Teaching Creativity to Leaders

AI is transforming the world. And it starts with the right compute. ARM is the AI compute platform trusted by global leaders. Proudly NASDAQ listed, built for the future. Visit arm.com discover. Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene. Today I'm talking with Tim Brown, CEO of ideo. He's written HBR articles, a book, and is now teaching courses through IDEOU about leading creativity. Tim, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Thanks very much. It's great to be here.

So I think the topic of this course is really interesting and I'm curious to sort of dig into some of the details here about leading creativity. But let's back up a little bit to start. What's your goal in all of this?

So there's an important nuance here and it's actually all to be found in the title of the course. It's called Leading for Creativity. The nuance here is we're actually not trying to teach creativity. I mean, there's lots of people doing that, including us, but everything from whether it's teaching design thinking, whether it's going to art school or whatever it might be, there's lots and lots of stuff, I mean, endless things on trying to get individual people to be more creative. That is not actually what we're interested in here. What we're interested in is how do people who have leadership roles in organizations, whether they be businesses or other forms of institutions, unlock the creativity of their organization. In other words, how do they lead other people so that those people are more creative? That's really the topic that we're focused on here. And there's a simple reason for it, which is that in a more volatile, complex, faster changing world, it's getting more and more obvious that organizations that don't evolve quickly through innovation, and I don't just mean innovation in their products and services, but innovation in everything they do. So these organizations, if they don't evolve quickly enough, they will simply be out competed by others, whether that's the latest startup, the latest disruptive technology, the large scale competitor that's busy acquiring and consolidating in their market, whatever it might be. And so there's this imperative for organizations to unlock far more innovation than they ever have before and therefore to spend more of their time innovating than they have before. And so for a leader, whether you're a product manager, a brand manager, whether you're leading a talent organization, large or small, whether you're a CEO, one of your principal tasks in the future Will be to figure out how to unlock as much creativity in your organization as possible. And that's what we're focusing on teaching here.

Okay, so I want to dig into this a little bit more deeply. One of the things I think that a lot of leaders seem to jump to when you start talking about helping people in their organizations be more creative is things like office space or ping pong tables or, you know, certain things about the space or the rituals that happen in the space. So we might as well just sort of bring that up now and address it. How much of this really is about that kind of thing? And if it is, then what are the types of things in those categories of rituals and space that really matter?

Some of it is to do with those kinds of things, But I think it's probably easiest if we sort of put that into context in terms of understanding how things like that play a role. I mean, the important idea that we're trying to get across in this course is that traditional forms of leadership that we have been get communicated through us from the youngest age, through media, tend to get reinforced and emphasized when we're going through our educational experiences, whether that be at college or at business school, whatever it might be, is that leadership is all about leading from the front. It's all about being the person with the smartest ideas, being the person who makes all the decisions, being at the top of some kind of pyramidal shaped hierarchy. And the most important point we're trying to make here is that unlocking creativity in an organization requires a more sophisticated idea of what leadership is and what we're focusing on here. And we're certainly not saying this is exhaustive, but we're focusing on what we think of as sort of three stances, as it were, that are necessary for effective leadership. When it comes to this idea of unlocking creativity, one of those is leading from the front. And there are moments when we use the metaphor of the explorer being the person who kind of points to the horizon and says, let's go explore. That way is the right way to act when it comes to getting an organization, a team, to do creative things, Mostly by focusing on what are the right questions to ask, not what are the right solutions, but what are the right questions. So that's tremendously important. But it's only one of these stances. Another one is one that refers to things like space and culture. And the metaphor we use for that is that of the gardener. This idea that we have to nurture culture and nurture environment and nurture circumstances in Other words, we somehow have to lay out the stage for people to be creative on. And that. That is important. And that takes a level of proactivity. That's something you have to think about in advance, right? It's too late. When you've asked the team to go off and be creative, if you suddenly think, oh, boy, the problem is our culture, you know, attacks creativity. Or our culture is so analytical that nobody has space to explore new ideas. Or our office space is such that everybody's in their own office never to speak to each other. I mean, I know these all sound blatantly obvious, but the fact is that thinking about laying out the stage, thinking about nurturing the culture and conditions is tremendously important if you want to get the most creativity out of your organization. So that's when moments of things like space matter. The fact is, I don't really care whether it's ping pong tables or anything else. It's that there are certain qualities that environments that support creativity have. They tend to encourage collaboration, they tend to encourage trust because they're often playful. Because playfulness is actually a great example of an environment of trust. When kids or animals, young animals, play, they trust each other to explore without undue criticism. They trust each other to kind of push the envelope. And so the reason that often creative spaces tend to look more playful is that playfulness encourages the kind of trust that creativity benefits from. Also, spaces that give people permission to let their brains go, as it were, to step away from the focus problem is another benefit of play. I mean, I think that's often why foosball tables and ping pong tables are popular. Not because of the actual activity of foosball and ping pong, but that it releases you from staring at the problem, gives your brain a moment to sort of reset and perhaps come back to the problem with a kind of a fresh outlook. So, you know, space culture, tremendously important. And then there's a third stance which we think is equally important, in fact, arguably the most important one for the actual leader themselves to become proficient at. And that's the stance we think of. At the right metaphor, there is the player coach, the person who's able to step in and advise and help a team as it's performing, as it's being creative to learn as much as it can from the experiences that it's had to ask questions about. Are we really reaching far enough? Are we taking all of the appropriate constraints into account? Are we stepping back from the problem and understanding it in its completeness? The kinds of things that people who had their own experiences in innovation are able to provide for a team that might be younger, might be more naive, or might just be overly focused on the problem at hand.

