk way to test whether an employee who is already identified as “leadership material” lives up to his or her potential by watching how that person performs during CLT and post-graduation on an arts board.

This case study helped assuage some of my concerns about how receptive employees of a business might be to participating in a hands-on practical arts experience. It sounds good in theory, but how do you put it into practice with people who may not see themselves as artistically inclined?

“The first time we tried asking the CLT participants to participate in art, we were kind of terrified,” she admits. “The people in our classes are bankers and lawyers and accountants. What if we put violins in their hands and they freaked out and just refused to participate?”

In fact, just the opposite happened. It turned out that everybody not only wanted to play music—they wanted to try every instrument!

Not only did the executives enjoy the participatory and creative elements of the CLT program, it turned out that the experiential aspects of the program actually made the education part “stickier” or more memorable.

Of course, one caveat to remember. The CLT participants were all self-selected. Mandatory or highly encouraged employee participation may result in a different experience.

The other case study, COCAbiz, a program created by Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in St. Louis is more along the lines of what I initially envisioned when I started thinking about how arts organizations can help businesses cultivate creative practices and thinking in their employees. COCAbiz works with teaching artists to help them create and deliver programs businesses find effective for their employees.

Depending on its partners’ needs, COCAbiz uses teaching artists from a variety of artistic disciplines including choreography, set design, theater, and poetry. Working with the business facilitators, these teaching artists help business people discover new skills and approaches in areas such as leadership, collaboration, communication, risk-taking, creativity, and presentation skills.

A number of the participants have found these classes invaluable to shifting their mindset and practices to be more constructive.

One part of the workshop consisted of improvisational theater. “These improv exercises helped me realize that to be an effective influencer, you really have to listen to other people and incorporate their ideas,” says Boland….Rather than just pushing my own agenda, I had to figure out what the other person wanted to get out of the skit and incorporate their ideas, too.”

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“Much of my job involves synthesizing observations and then analyzing data to create strategies,” says Wurth. “Experiencing how actors and directors use the See-Think-Wonder method showed me a really powerful way to communicate and offer suggestions in a way that promotes dialogue rather than shutting it down.”

When people from COCAbiz talk about how they developed and delivered this program, collecting feedback and revising comes up frequently as an important part of their process. There was a sense that the business community with which they worked had high level of expectations of the program so they couldn’t leave any part unexamined.

The Secret Magic Power Called Repetition

While I driving around recently, I heard an interview with This American Life creator, Ira Glass, talking about the early days of his career (from about 16:00-20:00 minutes)

The main thrust of that segment was a combination of the brief comments he made in 2009 on storytelling and creativity and the myth that people are essentially born proficient geniuses that I have addressed before.

As in his comments from 2009 (illustrated below in kinetic typography), Glass says when he was first starting out his working at NPR HQ in Washington, DC, the quality of what he was producing was bad to adequate.

As he looked around, he felt like everyone around him had some magical power to know exactly what was needed to make something good- emphasize a point here, edit something out there, etc. He didn’t think he would ever learn that skill. He even resorted to paying people around the office at NPR $50 to look at his work, figuring it was cheaper than going to graduate school.

Ultimately, he realized that obtaining proficiency was a largely a matter of experience, logging the hours and making mistakes.

It may require making mistakes for a long time. In the same 2009 segment that the kinetic type video above is excerpted from, Glass plays a piece he wrote in his eighth year of reporting and critiques it. He admits he doesn’t even understand what his point was and then gives a one sentence description of the situation which is interesting and comprehensible.

I bring up this idea periodically on my blog because I think it is important to be reminded that just because something/someone amazing seems to pop out of nowhere, that success may have been decades in the making.

The interviewer at WOUB was of the same mind. He specifically prefaces his request that Ira Glass talk about this experience “because we have a lot of students that listen…” Glass agrees noting that whenever you see a movie about an artist, they are always depicted as being great and inspired from the beginning, but that isn’t true to life.

