Creative Intelligence

Bruce Nussbaum

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062088437
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

Offering insights from the spheres of anthropology, psychology, education, design, and business, Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, a leading thinker, commentator, and curator on the subjects of design, creativity, and innovation, is first book to identify and explore creative intelligence as a new form of cultural literacy and as a powerful method for problem-solving, driving innovation, and sparking start-up capitalism.

Nussbaum investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their creative intelligence — CQ—and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. Ultimately, Creative Intelligence shows how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original and highly social.

Smart and eye opening, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire illustrates how to connect our creative output with a new type of economic system, Indie Capitalism, where creativity is the source of value, where entrepreneurs drive growth, and where social networks are the building blocks of the economy.

PART I

Reclaiming Our Creativity

1

Strokes of Genius Are Not What They Seem

IN 1959, A YOUNG MAN from Kent, England, was expelled from high school after skipping assembly. “We wanted to have a smoke,” he recalled, “so we just didn’t go.” It was the latest in a long line of offenses. He’d never been much of a student—even as a boy, he’d hated school. But as a teenager, once he began to suspect that nothing he was learning in school would ever be of any use, he “adopted a criminal mind.” The way things were looking, he was facing a future on the labor exchange.

On the surface, perhaps, the boy’s behavior might have seemed to an older generation like rebellion or apathy. And that was certainly a big part of it—but there were other complicated forces at work. At the time, postwar Britain was experiencing a tumultuous period of economic and social change: British influence around the world was waning; the pound sterling was losing its position as the global currency to the dollar; manufacturing was in decline; the rigid class system was cracking; and young people had begun to question their place in society.

As the country’s established social order was breaking down, a generation of young people could see that their parents’ model wasn’t working. And so they were searching for new ways of living and expressing themselves, and fighting to release themselves from the social bonds that held their parents tight in their prescribed roles within British society. Much the same thing was happening in the United States in the 1950s and early 60s, but the effort appeared greater in Britain, perhaps because the ties of class and tradition were ever so much stronger. “At a pace that seemed wholly un-British, various strains of unofficial culture—defiant, anti-authoritarian, and hostile to such commonplaces of tradition as modesty, reserve, civility, and politesse—were coalescing not so much in unison as in parallel” wrote Shawn Levy, in his pop culture analysis of London in the sixties, Ready, Steady, Go! “It was as much a revolution in English society as any the island nation had ever experienced,” Levy said.

Yet, despite the first signs of a massive shift in the country’s culture, schools still taught the old way, through rote memorization of a stale, standard, and irrelevant curriculum. “You realize later on that you’re being graded and sifted by this totally arbitrary system that rarely, if ever, takes into account your whole character,” the boy reflected about his education some years later. “They never took into account that hey, you might be bored.”

His teenage years were not without their bright spots. Though his family didn’t have a record player, the house was filled with music. Three generations shared a passionate talent for music: His grandfather recognized and nurtured his appreciation, showed him how to play his first licks and chords on a classical, Spanish gut-string guitar, and his mother knew just how to fiddle with the radio knobs. The boy devoured music by all the greats: Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis. And he had a talent for drawing; it was his art teacher who noticed and helped get him into Sidcup Art College.

Even at Sidcup, though, the boy didn’t play by the rules. While many students studied disciplines like graphic arts to prepare them for jobs mostly in advertising and commercial arts, others skipped class to smoke and play music in the bathroom—it was there that he felt really alive. While classes were being held down the hall, the boy and his peers were teaching each other fingerboard work. It was around this time he became reacquainted with another boy he’d met in primary school, a young man with an identical taste in music. They spent a year hunting for records, seeking out the “real R&B” of artists like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed.

In 1962, the boy dropped out of Sidcup, moved into a flat with his friend, and, together, they formed a band. They started out playing rhythm and blues in London nightclubs. Though they only covered other people’s songs, the boy dreamed of one day writing his own. But despite his many attempts, he had no success. Until one day when “something else took over,” he said. “It was a shock, this fresh world of writing our own material, this discovery that I had a gift I had no idea existed. It was Blake-like, a revelation, an epiphany.”

As he later wrote in his book Life, his first song was called “As Tears Go By” and was first performed by a then-unknown seventeen-year-old named Marianne Faithfull. His name was, of course, Keith Richards, and his collaborator and friend was Mick Jagger.

The partnership between Richards and Jagger would go on to form the foundation of one of the most famous rock bands of all time, one of the most commercially successful—the Stones have grossed more than $2 billion in their five decades of playing together—and one of the most lasting—even as Richards and Jagger hit seventy, they continue to play to fans around the world.