So this is interesting because I know part of what you have talked about is, is this sort of importance of a process of experimentation. Does that process shift depending on whether you see yourself as an explorer, a gardener or a player coach, or is that basically there's a process and anyone can do it?

No, I mean, I think experimentation is a process for exploring new ideas. Right. And I think you can think of it yourself as a leader playing different roles within those experiments. So if you're playing the explorer role, it may well be. This is the big question we're trying to answer. So please, let's design some experiments to get us there. If you're playing the nurturer, the gardener, then it might be, well, this is. We're going to be carrying out all these experiments, so let's make sure we've got an environment and a culture that's conducive to that. If you're playing the role of player coach, and I think this is where you're playing alongside the teams that are doing the experimenting, it might be helping them figure out what the right hypothesis is. Often I think it's in helping them understand what they've learned from an experiment, particularly if that experiment seems to have failed. Right. If it hasn't had the outcomes that they were expecting, that's often where teams struggle. And a good leader and a good player coach who's had some experience knows how to help the team extract the maximum amount of learning from the experiment. Because in the end, that is the purpose of experiments, is that they push learning forward.

Well, it's interesting too, as you talk about these roles a little bit more, it sounds like they don't need to be mutually exclusive. You could take a little from column A and a little from column B as it seems appropriate to you.

I think that's probably true. The way I think about it more is a bit like a dance. You can choreograph your performance, as it were, as a leader by moving backwards and forwards between these different leadership stances or leadership roles. So the best creative leaders are able to play all of these roles.

Excellent. Okay.

They may come from a beginning of being one or other. I mean, quite often we find in our own environment here at ideo, for instance, is that some people who are perhaps a little more introverted or have spent more time studying the craft of innovation and design tend to Start off as great player coaches, and they learn how to step out in front and sort of point to the horizon, or they learn to think about the constraints of culture and how they might affect those and how they might design for them. So most of us start from one or other of those three places. But I think what we should aspire to do as strong leaders is to be able to be competent at all three and then know when to play each of those roles.

One question I have for you about this is related to the sort of lumpiness of creativity in an organization. You know, it's not like everyone is equally creative. Some teams may be very playful and creative. Others may be less so. And I'm just wondering, if you are a very senior leader in an organization, how do you manage across that a team that, you know, may have a very different creative culture than another? How do you sort of bring them all along?

Well, I. I mean, I suspect this is true of almost any set of skills in an organization. I mean, you know, obviously any organization is striving for, well, ought to be striving for mastery of those skills so that they can perform at the highest level. And like any organization that's focused on any set of skills, you need to think about development. And so I think strong leaders of creativity need to think about how are their teams developing, whether that's learning from the experiences that they're having, whether it's seeing what others are doing. I mean, one of the values of thinking about creativity as a collaborative act rather than one where you isolate people or teams, is that they can learn from each other. I mean, that's certainly what happens at IDEO all the time. A team will discover a new way of doing something, and before you know it, it's spread out like wildfire across the organization because people are voracious to learn those things. And so thinking about how those skills are developing in an individual team or across the organization, tremendously important. In some cases, it's important to measure things. So, for instance, we believe that one of the indicators of a strongly creative culture is how rapidly teams can go from asking a question to getting something in front of users. In other words, getting prototypes built that less competent teams, less skillful teams take longer. They do a lot more thinking. They have less creative confidence, to use another term that we like. And so, I mean, it's possible to measure that, right? It's possible to actually measure how long does it take for a team to get to its first prototype. And it's useful in some cases to measure that particularly if you're trying to encourage an organization to do it faster. And so there are some things that as a leader, one might want to measure. There are also some things that as a leader, one can do to increase the skill base of your team by bringing in new people from the outside. One of those leading from the front, like activities that we talk a little bit about in the course is hiring people themselves, bringing people into the teams, being willing to experiment, being willing to hire kind of edgy kinds of people who might bring different creative capacities and different creative outlooks into the team. What tends to happen is that cultures tend to homogenize, right? So they tend to hire for people like themselves. And so it often takes strong leadership to hire people or bring people into the team who are not like those people that are already there. So that's one of those examples of a time when a leader needs to play a sort of a play that explorer type role in order to bring more edgy talent into the teams.

