The essential guide for creativity and enterprise innovation rafael wong chi hao

The Essential Guide for Creativity and Enterprise Innovation
Copyright © Rafael WONG Chi Hao 2013, all rights reserved
Insight from Artists and Scientists:
Looking through the convergence of Music and Neuroscience
Rafael WONG Chi Hao
Submission for the 2013 Peter Drucker Challenge
(Student category)
July 8th
, 2013

Introduction
The creativity and innovation crisis in a volatile, uncertain, complex,
and ambitious world
Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, said in 2011 that, except big advances in
computer-related areas, innovation had actually “stalled out.”
In 2010, a landmark poll by IBM showed that 1,500 CEOs worldwide
identified “creativity”, no longer “operational excellence”, as the No.1 “leadership
competency” of the future.
The proliferation of cool gadgets like tablets and smart phones might have tricked us into
believing that we’re living in an era of creativity boom – but we’re NOT.
In the United States of America, researchers show that creativity scores of pre-school
children had consistently inched downward across-the-board since 1990.
From all of the above studies, you need not be hard-pressed to see a natural linkage of
individuals’ capability of creative thinking to an organization’s innovation muscle – and
therefore commercial success. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed, especially
in our VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambitious world, coined by the
United States Military to describe the current socio-political landscape in the aftermath
of 9 / 11.
Creativity is about so much more than a “nice-to-have” competency and innovation is
about so much more than cool and cult consumer gadgets.

Framework of paper
Upfront, it is of utmost importance to clarify that creativity and innovation CANNOT be
used interchangeably. The confusion about the difference between creativity and
innovation make meaningful discussion difficult.
Creativity refers to as the capability of conceiving something original;
(e.g. brainstorming lots of new ideas);
Innovation is the implementation of new ideas.
This paper draws insights from musicians, dancers, novelists, neuroscientists and
psychologists to form an Essential Guide for individuals and corporations on improving
creativity and innovation. Key principles, blending time-tested wisdom and case studies,
forms the management lessons for managers.
Simple enough to be practical is the mantra of this paper.
2 public health scientists at West Virginia University discovered that whole milk is the
largest source of saturated fat in typical American’s diet. It turns out that changing
purchasing behavior is the key to get Americans start drinking low-fat milk, instead of
drinking behavior, as people will drink whatever in their refrigerators.
“Eating a healthier diet” was anything but a clear instruction. This begged a string of
questions such as ‘which food should people stop (or start) eating?’; ‘should they change
eating behavior at breakfast, lunch, or dinner?’ etc.
Instead of campaigning to ask Americans to “eat healthier”, the researchers had pinpoint
intervention measures targeted at altering people’s purchase behavior — buy 1%-fat
skim milk.

The same holds – the vague instructions to employees asking of them to ‘think out of
the box’ desert analysis paralysis and never make innovation happen.
As far as individuals' concern, can the ability to go creative be learned? If so, what
comprises of the essential HOW-TOs guide for companies and individuals to adopt right
away? How is creativity linked with innovation in the corporate environment?
To start with, we need to know what went wrong—and how we can fix it.

Creativity
The inhibitors that stifle creativity within individuals and
organizations
To understand what creativity really is, we have to take a step back and decipher the
myths of creativity. And there are 4 major misconceptions:
Myth #1
Creativity as part of the personality, a special gift exclusively for genius
Legends about the mad scientists and artists with the special personality shape our
perception of creativity. The prevailing view on creativity is mental and individualistic.
We tend to believe that creativity comes through the individual and is expressed solely
by the individual.
WRONG!