It goes without saying that Richards and Jagger are two of the most creative individuals of our time, but perhaps not for the reasons some might think.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT CREATIVITY WOULD tell us that the boy from Kent (not to mention his friend Mick) was a genius. That he was lucky, gifted, special—all it took was that big “aha moment” for him to discover his place in the world as an artist and creator. Americans love stories like this: stories about the mad genius, the special personality, the lightbulb of inspiration flashing on at the eleventh hour. That’s one story of creativity, and there are a lot of other beliefs about creativity that go part and parcel with it.

Many of us believe that creative people are visionaries who are ahead of their time, “right-brain” types who think differently from everyone else. We’ve romanticized the notion of the lone poet starving in a garret or scribbling away by a pond far from civilization. We’ve come to have faith that science, neuroscience in particular, can explain why certain people are more creative than others, and we hope brain scan technology might offer insights about what the rest of us can do to become more creative. We may well have experienced fleeting moments of creativity in our own lives—but once it passes, we go back to life as usual, certain it was just a fluke.

Most of us experience some level of creativity anxiety. We feel that we are not creative enough, that we don’t know how to be creative or simply weren’t born that way. Even some of the most talented people fail to recognize that what they do is indeed creative. They aren’t seeing any bright lightbulbs going off. They can’t pinpoint any special moment when creativity “happened.” They’re not “artists”; they’re just doing their jobs. I’ve heard of an engineer working on an advanced jet engine—basically hand-crafting a gigantic, complex, high-tech machine out of titanium, successfully boosting its thrust efficiency by 20 percent—who failed to recognize that he’s performing a creative activity. I’ve seen a student use smartphone app technology to develop a whole new way for her Gen Y friends to experience art, and still not consider herself a creative person. We don’t think of ourselves as creative because we don’t know how to identify creativity. We don’t even know how to define it properly.

Because there is so much uncertainty about creativity—and so many myths about it—we often reject creativity in favor of predictability and conventionality, even when routine destroys our ability to enjoy our work or our lives. Researchers at Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, showed that participants “demonstrated a negative bias toward creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty.” Worse, “the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea.” They associated creative ideas with negative words—agony, poison, and my favorite, vomit. Let’s face it. Creativity scares us.

As with most conventional wisdom, there is some truth to some of these perceptions about creativity—many artists do, after all, seem to move to the beat of their own drums (though perhaps that’s because we don’t see the other instruments accompanying them). And there have been a number of studies linking mood disorders and creative behavior, including one by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, that found the rate of depressive illness among distinguished artists to be ten to thirty times more common than in the general population.

But a growing body of research is showing that other forces, social forces, are at work. Einstein’s brain was extracted and examined for its shape and size, and in the end even pickled and sliced up, all ready for the microscope, because many believed the secrets to his extraordinary mathematical creativity lay in its unusual surface, density of neurons, or lack of crevices. (Lenin’s brain was also examined this way, by Soviet scientists seeking to verify his genius.) Yet we know Einstein was more than just a brain. He played violin, originally at his mother’s behest, but his reluctance was transformed when his discovery of Mozart inspired a lifelong love of music. He struggled in school, barely passing some subjects, while excelling in mathematics.

We also know Einstein drew groundbreaking conclusions from his work as an examiner in a Swiss patent office, where he evaluated applications for electromagnetic devices. The pace and quality of the work allowed him to dwell on recurring questions about electricity, light, matter, space, and time, which would be crucial in the experimentation leading to four of his most famous papers. While Einstein was a patent clerk, he and two friends convened a group they called the Olympia Academy, in which they read philosophers and physicists, such as Mach and Hume, and discussed their own work. Einstein acknowledged the effect of these informal convocations on the development of his thought throughout his career.

And we know that Keith Richards did not write “As Tears Go By” alone, but with Mick Jagger and only after Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager and producer, pushed them into a kitchen and told them not to come out without a song. Oldham, who’d worked for Mary Quant in London’s hot fashion scene in the early 1960s and later as a publicist for Bob Dylan and the Beatles, knew how songs—and careers—got made, and told Richards and Jagger their future depended on their songwriting. It was because of their collaboration, their hard work, and this bit of wisdom from someone with experience that Richards and Jagger were able to go on to write “The Last Time,” the first song played by the Rolling Stones; “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the band’s first hit (at least in the United States); and the hundreds of songs that came after.

That revelatory moment when the two began writing lyrics might have seemed like a stroke of genius, but it was actually a natural result of years of study and hard work: They learned to do what they love in a different kind of classroom—not by memorizing the right answers to an old test but by playing together to generate something new. “What I found about the blues and music,” wrote Richards in Life, “tracing things back, was that nothing came from itself. As great as it is, this is not one stroke of genius. This cat was listening to somebody and it’s his variation on the theme. And so you suddenly realize that everybody’s connected here. This is not just that he’s fantastic and the rest are crap; they’re all interconnected.”

Of all the words that Richards has written in his half-century-long career, these perhaps are the most apt to begin a discussion about creativity. It’s a discussion that’s a little different from the ones we’re used to having, and it’s one whose time has come.

