In the second part of this mini lecture about creativity
let's try to have a look at who can be creative,
what are the circumstances,
what are the personal conditions of being creative?
Let's start with an extra example.
Would you like me to be creative about your eye surgery?
Cut it.
I'm pretty sure that all of you think no way!
But if you really had needed an eye surgery,
a very, very difficult case,
would you want the best eye surgeon in the world
to be creative about your eye surgery?
Almost all of you would say yes.
So what does this mean?
It means that creativity is not something independent
from the knowledge and the discipline.
Only the person who is knowledgeable
in the discipline can be creative.
That's why I could not be creative in eye surgery?
Could I be creative in teaching?
Probably, yes, because I know quite a bit about teaching,
experienced at doing that for decades and so on.
Now, don't let yourself be misled by
examples where some outsiders,
people who had absolutely no idea,
came up with something remarkably creative.
There are very well known examples about how they
clean walnuts on an industrial scale.
So it was tedious work, you take the hammer,
open it up, remove all the hard stuff to get at the core,
and so on.
When you want a couple of tons of walnuts cleaned
that's not the way to do it.
So they put together a team
to think about cleaning the walnuts.
And there were all sorts of engineers
and food specialists and so on,
and there were a couple of guys who had
absolutely no idea about walnuts.
They were pretty bored with this whole process
of trying to figure out what to do with walnuts.
And finally one of them said,
'why don't you just blow them up?'
And you know what?
This is still how they clean walnuts on an industrial scale.
Of course, this idiot meant that you put in a tiny dynamite
into the walnut, light it, and it will blow it up.
Of course, it is complete nonsense.
Of course this guy was not creative,
he was just saying something stupid.
But this thing that he said triggered the creative idea
of the knowledgeable people who were there,
of those engineers and food specialists,
and they figured out that the walnut is closed pretty tight.
And there is quite a bit of air in the walnut.
So if you reduce the air pressure outside very, very quickly
the walnut cannot let out the air that quickly.
And what happens? It blows up.
And then you just blew wind through that
blown up mess of the walnut and the cover,
and you get the cleaned walnut on an industrial scale.
A very important thing, it was the knowledgeable people
who were able to create this idea,
although the trigger was coming from someone
who was not interested or knowledgeable about the process.
It is also important that in the schooling
we do not encourage creativity.
Sometimes we say we do, but actually we don't.
Why? We try to achieve all those controllable, measureable,
results on which we can mark you.
Why? Because it has to be controllable,
it has to be objective in a way.
Now, there are some interesting examples about creativity.
For example, Robert Percy writes about an Indian tribe
I mean American Indian tribe.
Who were settling down in an area,
and every couple of years, even if that was the best area
with the most buffalos and water and everything they needed,
every couple of years they picked up everything
and they moved to a new location.
And when they asked them why are you doing that,
you were in the Garden of Eden for you,
everything was there, the forest, the animals, everything,
you did not have to work hard,
and they said we need to keep used to change,
otherwise we will lose our capability of adapting,
our capability to create new things.
Obviously this was not their vocabulary,
but that was the meaning.
You can also see in the old tribes
that there are two roles which are perfectly separate.
One is the chief of the tribe who is usually the strongest guy,
the best hunter, the best fighter and so on.
And you have a completely different setup,
which is the board of elders;
the oldest, wisest people from the village.
Now, they are judging what needs to be done and so on,
so they are advising the chief of the tribe,
and the chief of the tribe is the strong guy who can go through with the new idea.
What is important about this is that
this is bringing you the balance of the static and dynamic.
So the fighter chief of the tribe is always
trying to the new dynamic quality,
while the board of elders is concerned about
the wellbeing of the tribe, the wellbeing of the village,
and try to push things to the static way.
If you find the right balance between the static and dynamic
it is the same as we will see later,
as between the creative and the non-creative parts of the work.
What kind of environment is needed
for the creative people to perform really well?
The first thing is that mistakes must be allowed.
If your every creative idea that you have has to be a success
it is out of the question that you will be creative,
because no one can do that.
You have some ideas, some better, some worse,
and some of them might be successful,
some of them might be accepted,
some of them might actually be converted
into something more than a creative idea.
The other thing is that as we are obsessed so badly
as you have heard in the knowledge economy,
knowledge society lecture in the first semester,
as we are so obsessed with being scientific,
with the analytic evidence and so on and so on,
intuition is usually not allowed.
If I just look at our academic publications
you cannot say that intuitively arrived at my result.
You need to justify everything with facts and theories
and deduction and so on and so on.
So in perfectly analytical ways.
In hard sciences where actual proof is often available
it can be allowed that you intuitively arrive to something
because you were able to prove it afterwards.
Now, this thinking can be applied to organisations as well.
And actually quite a bit of companies do that.
Mintzberg was asked on one occasion about
whether he knows of any companies who are performing very well
and they substantially depend on intuition.
He said that I don't know of any successful companies
who do not do it this way.
There is also a very famous example
about how we conduct market research.
There was a company, it took them always very long,
they were performing very thorough market research
when they wanted to launch a new product.
