It’s Not Too Late, Baby

Songwriter Carole King has it wrong when she sings, “It’s too late baby, now it’s too late”—or at least as it relates to creativity and innovation. “Maybe we’ve just stopped trying,” but it’s never too late.

This being the last Innovations blog for the calendar year, I feel compelled to offer up some optimism to lead into the new year. So, even if you’ve just stopped trying, you can start trying again.

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, and frankly, I get irritated at all the people that get fitness frenzy because the first two weeks of January are the only time that I have to wait to get on an elliptical machine at the gym. Putting my own resolution prejudices aside, anyone can be creative at any time during their life, and if you want to make a resolution to be more creative in 2011 you’ve got my full support (not that you need mine or anyone else’s).

I was reminded of this when the New York Times Magazine ran a piece on brainstorming this past Sunday, featuring a consultancy that charges $200,000 for a one-day session for 25 people to learn how to brainstorm. While the consultancy has rock-star status in the world of innovation, I think that any company that pays $8,000 a person for a one-day peak experience should use what they learned to figure out how to have more common sense.

I’m not bitter that other people doing what I do are getting, oh, about $195,000 more for a day of their time. No, it’s because with just a little effort and an Internet connection anybody can learn more about their own creativity, including brainstorming.

I usually begin my innovation training sessions by asking people to write down what they would attempt to do if they knew they could not fail. Then I ask how many of them are doing what they wrote down, which is usually very few, and then I ask why. Not enough time, kids’ schedules, not enough money—I’ve heard all the excuses. And that’s when I think of Carole King’s line, “maybe we’ve just stopped trying.” Do you really want to be more creative and innovative, or are you just saying you want to be? Or maybe we’ve just stopped trying. Poor baby.

While financial service companies paint sappy inspirational images of baby boomers grafting grape varieties in their vineyards and making artisan cheeses in their “retirement,” or second careers, the reality is that you can exercise your creativity at any time in your life. The key is to start doing something—anything that moves you beyond intention to action. You want to make cheese? Knock yourself out.

If you’re waiting for New Year’s to start something that develops your creativity, why not take action now? Nike’s most famous slogan—Just Do It—resonated with so many people because it cut through the excuses, got up in your grill, and said if you want to do something, don’t hand us lame excuses.

The author Frank McCort started writing late in life after he retired and wound up winning a Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes at age 66. Legendary painter Grandma Moses started her art career in her 70s. Culinary icon Julia Child didn’t begin her television career until she was in her 50s, after her classic on French cooking was published. There are many other examples.

It’s not too late, baby. Happy New Year.

The Ultimate Holiday Gift for Kids

No, it’s not the newest electronic game. But how about the box that contained the new Xbox 360?

 

Recent testing showed that creativity is declining, especially among kids in kindergarten to sixth grade, so perhaps the most valuable gift you can give your kids is time to help them discover (or re-discover) their creativity.

 

Instead of falling back on the tired cliché of thinking outside the box, what if you help your kids imagine what could be in the box. It’s an exercise that friends of mine who teach improvisation use in their classes.

 

Imagine you’re giving someone a box. The recipient asks, “What’s in the box,” at which point you can make up whatever you want. Maybe it’s your Aunt Ethel or a live circus—whatever you choose to put in there. Then the recipient has to respond in an affirming way and make up something that they’re going to do with the “gift.” It’s a simple exercise, but one that’s fun and helps stretch imaginations.

 

One thing that parents can regularly do to help nurture their kids’ creativity is to ask them to find all the right answers for something, or all the possible solutions to something—and then listen to and affirm their ideas. And whatever you do, don’t judge their ideas. Imagination doesn’t come automatically, and sometimes all it takes is a little prompting on a regular basis to help kids develop their creative problem-solving skills by thinking of all the possible answers to something—even ones that seem impossible.

 

Mark Runco, professor of creative studies at the University of Georgia, works in the school’s Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development, and you can find a variety of tests and ideas to explore on its site. The center is named for E. Paul Torrance, a former University of Minnesota professor who left Minnesota for Georgia and whose research pioneered the study of creativity. Shame we couldn’t keep him here.

 

There are a variety of other programs available to parents who want to help their children think more creatively. The Odyssey of the Mind program is well-established nationally and active in Minnesota, and there is also Destination ImagiNation, based in New Jersey, which sponsors an annual competition around creative problem solving and has an active Minnesota chapter.

