Donna Porter and Nancy Tennant

Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species; and its ultimate goal, self-understanding.

—Edward Wilson

In the late 1990s, NASA launched a mission to Mars named the Martian Climate Orbiter. Its primary objective was to determine the distribution of water on Mars and monitor weather conditions. During the mission, the Orbiter was to communicate with a lander on Mars’s surface, sending data back to NASA for analysis. Unfortunately, there was a communications problem. It appears there was a misunderstanding of terms and measurement systems being used for the path of the Orbiter. NASA provided the data program (which used the United States Customary Unit), while the part responsible for completing the calculations was provided by a critical contractor, who used the NASA Standard Software Interface Specification. Apples talking to oranges. In the exact science of NASA, where inches matter, the Orbiter path’s calculation was off, causing the Orbiter to miss its trajectory and ultimately ricochet into the uppermost atmosphere where it was lost. Working with a common agreement or definition is vital to NASA missions, but also in our work lives. Do we have a common agreement on what the term creativity means?

Organization work is often muddled by terms that have multiple meanings. A combination of academics, authors, and practitioners redefine the same terms causing multiple meanings. Often, we do not check to see that we are on the same page. Examples of ambiguous terms include innovation, talent, teams, and leadership. It is worth it to spend the time to define terms so that we don’t ricochet into the wrong atmosphere.

Invaded Terms: Guilty as Charged

Consider the invaded term creativity. An invaded term is a common term that’s been taken hostage by someone who plunders its original meaning to fit their purposes. The more this happens, the more the term loses a shared meaning. The term was first used in 1875 by Adolphus William Ward to describe Shakespeare’s poetic “creativity,” although it did not see common usage until WWII. As an invaded term, creativity has acquired different shades of meanings that include original ideas, novelty, artistic work production, the creation of ideas, effective, useful, utility, imagination, innovation, and invention. One of our favorite definitions belongs to Robert E. Franken, who says creativity is a “tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.”

We are guilty of invading the term creativity to fulfill the promise of this book. Our definition draws on the key definitions that came before us, but it is unique; it adds context. For this book, we define creativity as:

The ability to recognize or generate ideas through novel perspectives that defy the crowd and create aha moments.

Our promise for this book includes deconstructing the morass of information on creativity to provide a purposeful and practical way to bring more creativity into organizations and personal lives (Figure 1). Let’s break down our definition:

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• Recognize. While many believe that only creatives generate the ideas, it should be noted that leaders who can recognize creativity have an important role. Often in organizations, it is these recognizers who remove barriers for the creatives to succeed.
• Generate. We will look at the roots of the word creativity shortly, but for now, we like that notion of bringing something out of the dark into the world. Creativity has to come out of your head or your heart and into your environment. Otherwise, what good is it?
• Novel perspectives. Creativity in and of itself may not solve problems. However, it does create unique perspectives that are essential to solving many of the vexing problems we face. These perspectives can be new to the world or new to your organization.
• Defies the crowd. Creativity overturns orthodoxies and goes against the grain. It is frame-breaking. Defying the crowd is our shorthand for going against the norm. Again, we offer context in our definition—in this case, to go against the crowd where the crowd is those around us who are holders of the status quo. Additionally, we are often part of the crowd that critiques our own ideas, pushing against our creativity.
• Aha moments. An aha moment is a moment of sudden inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension. Creativity should engender an aha moment and an emotional reaction that affirms its gift to the problem at hand.

Creativity Forward

Building on this definition, we looked at the origin of the word. Creativity’s etymological roots are from the Latin verb creare, meaning to bring something forth. We like the movement associated with creare—bringing something out of the dark into the world. It’s not enough to think creatively, you must do something with it. Unleash it into the world, bring it forth. We like this notion of movement in creativity. We refer to it as creativity forward, bringing your creativity out of your head and heart and into the world, and paying it forward to elicit creativity from others.

Creativity forward has interesting added qualities. It speaks to always pursuing creativity but never quite getting there. To keep tinkering. It connotes lifelong learning to become more creative. It speaks to the movement, not the destination. Creativity forward is both a concept and an encouragement. It’s the birth of moving creativity from nature to nurture, adding panache and confidence.

Creativity forward also draws on the courage needed to fulfill part of the definition. To defy the crowd, and even oneself, in the act of creativity is not an easy thing to do. We suggest that when people think they are not creative, it is not that they don’t have creative ability; it is that they may not have tapped into the courage required to unleash their creativity into the world. Creativity forward is a rallying cry to mobilize ourselves to defy the crowd.