In an early part of the interview, Glass notes that they kill around 50% of the stories at This American Life–not the ideas, the actual stories they are in the process of working on or have completed. So even as acclaimed as he and his team are, they are regularly making mistakes or producing work that falls short. Glass says their success is as much attributable to being ruthless about cutting as it is to being capable story tellers.

The idea that you shouldn’t become so emotionally involved with your work that you can’t let it go is not a new one, but it is a lesson that is worth revisiting from slightly different perspectives.

Inspiring Comics Break

If you are looking for fun, inspiring thoughts to start your day, I would direct your attention to Zen Pencils. It is not updated every day, but given the time cartoonist Gavin Aung Than invests in creating each one, you wouldn’t expect it to be.

Along with illustrating the words of prominent figures like Dalai Lama and most recently, Jane Godall, he tackles issues near and dear to the hearts of creatives.

Among some of my favorites, (and I haven’t yet read them all); are animator Chuck Jones assertion that “creative work is never competitive;” Richard Feynam on how science adds to the appreciation of art; director Kevin Smith noting, “It costs nothing to encourage an artist;” director Shonda Rhimes reminder that dreams require work; and Sir Ken Robinson talking about how education needs to encompass both body and mind.

One comic that I appreciated was his own “The Calling,” which depicts the some of the possible consequences of heeding the call for an artistic vocation. No one wants to have things go poorly for artists but I was glad that the comic reflected reality rather than trying to be overly optimistic.

What To Unlearn To Be More Creative

Dan Pink tweeted a story by Art Markman on the Inc magazine site, “4 Things You Learned in School That Make You Less Creative.”

I often talk about how artists and arts organizations can exhibit their value to the business community by providing training in various areas like conflict resolution and creativity. As I was reading this article, I recognized that it provided a good basis for conducting a training session. The content can be useful to either to overtly say, these things you learned as a kid run counter to what we are trying to achieve or just to help a trainer understand some of the socialization and training people have received which makes it difficult to embrace the creative process.

One of the things that really ought to be acknowledged is that there is a degree of “do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to arts classes. The assessment structure in most school classrooms (versus classes you might take at the local arts center) impose expectations that actually run counter to, and may impede, the creative process. Students are told creativity is a gradual process by which you learn from your mistakes–so hurry up and make sure it happens by the time grades are due.

Even people with formal arts degrees need to keep some of these points in mind so they don’t pressure themselves with unrealistic expectations.

The first lesson Markman lists is, There is an answer. Find it and move on. He makes the point that creativity is about finding answers to questions no one has thought to ask and that there are many potential solutions to a problem.

This is probably the one lesson that runs entirely counter to life experience. There is rarely a single answer to a problem in life. Even if there appears to be, you can’t discard it the moment you have used it. At the very least, you have to have a sense of what to do when your go-to solution fails.

Markham notes that schools teach us to be risk/mistake averse. Basically, the fewer mistakes you make on a test, the more successful you are regarded as being. Risk taking is frequently mentioned these days as an crucial element of the creative process so it may not come as news that this important for people to embrace.

Markham also mentions the class room lessons of Study what is going to be on the exam and Make steady progress. Both are intertwined with the previous two lessons. Schools value being able to perform with few mistakes on demand, but don’t emphasize retention of information and skills as strongly. Not only is retention not highly valued, but applying knowledge in a novel manner is barely encouraged at all. Yet that is considered the very definition of creativity.

Accepting mistakes requires that you accept that your progress won’t be steady. Even when you aren’t making perceptible mistakes or experiencing setbacks, creativity requires patience with status quo long enough for your mind to make the leap to another of the many potential solutions.

When I write about creativity, I often emphasize this last point about creativity requiring time and patience. The tools we may use like brain storming sessions, free play, improv, change of venue, etc are merely ways to carve out time and brain processing power for creative endeavors. They don’t guarantee a creative outcome of themselves.

Being open to making mistakes and accepting slow progress may be the most difficult elements of creative practice to teach because minimize mistakes and making steady progress are two lessons that are rewarded in life. If you produce work quickly without many mistakes at your job, you can set yourself up to receive a promotion and more challenging projects.