Correction:
Although extensive researches ranging from cognitive psychology to neuroscience have
tried to right us that we all possess the ability to be creative, these findings don’t resonate
with our existing perceptions, as we always undervalue our creative ability by comparing
with exceptional individuals like Albert Einstein. We always forget the fact that Albert
Einstein developed his ground-breaking works after he had spent years evaluating
applications for electromagnetic devices as an examiner in a patent office. Einstein didn’t
come up with the Theory of Relativity out of the blue when he had a shower after dozens
of espressos and pulling an all-nighter.
The fact is, people from different fields and careers have their own measures of novelty.
Each field – whether music, science, sports, psychology – has its different schools of
experts who have specific understandings of what is traditional against creative. So while
there may be general patterns of creative behavior that everyone shares, creativity in the
field requires a certain level of domain knowledge.
Myth #2
Creative people are visionaries who are ahead of their time, “right-brainers” who think
differently from everyone else
Again, the romanticized story of the lone poet starving in a garret far from civilization
confirms existing belief.
Correction:
In 1967, psychologist J.P. Guilford identified 2 different types of thinking that occur when
human respond to complex problems. Our brain starts from thinking divergently for
generating ideas and possibilities, while convergent thinking analyzes these ideas into
concrete actionable steps. Neuroscience shows that left brain is mainly responsible for
complex analytic processes (a. k. a. convergent thinking) while the right brain draws
connections between different bodies of knowledge (a. k. a. divergent thinking).

The implications here are that:
1.) Both left brain and right brain, therefore creativity AND empirical analysis, are
essential in solving complex problems and;
2.) Creative ideas must origin from proper understanding of the context. In other words,
creativity is situational that a certain depth of domain knowledge is a must.
Myth #3
We fail to recognize that what we are doing is actually creative, just because we can't
pinpoint the eureka moment when creativity "happened". Although we have our fleeting
moments of creativity once in a while, we go back to life very soon after, we dismissed it
as just a fluke.
We don't know how to identify creativity. We don't even know how to define it properly.
Therefore we jump to the conclusion that we simply weren’t born creative. We suffer
from creativity anxiety.
Correction:
As Keith Richards pointed out, creativity is neither about the "aha" moment nor all-or-
nothing in nature. Instead, it is progressive, collective realization.
Myth #4
Creativity is always admired. Not really.
American researchers showed that participants showed "a negative bias toward creativity
(relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty." Worse, "the bias
against creativity interfered with participants' ability to recognize a creative idea."

Rejecting creativity in favor of predictability and conventionality is our innate nature after
million years of evolution following Charles Darwin's Survival of the Fittest rule of thumb
that we instinctively seek out the predictables to increase odds of success and survival.
We always praise creativity in a vacuum, by ignoring the twin brother that creativity comes
hand in hand – uncertainty.
Sarcastically, by excessive manipulation of uncertainty, we made ourselves not creative.
Correction:
It is not realistic to expect change of deeply entranced mindset about creativity to happen
overnight. Therefore, we need to shape the external environment, such as implementing
a reliable decision-making system for judging and approving innovative ideas, to override
faulty human bias against creativity in corporate environment and educational institutions
alike.

Key principles and time-tested wisdom for unleashing creative
potential within individuals and corporations
Ingraining power activities to become habits that promoted creativity is essential for
individuals and organizations to free up their creative potential, very much the same as
going to gym for body building.
These habits not only beef up individuals’ and organizations’ creativity muscle, but they
help further appreciate and re-learn the nature of creativity, track down the origins of
creativity, and learn the language to properly and meaningfully express creativity to
outsiders who have little ideas how to make sense of our brainchild.
Key principle (1) — Less is more
Solution for individuals — be self-reflective and mindful by disconnecting
Bill Moggridge, former director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New
York, kept an empty schedule for mindful walking around the city. It is also well known
that Steve Jobs was a walker, so are Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
For good reason.
We are always connected. Our consciousness is spent reacting to others’ requests or
absorbing, taking in new information. But we often lack the time to integrate knowledge.
Taking a walk alone is a simple way for getting away from constant distraction so as to
bring together different areas of knowledge. An empty schedule brings mindfulness of
life and creativity to solve challenges.

Solution for corporations — the 15 % solution
Scientists and engineers at 3M Corp are allowed to spend up to 15 % of work hours on
their own projects that have nothing to do with their job roles.
This has everything to do with 3M’s commercial success.
Scientist Art Fry knows best what the informal, bottom-up scientific research culture of
3M allows – he created Post-its while trying to create bookmarks that would stay put in
the church choir's hymnals.
The secret sauce for 15% solution to work is keeping it informal to maverick-oriented.
Making it formal, like Hewlett Packard's creative non-projects, is a recipe for failure.
Key principle (2) — Mining the existential
Solution for individuals — delving into the past, the historical context and
relationship of key ideas
Digging deep to understand the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come
from and why they exist is hugely important to creativity muscle building.
Bob Dylan was once considered Woody Guthrie wannabe
Having discovered Woody Guthrie's folk songs while he was a teenager, Bob Dylan —
one of the most influential singer and songwriters ever — imitated Woody's style in
learning music when he started his career and even headed to New York to find Woody
Guthrie. His move to New York challenged him to be a better performer. Soon, he had
even stopped playing other people's songs altogether, and was writing his own tunes.