Your Creativity Muse

The word muse stems from Greek and Roman mythology, describing a spirit who presides over artistic disciplines. We are using the word to refer to a person in your life who serves as one of your creative inspirations. Use the “Your Creativity Muse” exercise to think about someone in your life, professional or personal, who you believe is extremely creative. Try not to use an artist, poet, or someone already in the creative world. See the appendix for a completed example.

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Human vs. Machine Creativity

News about machines taking over our jobs inundates our everyday lives. Will machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) ever replace human creativity? At this point, we can say that in most countries, to receive a patent on a new product, the inventor has to be a human. While problem solving is within the domain of machine learning (with limitations), problem finding is not, at least not now. A likely scenario now might be for humans to identify new questions or identify new problems that humans and AI solve together. For now, creativity, as we have defined it in this book, is still the unique domain of humans.

But AI can augment human creativity. Presently AI can only choose between the data inputted into it by humans, and cannot choose between imagined options. That may change in the future, but pure creativity is still a uniquely human trait. Even if machines cannot replace humans in the creative domain, they can complement human creativity. But is AI creative? We’ve learned where AI is concerned, never say never.

Compare and Contrast

We defined creativity as recognizing or generating ideas through novel perspectives that defy the crowd and create aha moments. We created this definition to focus on professionals in organizations, such as talent development professionals, who use creativity to solve their internal partners’ or customers’ problems. This brings up the question of how creativity, as defined here, relates to other practices that, on their surface, seem similar or identical to creativity? Let’s compare and contrast a few:

• Innovation. Innovation is the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. While there is some overlap, innovation is clearly focused on value extraction from the end-user or customer who values the solution. With that said, creativity is an essential ingredient at critical points, particularly divergent points, through the innovation process.
• Invention. Invention is the act of conceiving something that has never been made or used before. Creativity is a necessary component in invention, but the two are not the same.
• Craft. Craft or crafting is an activity involving skill in making things by hand. If you are the originator of a craft, likely you used creativity in its creation. If you are making the craft, you are likely following instructions and may not be using your full potential creativity to do so.
• Design. Steve Jobs defined design as “not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Design is a user-centered plan and specification for the construction of an object, system, or process. It indeed uses creativity throughout the process, but it is not the same as creativity.
• Imagination. The act or power of forming a mental image of something that has never existed either in the senses or in reality. Imagination is an ingredient of creativity, and vice versa, but they have vastly different roles in bringing creativity out into the light.
• Fantasy. The power or process of creating unrealistic or improbable mental images, such as a daydream. Again, creativity is at play, but our creativity has to lead to something realistic and probable.

An Example of Creativity in the Workplace

We started this chapter with an example from NASA about definitions. So it is perhaps fitting that NASA provides an unexpected example of creativity in the workplace from our own lives. When we worked for Whirlpool Corporation, one of our annual assignments in the TD area was to design the annual leadership conference for the senior leadership group. We based our design on current issues the CEO and executive committee wanted to explore. That year, they wanted to explore how hard it is to speak up when you see something that is not right. To bring the workshop to life, we decided to take the leadership group to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to learn firsthand about the Challenger disaster.

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, centered around O-rings and their failure at cold temperatures. The O-ring was known to be sensitive to cold below 53 degrees. The weather on the day of launch was 36 degrees. Why would NASA go ahead with the launch knowing that the O-rings could fail? There are many case studies of why NASA launched Challenger that morning. The root cause analysis centers on a host of reasons that led to the ill-fated launch; engineering, public relations, and politics are just a few or the reasons cited. We were interested in exploring the leadership failure to create an environment where people not only felt free to speak up and defy the crowd but felt accountable for doing so.

We dedicated one morning of the three-day workshop to a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. We were fortunate that we had contacts within NASA to provide our workshop participants with a behind-the-scenes experience. We lined up NASA speakers who brought the Challenger disaster to life in terms of leadership lessons. Many had been in leadership roles at the time of the disaster, so they had firsthand stories and lessons to share. It was very emotional to hear them speak and feel their regret for their failure to defy the crowd or create an environment where others could defy the crowd by opposing the tidal wave of PR and political forces. It was an incredible experience with brave leaders who told their story and how they changed, many saying never again would they fail to go against the crowd when they knew the crowd was wrong. The impact of their decision—lives lost—was more significant than anything most of us would face in our working lives. The experience left an indelible impression.

