Innehållsförteckning för Rotman Management Leader's Digest Issue: Creativity från Rotman Management

Creativity has become the defining feature of early 21st century economic life, powering the great ongoing changes of our time. However, this shift presents a huge challenge for organizations, because until recently, creativity has not been explicitly valued in business. As the global economy continues to morph into an economy bound only by the limits of human talent and imagination, the organizations who figure out how to foster and manage creativity will have a crucial advantage. In our second Leader’s Digest collection, we present popular articles that bring together various aspects of Creativity and show what leaders can do to enable more of it in the workplace. Rotman Management Leader’s Digests are themed collections of both classic and recent articles from Rotman Management magazine, written by the world’s leading management…

Engineers have long viewed design as a core activity. Managers would be wise to turn to them for creative inspiration. BUSINESS STRATEGISTS TEND to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints. But what of possibilities? If the ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs — whether of products, cities or business strategies — what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? Not much, it seems. Business strategy has historically been seen as a largely analytic endeavour, with relatively little attention paid to the creative aspects of strategy formulation. In this article, we will describe eight ways to illuminate new possibilities taken from Engineering success stories and discuss what each might look like if applied to business strategy. 1. Challenge Assumptions Challenging assumptions and defying…

What is the sum of 5 plus 5? What two numbers add up to 10? The first question has only one right answer, while the second has an infinite number of solutions, including negative numbers and fractions. These two problems, which rely on simple addition, differ only in the way they are framed. In fact, all questions are the frame into which the answers fall. And as you can see, by changing the frame, you dramatically change the range of possible solutions. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than…

IN PERIODS OF GREAT CHANGE like the one we’re living through right now, one of the most important skills to possess is imagination. It’s what enables us to invent new business models, create differentiated brands, and reframe a growing number of wicked problems as opportunities. Understanding how the imagination works — and thrives — is therefore a key task for today’s leaders. It turns out that when people talk about ‘dreaming up’ an idea, they’re not far from the truth: imagination has been closely linked to dream states. When they studied the brains of jazz musicians during improvisation, neuroscientists Charles Limb and Allen Braun found a “disassociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex.” Interestingly, this pattern was absent when the musicians played memorized sequences. These disassociated patterns, they say,…

WE EXPECT TO FIND ARTISTRY IN THE FINE ARTS – in painting, dance, photography, music, sculpture and the like. However, artistry does escape these boundaries, and most of us recognize it when we encounter it. We can see it in an athlete’s performance, we can taste it in the dishes of a great chef, and we can hear it in the words of an accomplished leader. This recognition often generates a curiosity about how such exceptional and apparently effortless performance is accomplished. Intuitively, we know that artistry involves expertise, focus and control, because the people who achieve it demonstrate mastery in what they do. At the same time, we know that it involves creativity, spontaneity and imagination, because the people who achieve it create original, often surprising, results, products and…

BUILDING YOUR QUALITATIVE INTELLIGENCE WE LIVE IN A WORLD THAT IS PREOCCUPIED with predictability and enraptured with quantitative analysis. In the realm of business, the evidence is clear: forecasters crank out precise predictions of economic growth using massive econometric models, and CEOs give to-the-penny guidance to capital markets on the next quarter’s predicted earnings. In the world of healthcare, geneticists sequence the human genome and predict the elimination of numerous diseases. In our day-to-day lives, we are governed by adages like “Show me the numbers” and “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.” Where has this obsession gotten us? Not far, I would argue; the economists, for one, have gotten it consistently wrong. As late as the middle of 2008, none of the world’s leading macroeconomists or forecasting organizations…

You have closely studied the thinking processes of great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci. What can we learn from his example? Not surprisingly, da Vinci is a supreme role model for creative thinking. Considered perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, he was not only a pioneer in Biology, Botany, Geology and Anatomy, but is renowned as one of the greatest fine artists ever, in part because he integrated scientific and artistic ways of thinking. There are other great scientists who have had some artistic ability, and there are great artists who’ve dabbled in Science, but no one has integrated the two as thoroughly as da Vinci. For me, he was a childhood hero, and the more I learned about him, the more he seemed to embody the very…

You have said that “In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” Please explain. Being creative is a full-time job, with its own daily patterns. Think about it this way: we stretch before we jog, we practice the violin before we play — and it’s no different for our minds. Anyone who has been successful in a creative profession has their own routine for preparing for their work, whether it’s a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory. The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration — maybe more. Igor Stravinski always did the same thing each morning when he entered his studio:…