van Gogh found inspiration in Jean-Francois Millet
At age 22, after van Gogh saw Jean-Francois Millet’s drawings, he would later painted his
most famous Starry Night with profound inspiration from Millet’s 4 woodcut prints
“Four Times of The Day”. van Gogh wrote: “it seems to me that doing painting after these
Millet drawings is much rather to translate them into another language than to copy
them.”
The importance of rice in Japanese culture
In his book “Inei Raisan” (translated into English as “In Praise of Shadows”), novelist
Tanizaki Junichir extols a Japanese entrancing relationship to the aesthetics of cooking
rice as developed among both the elite but shared also by the folk. Even today, rice, called
“pure rice (junmai)” or “white rice (hakumai),” has an aesthetic quality, manifested in
Japanese cuisine.

Solution for corporations — audit internal networks
Auditing shouldn’t be viewed merely as a necessary evil for fulfilling regulatory bodies’
compliance standard. What if corporate leaders start global mandate of ‘stock-taking’
human capital within organizations by auditing both the ‘formal’ innovation centres (labs,
new product groups, R&D) AND the ‘informal’ groups that work under the radar on
weekends and at nights, example?
Finding meanings with the roots of the knowledge domain, the industry, and staying
engaged emotionally means understanding the intellectual context and history of key
ideas in the lens of creativity. It allows understanding the deeper meaning of
relationships, outside and inside the marketplace.

Innovation
The inhibitors that stifle enterprise innovation
As the economic pillars are primarily driven by the banking & capital markets of
commodities trading and financial instruments in the stock market, therefore we first have
to understand the external constraints where our organizations are operating in:
1. The finance-based, shareholders’ value-centred model of capitalism
Starting from mid-80s, boards of directors of numerous companies directly tied the
compensation of CEOs to the share price of the stock options of the companies they
manage.
With stock prices on financial markets being the only signal of success or failure CEOs
focused less and less on stakeholders such as employees, business service vendors, local
communities, and national governments because doing so compromised their ability to
maximize profit for shareholders and themselves.
Implications
Managing for efficiency, a financial culture that reduced everything to metrics, markets
and monetary transactions, squeezing more and more profits out of existing products,
and focusing on the short-term financial benefits resulting from efficiencies of scale at
the expense of long-term investment in internal innovations which take longer to
mature, have since been the paramount guiding principle for corporate behaviors
worldwide.
The focus on measurable risks and predictability ushered in a control culture in all sorts
of organizations worldwide.

2. Scientists giving way to management gurus
As professional managers hold the helms for global expansion through creating complex
organizational hierarchy, management culture overwhelms research culture.
The counter-example of how Hewlett-Packard shrank their innovation muscle taught the
best lesson of what NOT to follow.
HP was once a R&D company, leading the world with their enviable HP Labs in scientific
instruments, printers, PCs. But when the company embraced a financial culture in 1999,
the momentum turned.
With the backward move to shift HP’s culture away from organic growth through internal
innovation and towards expansion by mergers and acquisitions — an example being
buying PC maker Compaq, and merging it with HP’s PC business — managers were
preoccupied with administrative work for integration, not innovation.
The bureaucrat-minded management gurus with MBA replaced general managers with
engineering expertise as the decision-makers. New ideas were thereafter judged through
the lens of data-driven efficiency analytics. Profitability replaced possibility as a criterion
of judgment.
Cost-cutting measures such as outsourcing many of the manufacturing processes and
cutting budget on R&D to pump up short-term profits further weakened the ability of
engineers to innovate amid essential labor skills lost. All managers, including lab chiefs,
were required to fire the “bottom” 5 % of their staff every year. As a result, the trust
between lab engineers, scientists, and general managers had been broken. Engineers now
had to compete with a one-year deadline in mind.
Serendipitous invention and the creative exploitation of ideas is a muscle that companies
can choose to workout or allow to wither, only when the leader understands the
aspirations of the company’s customers and guides employees towards innovating new
ways to meet them.