In the afternoon we returned to our hotel conference room and had a short debrief on the NASA experience. Our plan did not consider how emotional the visit would be for our leaders or how, during their ride back, they would reflect on their failures, personal and professional, to defy the crowd, in both big and small ways.

Once we finished the debrief, we got ready to move to the next business topic. Suddenly, however, someone interrupted and said, “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not ready to move on. I want to talk about this more.” Then, to everyone’s surprise, he walked to the front of the conference room and started sharing how deeply the visit had affected him, reflecting on his failures to take a stand in large and small situations. He vowed on that day to work on defying the crowd when he thought it was headed in the wrong direction. Others followed, walking to the front of the room and sharing their emotional reaction to the morning and their leadership lessons learned around creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up when they see something concerning. As the workshop facilitators, we watched this unfold and called an audible (that is, we changed course)—we scrapped the entire afternoon’s agenda. We then did something we’d never done before; we turned the meeting over to the participants. It was an afternoon that none of us would forget.

Let’s use our creativity definition as a lens to assess what happened as we, the workshop designers, used creativity to pitch the idea of taking the workshop to NASA. The day we went in to pitch the NASA visit idea to the CEO is sealed in our memory. We had never done anything like this; it was big and bold and risky. We had no idea how the CEO would react. He immediately felt the aha moment of the idea and jumped in to co-create critical aspects of the experience. He thought it was unique, offering a novel perspective, an aha moment; it defied the norm.

However, there is another crucial creativity lesson in the story, one that had nothing to do with our actions. When the workshop participants stood up and took control of the meeting by sharing personal stories of how the visit affected them, group creativity took over. They had their own perspective on how best to spend the rest of the day; they shared their moments of struggle to defy norms in their professional lives. And while none of their experiences had resulted in anything near the Challenger scale, they certainly felt the weight of going along with the crowd when they thought the crowd was not right. By taking over the workshop to do what they collectively felt in the moment, they turned around our notion of who runs a leadership development workshop, or who should run it. Our only creative contribution at that point was to recognize it and get out of the way. At that point, we became recognizers of creativity.

What Am I Hiring Creativity to Do?

In the innovation world, Clayton Christensen was a giant. One of the tools he gave us was to think about a product or service in terms of what you are “hiring” it to do. He called the tool “Jobs to Be Done.” We want you to use this same logic in terms of creativity. In the next chapter, we will explore why creativity matters. It will be a more wide-reaching discussion on creativity in terms of individuals, teams, and organizations. To help you prepare for that chapter, let’s explore what you are hiring creativity to do for you in your professional or personal life. Figure 2 presents some options to start your thinking. They come from the creative workshops we have conducted over the years.

Figure 1.2. What Am I Hiring Creativity to Do?

In addition to myths and enemies, we will encourage you to reflect on what you have hired creativity to do in the “Jobs to Be Done” exercise. Think of three areas of your life where creativity could produce new outcomes. What are different jobs for creativity? What could you hire creativity to do? Be as varied as you can. Please also draw your concept, no matter how rudimentary. No one is really looking. Go ahead, defy the crowd with your drawings! What three things will you hire creativity to do?

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The One Thing: Defy the Crowd

There is a great deal to think about in terms of the meaning of creativity. It’s an invaded term thrown around a great deal without a shared understanding. We believe our definition—recognize or generate ideas through novel perspectives that defy the crowd and create aha moments—offers a concise and comprehensive way to define creativity within organizations.

The part of the definition that we want to emphasize is defying a crowd, where the crowd includes yourself. We are often our own worst enemy to our creativity. In fact, at the top of the enemies list, most of us should write “me.” The one thing that we want you to begin to experiment with is defying the crowd.

Perhaps, just for fun, think about Asa and Tim in the Name Game from the introduction. Asa defies the crowd at every turn, even though she did not have an audience. Tim feels pressure from the crowd, even though there is no one watching. His own mind stopped him from misnaming objects in the room.

We would like you to try the exercise again with a mindful intention of defying the crowd. Go into it with the idea that you will delight in misnaming things. Get more comfortable with the creativity of it. Take note of how you react to something you are about to say or do that is creative. And then, as Asa did, throw caution to the wind and try it. We promise you will not cause clocks to stop or a tsunami to engulf the earth. It will be OK. Put your best creativity foot forward and defy the crowd, starting with yourself.