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Lab's business
Laba Business School,
Editorial Team
Adam Kingl has explored many career paths: he has been an actor, director, consultant and talent development specialist, eventually becoming a leadership expert. The thread that unites his various careers is his passion for creativity. He is now a researcher at University College London (UCL) School of Management, where he teaches executives how to transform their natural curiosity into new ventures.
In his latest book, Sparking Success, he explores the ways artists and leaders in creative fields generate new ideas. Can business leaders use these practices to boost innovation in their companies? From improvisation to “layered leadership,” corporations can learn a lot from chefs, comedians, and animators, Kingl says in our interview.
How can we rediscover the creativity that we gradually lose as we grow up, especially in the workplace?
The way we run organizations is one of the reasons creativity is declining. It starts even before we enter the job market – our creativity is held back by the education system. School has only one right answer for everything, and memorization becomes a substitute for diverse answers and original thinking.
Organizations that want to be more adaptive can georgia telephone number data make structural changes. They can provide incentives and change their organizational design to be more creative.
I worked in improv – I created and led an improv group for a decade. At first glance, improv may seem chaotic, but it is creativity seeking structure . There is not much outside input, sometimes it relies on slight suggestions. It is about collaboration and listening skills – and these are skills that every organization considers important.
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One reason brainstorming may not produce the expected results is that people are trying to generate, evaluate, and select ideas to implement at the same time . This creates chaos.
Improvisation creates a structure around that. You come up with an idea and you develop it. You don't decide right away whether you like it. You explore it as if it were the best idea in the world. It's a technique called, "Yes, and?"
It’s the opposite of the “Yes, but?” approach—a phrase we often hear in the business world that means, “No, I reject your idea.” “Yes, and?” means you explore your idea for a moment. You extrapolate what would happen if you implemented it.
Even if you don’t follow through with the idea, you’re still showing appreciation by giving them respect and time. Many managers assume their job is to say, “Yes, but?” But then don’t be surprised if your team stops generating new ideas. Why should they if you immediately reject them?
Can creative people be great leaders?
Every organization says their top priority is to have a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture . But if leaders aren’t willing to think outside the box and motivate people to be different, it won’t happen.
Take Pixar Animation Studios. Steve Jobs was building Pixar before he went back to Apple. He hired people who thought differently—I call them “creative misfits.”
He hired producer and director Brad Bird, who had created many of Pixar's most famous animations and was also one of the key people behind The Simpsons. Steve Jobs told him, "I want to hire you because you're a little disruptive." Bird said, "I've been fired from a lot of places for being disruptive, but I've never been hired for it before." He signed on the spot, and it was one of Pixar's most successful hirings.
This is a good example of how organizations need to think about diversity and inclusion. Organizations may employ people from different backgrounds or from different fields of study. But when they join a company, they are likely expected to adopt a predetermined approach to work.
So don't be surprised by the lack of creativity. Diversity is important, but it's just politics. Highly bureaucratic institutions are usually good at hiring diversity.
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What organizations are pretty bad at is inclusivity. How do you encourage people to bring their differences to the forefront? How do you value and empower them, rather than suppress them?
Steve Jobs was very vocal about appreciating that. He wanted to raise people's level of thinking, not turn them into some corporate Xerox of Pixar.
I don't like the term "onboarding" when referring to new employee orientation because it has so many emotional connotations: "coming on board," "getting into the company."
But the question should be, "How do we keep an outside perspective? How do we get you to think differently than other people working here so that we expand our thinking?"