FAILURE IS AN INEVITABLE outcome of operating in an uncertain environment, which is why so many attempts at innovation go awry these days. However, some of the most successful organizations have embraced this fact — and the opportunity to learn from failure, thereby improving their innovation track records. Leading organizations, from Apple to Google and beyond, have learned from early-stage failures. A classic example is Apple’s Newton PDA tablet in the 1990s, a flop whose core concept eventually found its way into the iPad. Or the predictable user furor over nearly any new Facebook feature, which eventually gets re-cast by the company as ‘market research’ or ‘design validation’. Learning from failure isn’t a new idea. A decade ago, when Henry Chesbrough of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley…

ARE YOU CREATIVE? When most adults are asked this question, their knee jerk reaction is to quickly answer, ‘No’. Why? Because somewhere along the way, we were trained to no longer expect or deem ourselves to be creative. For my own daughter, this happened early on, when an elementary school art teacher informed her that she must fill up the entire page with her art. What she ‘learned’ from this exchange was that she is not creative—and in different ways, most of your employees and colleagues have learned the same thing. The sad result: they are reluctant to offer up new ideas or to try to find a better way. Complicating matters further, Gallup has estimated that 71 per cent of employees in the average organization are not engaged in…

WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD ‘CREATIVITY’, what do you think of next? If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavours like sculpture, drawing, music or dance. You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers, but CEOs, lawyers and doctors are not. Or you may feel that being creative is a fixed trait, like having brown eyes — either you’re born with creative genes or you’re not. As brothers who have worked together for 30 years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as ‘the creativity myth.’ Our latest book — Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All — is about the opposite of that myth: it’s about what we call ‘creative…

AS THE 21ST CENTURY UNFOLDS, lone creators of new ideas are increasingly rare, as teams and larger groups within organizations become the dominant mode through which progress is made in much of the world. Appropriately, management scholars have been turning their attention to organizational creativity in recent years. Research on creativity began in the psychological domain, with the traditional view of the creative process stemming from Graham Wallas’s seminal work The Art of Thought. In it, he proposed four distinct stages of creativity: 1. Preparation, in which the problem to be solved is detected, and relevant data are identified; 2. Incubation, in which the problem is ‘left alone’ for a time while the unconscious mind works on it; 3. Illumination, in which the idea or solution suddenly appears; and 4.…

THE WORLD HAS GROWN MUCH MORE COMPLEX in recent years — that much is obvious. However, what we can do to thrive within this increased complexity is far from evident. The economy’s evolution towards more immaterial, knowledge-based products and services presents an endless list of open-ended questions. In this article, we will tackle one of them: what is the best way to lead knowledge workers for optimal creative output? A new source of inspiration for creative leadership and development comes from the world of the Arts. While the Arts have inspired people for centuries, greater attention is now being paid to learning from artists themselves. In our own work with artists and business people, we have uncovered two key approaches for applying artistic methods in business: the development of artful…

PLAY IS A FORM OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR that is easily understood in experiential terms. We recognize expressions of play in the world around us, and are aware that play occupies spaces of cultural and economic significance, such as theatres, cinemas, sports, games of chance and hobbies, to name a few. While play is a familiar concept, as a topic of inquiry it is among the least-studied and least-understood organizational behaviours – despite the fact that it has long been associated with creative functioning. More than 30 years ago, Stanford Professor James March suggested that play fosters creativity by legitimately freeing people from the requirement of behavioural consistency, and the University of Michigan’s Karl Weick has argued that play fosters ‘combinatorial flexibility’ – the novel recombination of existing elements in one’s…

How do you define ‘Creative Intelligence’, or ‘CQ’? A few years ago I was at a conference on innovation and design thinking at Stanford’s Institute of Design. Bill Burnett, who heads up Stanford’s design program, said something that really resonated with me: “We have GREs and SATs to measure math, verbal and writing scores; but we don’t even attempt to measure creativity.” That got me thinking: what if we could develop a methodology to assess an individual’s Creative Intelligence, or ‘CQ’? I started talking to some of the most creative people I know about how we might do this. First up was [former] Rotman Dean Roger Martin, who was among the first to bring design thinking into a business school setting. He offered some simple advice: “Do what Juilliard does,”…