What happened is that they were always late to the market.
So finally the CEO decided, he said,
'okay, from tomorrow we are not doing market research at all.
We have these marketing guys here
who know the market inside out,
instead of sending out the surveys and do the sampling
and processing all those surveys,
we will just ask them whether the new product
will be successful in the market or not.
And they don't need to justify why they think that.
They will of course discuss it and so on,
but if they intuitively say that this is a superb product
we will go ahead with it.'
Of course the time to market was reduced immensely
they were fast and usually the first to get the new product,
but that's not the main point.
The main point is that the actual market projections
were more accurate than from the surveys.
So intuition can work very, very well,
when it is the intuition of knowledgeable people.
It does matter very much what kind of people have those intuitions.
There is a concept related very closely
to creativity and that's innovation.
And very frequently we even confuse the two.
They are not the same.
They are related, but they are very, very far from being the same.
Creativity as you have heard from the previous part
creativity results in a new idea,
which is original and potentially useful.
But this is not enough for innovation.
For innovation you need to take this creative idea,
put it at work, so that it becomes a value.
So converting the new idea into a new value;
that's innovation.
And obviously the results of the innovation
in terms of business organisations will very frequently
be measurable in terms of money.
But there are not only business organisations,
there are many other kinds of organisations,
so not all innovations are obviously measureable in terms of money,
sometimes it is a better lifestyle or better health
or whatever else.
Now, the difficult question really is,
how do we evaluate the quality of the new idea?
How do we evaluate the quality of the innovation?
For the creative idea there is only one way,
you have the specialists who are knowledgeable in that field.
If you came up with a creative idea, show it to them.
And if they say that it makes sense, that's how it can be accepted.
Following Polini this is called interpersonal verification.
The innovation is slightly different.
You usually have two layers of getting this kind of evaluation.
The first layer we call gatekeepers.
These are those guys who are laying between
the creatives and the audience who will be the users
of the innovation if it and when it happens.
And ultimately the evaluation of the innovation
will be judged by the users.
The problem with that is that it is too late if you find out
that the users don't like it.
So that's why you want to get something a bit earlier.
If you want to understand the gatekeepers better
just think about these Michelin star restaurants
and then those who are writing the Michelin guide,
they are the typical gatekeepers.
Finally, how much innovation an organisation needs.
Now, it is very tricky because the creativity as a requirement
appears probably most frequently in job descriptions.
I have even seen job advertisements where they were looking
for a junior administrative position,
basically they were looking for someone to make coffee,
and the requirement was to be creative.
What for?
So it became a buzzword, and we emphasise it much more
in requirements than what we really want.
Why?
Because there are many, many more jobs
that do not require creativity.
If you are obsessed with the creative things
who will do the usual things?
Who will make your organisation work?
Who will do the day-to-day jobs?
So 99 per cent is this non-creative work that is needed.
Of course that tiny, tiny part that is about creativity
it can be incredibly important,
it can make all the difference in the world for that organisation,
but it does not mean that it is sufficient.
So if you look at these innovation oriented companies,
very frequently there is a huge mistake
and they say that SMEs, small companies can be flexible,
they can be innovative.
Completely wrong.
Of course it is true that there are many, many small companies
who started up from a creative idea,
and they made their fortunate or more frequently they failed.
But it does not mean
that they can continue being innovative or creative all the time.
Why?
Because that costs a lot of money.
Being creative, being innovative is incredibly expensive.
You need to be able to throw
large amounts of money through the window.
You don't think about R&D, research and development
as something that you are financing
and then you are calculating the return on investment.
You think about creativity as something that you are sponsoring,
and occasionally there will be something that might
change the life of the company that may make you successful,
that may earn enormous amounts of money and so on.
But it is not happening all the time.
There is some calculation which says that
it is about four per cent of the good creative ideas
that can become a successful innovation.
It is basically twice applying the 20/80 rule.
So 20 per cent of all ideas can be acceptable,
20 per cent of the innovations can be really successful.
So it is like the 20 per cent of the 20 per cent is 4 per cent.
It is also important to understand that innovation
is not always a product.
Innovation can be anything, it can be a business process.
For example, if you add Bill Gates' at the speed of light,
he says that Microsoft can be beaten in the software market,
but not by product innovation;
it can be beaten by business innovation.
And we have seen some of this already happening.
Now, does it mean that bigger creativity
is bigger innovations, smaller creativity, smaller innovation?
Not at all.
The two pictures that you see on the slide,
One is a black hole, which is the great, great, thing;
the other is a new dish by Ferran Adria who is
acknowledged as the best chef in the world.
Both of these require great creativity,
and one will change only the life of a couple of people
who taste the brilliant dish of Ferran Adria,
the other can change the world of science,
our understanding of the world,
and ultimately the life of all humanity.
So there is no such relationship.
Now, to think about creativity and the creative people
in preparation for your group session,
look up on the internet the Belbin roles of creativity,
the Belbin roles of working in teams,
and that's what you are going to work with.
Thank you very much.
