Thoughts along the way

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Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating

After an inspiring innovation session during on of our clients' introduction session for 60 new employees, the comedian and scientist John Cleese´s brilliant lecture about creativity came to my mind.
During the innovation session the newly employed came up with ideas on how to develop society using solutions citizens dream of (our client’s mission). These ideas were considered as intermediate impossibles. An Intermediate Impossible is an idea that in itself is impossible but spurs better ideas that are possible. The term was originally coined in 1973 in the book ‘Po: Beyond Yes and No’ by Edward De Bono, as a tool to use in the creative process. In his inspiring and funny lecture from 1991, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity. Cleese outlines 5 factors to arrange that will help you be more creative”:
1. Space “You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you are under pressure.”

2. Time “It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”

3. (More) time “Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.

4. Confidence “Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making mistakes”

5. Humor “The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”
Cleese’s model for creativity is based on our two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to consider possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it.

When leading change our role as leaders are to respect those modes, to release control in ideation phase and ignore how it fits in, or will be implemented in our current operations. Then magic will happen!

   

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