Managers are trained to be cost-cutting experts, but not innovation leaders. Every
managers secretly believe that “innovation is someone else’s job and not part of my
responsibilities.”
With most of the resources devoted to day-to-day business that few remain for innovative
prospects, managers are conditioned to immediately look for flaws in new ideas with an
efficiency focus rather than assessing their potential.
Enterprise innovation crisis is really a leadership crisis.
So what is the ideal profile of a corporate innovator?

Key principles and time-tested wisdom on The Art of Management:
nurturing corporate innovators within corporations
More transparent and flatter organizational structure means that leaders at the tip of the
pyramid are holding less control and is becoming increasingly difficult to lead by
commands than before.
Arts can prove to be a powerful metaphor for business. What leadership and
management lessons can we learn from the unlikely models of dancers and conductors?
1. Adaptability
Rachel Moore, executive director of American Ballet Theatre — one of the most
prominent ballet companies in the world — knows a thing or two about adaptability.
When Rachel was appointed the position in 2004, she drew on her empathy for dancers
to re-design programs to train dancers holistically, caring more about their health, and
curating a well-rounded performance standard. This makes dancers “more mature artists,
and more emotionally stable human beings.”
Rachel likens adapting as innovators to moving as dancers, when practicing with the
mentality of improvisation is a must. For example, dancers learn a new dance move and
combination in a controlled setting and freedom within safety. The ability to adapt
performance on-stage brings together the physical and emotional intellect that are
essential as dancers and innovators.

2. Patience & Partnership
Dance teaches Julia Erickson, a dancer-turned-entrepreneur, about the push and pull of
partnership intellectually, viscerally, and kinetically. She and her life partner, Aaron, turns
the idea of “healthy energy bar for dancers” into a series of franchise products.
Dance partners learn how to work and move together, listen to each other, and to move
past missteps. Dance teaches Julia trust, which she applies to start her own business as an
innovator.
They collaborate with subject domain experts outside of business and dance in teams and
groups for product development, sometimes taking the lead and sometimes following.
Regardless of who’s leading, Julia and Aaron are always trusting each other.
3. Always prototyping
Choreographer Twyla Tharp created a whole new dance form called inverse variation
when she asked her dancers to reverse their moves as if they were a mirror of
themselves.
By quickly testing new variations of working rather than striving for the excellence at
first attempt, this “small” variation in practice embodies the progressive nature of
discovery in mundane (even mechanic) work lives.

4. Striking the fine balance of control and autonomy
Austrian conductor Carlos Kleiber led his orchestra as partners, where he gave clear-cut
instructions at the right times (e.g. when there is a mistake, the authority is there) and
enough room of autonomy for the musicians to interpret and perform the musical pieces
in their own right.
Unlike German composer and conductor Richard Strauss who exercised firm control on
his orchestra to play his music with zero-tolerance against interpretation, Carlos Kleiber
deliberately empowered his orchestra to “put in another layer of interpretation” when
they play. He enabled followers tell their own stories, when both the leader and the
followers took great pride and success from the serendipity.
What Carlos Kleiber exemplifies is the management philosophy of doing without doing,
which only happens after the business processes and the decision management structures
that create the operating conditions which allow team members to perform autonomously
are in place.
It is not that because the leaders don't give followers instructions, and yet, they have to
always second-guess the leaders’ mind. The fine balance strikes when the ultimate
decision maker is still in control while letting people be / feel free.
People management, after all, is an art of its own kind.

Conclusion:
Rethinking Creativity
The rising value of creativity has important implications for each one of us. We must first
recognize creativity as a competency that can be taught and learnt systematically over time
with adequate training and the importance of creativity-driven business. Unfortunately
the current level of commercial discourse makes it very difficult to do so.
Despite our vast creative potential, we have been brought up to believe that creativity is
rare, the special gift of a few individual geniuses, the magical quality that we don’t have
and can’t share.
Through extensive researches in writing this position paper, I know how untrue creativity
myths are. We can all be creative. We just need to get into systematic practice.
And in practicing creativity on individual level and corporations-wide, we can build new
kinds of businesses, reinvent our capitalist economy and take humankind to the next level.

The essential guide for creativity and enterprise innovation rafael wong chi hao

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