Richards’s story reveals that we all have the capacity to be creative. We just need to search a little deeper to bring it out. Indeed we have been searching for the source of creativity for some time.

2

The Search for the Secrets of Creativity

I BEGAN COVERING DESIGN AND innovation in the 1990s for BusinessWeek, and during my years at the magazine, I was involved with many attempts at measuring innovation. In 1992 BusinessWeek began supporting what is now called the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), highlighting new innovations at corporations and consultancies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In April 2006, the magazine teamed up with the Boston Consulting Group to launch a list of “Most Innovative Companies” using an algorithm that combined soft and hard data—the collective opinion of senior managers as well as metrics on R&D spending, patent listings, and revenue generated by new products.

Then, in 2008, my team created an S&P/BusinessWeek Global Innovation Index, which consisted of twenty-five global companies that were considered “creativity-driven” and whose stock prices over time were higher than the average. The goal of the index was to facilitate investing in innovation within big global corporations, and we used conventional measures for ranking—R&D spending, number of patents, revenues generated from new products.

Between our many lists, the index, and in 2006 the launches of the online Innovation & Design channel and IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly magazine filled with insights and advice on innovation, we put in a massive amount of work and effort to covering innovation over the years. We wrote hundreds of stories about innovation successes, compiled scores of lists, and congratulated ourselves on really covering innovation.

And then I stepped back and really looked at the results.

In list after list of “Most Innovative Companies,” and year after year at the IDEA annual awards, the same two dozen or so companies showed up time and again. Thousands of public and private companies launch innovative products and services each year, but only a tiny sliver of that group ever showed up.

To add insult to injury, the one company that everyone agreed was the most innovative didn’t fit any of traditional measures; that was, of course, Apple. Apple spent very little on R&D; it didn’t have a formal innovation “funnel” process with established procedures; it made just a few things and it was run by an imperious CEO and a small band of followers. Here was this company that was transforming our lives—not only by giving us beautiful, elegantly designed products, but by changing the very way we interacted with products, giving us the tools that allowed us to create everything from playlists to photo albums to movies.

Apple simply didn’t fit. And that wasn’t the only important omission. When you look at most of the products that have changed our lives over the past decades—from Facebook to Twitter, Amazon to eBay—they are almost invariably start-ups offering surprising new products or services. Their success had nothing to do with the number of patents or the amount spent on R&D, and so it was impossible to measure these companies using the same metrics of more established organizations. That made it clear that something else was happening, something else was responsible for these big disruptive innovations, something that we hadn’t yet discovered how to quantify.

Frustrated, I began asking around, starting with my contacts at a number of consultancies whose job it was to help existing companies become more creative. They were reluctant to talk about it at first, but eventually they began to share the same surprising truth: They had an incredibly low success rate when it came to helping companies usher in the kind of transformative innovation they were seeking.

We’ve all read about the many corporate innovation successes (BusinessWeek published articles about many of them, from Kaiser Permanente’s shift from focusing on medical treatment to the “patient experience” to P&G’s development of the Swiffer brand), but few of us are aware of the large number of failures. I prodded people and, grudgingly, they agreed that innovation was hard to come by. Years after I initially began these conversations, the heads of two top innovation firms would tell me that of the hundreds of projects they worked on each year, only a handful actually worked.

After spending most of my career covering innovation, developing tools to help companies and investors measure it, and believing that companies really could become more innovative, I was shocked. And every bit as frustrated. What was this all about? Why were all the hugely disruptive innovations coming out of left field? Why were companies that were spending money and time on all the right things failing to come up with the same kinds of life-altering products and services that some twentysomethings could do with zero budget? How could the millions spent on metrics and measuring by big organizations generate far less innovation than some talented computer programmers and their buddies?

Sure, you still saw significant creativity coming out of the government—the Internet and the technology that led to Apple’s Siri are two excellent examples—but the closer you got to what was going on there, the more it seemed that the government labs had less in common with Fortune 500s than they did with start-ups. In fact, I began to dig into what actually happened inside the best government and corporate labs, only to discover the social dynamics that led to innovation—serendipity, connection, discovery, networking, play—mirrored the organic messiness of a great creative city or college campus more than the mechanical process of a big corporation. So what was going on?

I began to ask myself not only “What are we measuring?” but also “What aren’t we measuring?”

CRACKING THE CODE OF CREATIVITY

I wasn’t the only one asking these kinds of questions. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, design thinking had become wildly popular. Ironically, it was during a discussion about design thinking and innovation that some of us came to see the limits of focusing on design alone.

I had joined Danny Hillis at his Applied Minds studio in Glendale, California, on October 30, 2007, along with the big guns in design, design thinking, and innovation—Larry Keeley from Doblin, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and Patrick Whitney at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. Hillis, a world-class innovator who invented parallel computers and worked f...