Hallmark each year brings into its Kansas City headquarters 50 or more speakers they believe have fresh ideas. Guests have included Lyn Heward, vice president of Creation, the animal-free circus Cirque du Soleil; Guy Kawasaki, Apple Fellow; and David Whyte, storyteller and poet. The sole purpose is to provide stimulation to the world's largest creative staff more than 740 artists, designers, writers, editors and photographers who generate more than 15,000 original designs for cards and related products yearly.
Several years ago, Bell Labs brought in a speaker whose talk about nature led to the idea for new technology. Roger Payne, a world expert in whale communication with a Ph.D. in ornithology, described to the group his major finding: that whales sing to each other to communicate, but that they change their language patterns each year. Payne noticed this phenomenon in contrast to birds, which keep the same pattern year after year. Halfway through his presentation, a scientist jumped up and ran out of the auditorium with an idea on how to improve communications between submarines. The stimulus helped him make a connection to a problem he was trying to resolve in another setting.
External structures for positive turbulence provide opportunities for both individual and organizational innovation.
On the individual level, such structures include conferences, training experiences, travel, museum visits and gallery openings, and reading outside periodicals. All of these sources offer a glimpse into what will become mainstream, and help prime people and their organizations for change.
On the organizational level, companies should look to joint ventures, alliances and networks to provide alternative methods of competing today. Whether undertaken for strategic advantage or financial gain, these events offer opportunities for cross-fertilization of ideas and perspective. What is important is that the companies come together to help create positive turbulence for their partner organization.
The paradox of positive turbulence is one business leaders today cannot afford to ignore: the energizing, disparate, invigorating, unpredictable force that often feels like chaos is the same creative energy that can provide continuous success and organizational renewal. Without such risk-taking, without embracing uncertainty, many of today's leading businesses will be tomorrow's failures.
WHAT IS YOUR CREATIVITY CAPACITY?
What is your organization's capacity for creativity, innovation and successful renewal? The answers to these questions may provide you with insight into your organization's capacity for innovation:
1. What is your organization's ability to absorb new information? High? Medium? Low?
2. What capacity does your organization have to learn, remember and process information?
3. What motivation do your employees have to engage in novel interpretations, to seek novelty and then make sense of it?
4. Is your organization balanced with both innovators and implementers of new ideas? Both are needed. One without the other results in either a house full of ideas never implemented or perfected redundancy.
GAMES TO GET THE CREATIVE JUICES FLOWING
Everybody knows that creativity--the ability to express ideas that are both new and valuable--is mysterious, right? We also know that creativity is rare, that only those with high IQs have it and that it can't be studied scientifically. Not true! Recent research has taken much of the mystery out of the creative process in individuals, and it suggests that everyone has roughly equal creative potential. To realize that potential, we need to build certain basic competencies--special skills that allow us to express our creative potential. There are, it turns out, four basic types of skills we need to express our creativity:
1. CAPTURING: It's important to pay attention to and preserve new ideas, even if they don't seem valuable at the moment. That's why artists and inventors carry pads everywhere and jot things down on napkins.
2. CHALLENGING: Difficult problems and situations may be scary, but they're wonderful for creativity, because they cause old ideas to "resurge" and multiple ideas to compete. We can spur creativity by seeking challenges and learning to manage failure.
3. BROADENING: Getting broad training--especially in areas outside our current areas of expertise--also boosts creativity, because it leads to more interesting interconnections.
4. SURROUNDING: Multiple ideas--the stuff from which new ideas emerge can also be set in motion by interesting and diverse environments, both physical and social. A static environment--meaning the same old desk and the same old colleagues--is stifling.
Here's a sampling of games that make it easy and fun to build basic creativity skills. The games not only spur creativity, they also teach some of the principles we need to keep ourselves creative throughout our lives. Let the games begin!
THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE GAME
IN A NUTSHELL: Participants try to solve absurdly difficult problems.
TIME: 5-10 minutes.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Unsolvable problems provide directed challenges that spur useful creativity.
WHAT YOU'LL NEED: Writing materials.
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