 

Educational psychologists say that raising creative kids can be more challenging to parents because they score higher in areas like “spontaneity, boldness, courage, freedom, and expressiveness,” according to Dr. Kyung Hee-Kim of the College of William and Mary—but I bet that parents have as much to gain related to their own creativity as their children.

 

Maybe the best gift box for your kids this season is the one that’s empty, but filled with time and imagination—plus, you won’t have to worry about opening up your credit card statement come January.

Worried About Innovation? Relax

Making year-end numbers have you stressed out? Where will that extra revenue come in the waning days of 2010? And what about meeting expectations that next year’s going to be a minimum of 10 percent better than this year?

 

Feeling a little tense? Well, relax. In fact, laugh it off and you’ll be more creative.

 

And when the chief financial officer looks at your expense report and questions that charge to take your employees to a local comedy club, you can tell him/her that you were working on improving the bottom line with innovative thinking—and you’ve got the research to prove it.

 

In a study recently reported in the New York Times, Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, and graduate student Karuna Subramaniam found that humor can put the brain in a positive mood—one that is strongly associated with the ability to solve puzzles with sudden insight, rather than through trial and error.

 

In the Northwestern study, after watching a short routine by comedian Robin Williams, college students solved more word-association puzzles overall—and significantly more by sudden insight—than they did when they had viewed a boring or frightening video beforehand. And that sudden insight, along with traditional problem analysis methodology, is an important part of the creative problem-solving process.

 

The findings of the Northwestern study complement work done at the University of Toronto, which found that people in positive moods were able to notice more background detail, even when instructed to block out distracting information.

 

While it may be our natural inclination to react to demands and deadlines with stress, it’s beneficial to take a lighter approach to come up with more creative solutions. Easier said than done—especially with year-end approaching, revenue expectations, and Wall Street analysts that find no humor in missing earnings forecasts. We need to take our businesses seriously, but on some occasions, when you want to be more innovative you should think seriously about injecting some humor into your process.

Keith Richards, Management Guru

The title of this post is one of the sub-headlines on the cover of a recent issue of The Economist. Interesting, but a rehash of a point made weeks ago here in a posting about partnership. Not that the 50-year creative partnership between Keith Richards and Sir Mick is anything to ignore. The secret is that they realized that they needed each other to succeed—they were better together than apart.

 

Another piece of anniversary news in the music business this week caught my eye, and it happened to be about one of my favorite groups, Asleep at the Wheel. (“Ladies and gentlemen, western swing ain’t dead; it’s asleep at the wheel.”) The Wheel just celebrated its 40th anniversary with a concert in its adopted hometown of Austin, Texas. (They’re originally from West Virginia.) For those of you not familiar with the group, they play Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys–inspired western swing.

 

One of the impressive things about the concert—in addition to the fact that the group has been around in some form for 40 years and is still going strong—was that it reunited many of the 90 musicians who have at some time been members of the band. That’s right, 90.

 

Lead singer and band leader Ray Benson, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, said, “My best talent, really, is convincing really talented people to join this band, and a lot of people have been in it by now.” He added, “To stay around, you’ve got to reinvent yourself every 10 years.”

 

While the Stones staying together for 50 years is no small feat, they’ve largely done it with the same band members. The Wheel on the other hand has had to deal with melding new members and blending new personalities for four decades, releasing 20 albums, and winning nine Grammy Awards along the way.

 

The Economist talks about Richards as a management guru, but I think Benson may be more the master of innovation, because convincing really talented people to join your organization—whether that’s a band or a corporation—is critical to keeping innovation fresh. Sustaining innovation among existing employees is important, but the ability to recruit new talent into an organization shouldn’t be overlooked, because it’s equally important to bring different perspectives and experiences into the mix, which new talent does. Just like a band needs to integrate new members to not only continue what it’s been doing but to also move the music forward, organizations need to do the same thing. Same song, different lyrics.

 

Benson also speaks to the need for reinvention. And the fact that the band has been able to continually improvise variations on a theme is a testimony to its ability to reinvent itself several times over. That’s not all that different from a company leveraging existing technologies in a variety of new ways.

 

When you look at your innovation efforts with regard to infusing new talent into your organization, are you Asleep at the Wheel? Maybe you should be.