Okay, so just to quickly recap, you've mentioned learning from failure, experimentation, the importance of fast prototyping, bringing in fresh viewpoints. One of the things I don't think we've covered yet is constraints. And that is a word that gets thrown around a lot when you hear people talking about creativity. And I'm just wondering, where are you on this whole constraints discussion of are they useful, are they not useful? How much do you want to constrain people? How do you sort of find the right kind of constraints to help you learn more quickly?

In my opinion, constraints are a matter of fact. I mean, without constraints, you actually don't have a design challenge. I mean, you have the metaphorical blank canvas, which is practically impossible to innovate around on or in unless some very particular circumstances exist. And so this idea of constraints is that they're just a matter of fact. Now then, the skillfulness, in fact, I would say the opportunity for creativity is an understanding at what level those constraints exist and which ones are important, perhaps which ones you're prepared to ignore at certain moments in the process in order to explore ideas which might be outside the possibilities of reality because of constraints, but which you can bring back inside once you've had them. So for instance, one good example of that is, quite often in my world or my old world of product design, we would attempt to design solutions that were perfect for the user, even though we didn't know how they could be made, even though we didn't know how you could manufacture them. Right. Because we wanted to know what the perfect solution was. And then we might have to continue to evolve the design in order to figure out how to make it. But at least we knew what the ideal solution was. Whereas if we started with, oh, we have to be able to make it, then often we got to much more incremental solutions. And what would happen sometimes is you'd find imaginative new ways to make things when you knew what you were trying to shooting for. And so being willing to step outside constraints. And that again takes leadership and sometimes permission for a team to do that. Another thing that's important is the opposite to that actually, is that sometimes teams are working on solutions and they're looking at the problem in too local a way and they might not understand what some of the kind of system level constraints might be. So a good example of that is again, in the kind of products and services world is they might well be working on a new solution but have failed to think about what channels to market they're going to use to get that product out there. And because they haven't thought about that, their solution is actually less relevant and less good. So it might be your job as a leader to point out that they haven't thought about how are we going to market this thing or who's going to sell it for us or how are we going to distribute it. So sometimes that's that moment when you might be playing, you're in that player coach role where you're reminding the team that they may not have thought about things that were important. So I mean, I'd say to recap, constraints are a matter of fact. The cleverness and the leadership opportunity is how creative you are with those constraints.

Hmm, excellent. Okay, I think I maybe have time for just one more question. I guess I'm just wondering, you know, you have a ton of experience with this. Is there a mistake that you see people making over and over again as they try to help their teams or organizations get more creative? Or maybe a series of mistakes?

Well, the mistake I always used to make, I don't know whether this is common, but I think it is. I've seen it many others make, which is that particularly for someone like me who started off as a, I mean, I'd like to think I was a creative person, I am a creative person, I was trying to designer, is that you make the mistake of thinking that your job as a leader is to have all the good ideas or that somehow your ideas need to be bigger and better than everybody else's. And that's a huge mistake to make maybe that you have the biggest and best idea. It may be that you have the most perspective, and therefore your ideas have a certain value because you have more perspective. But it's a tremendous error to think that others in your team and your organization haven't also got really important ideas. And it's very easy to, when you fail to understand that, not only to not give value to those ideas, but sometimes you sort of, even when they've got good ideas, your stance of like, I'm the smartest person in the room causes them to give up on those ideas too quickly. Right? Because they think, oh, he's got a big idea. He's the one who's going to think of the solution. I don't have to be creative. So that's the mistake that I see many leaders making. Essentially, it's assuming they have to lead from the front. And so I really encourage all leaders to have that little question constantly going on their head is like, am I doing too much leading from the front here? Am I having too many ideas? Am I speaking too much of the time? Should I be stepping back and listening? Should I be stepping back and coaching and asking questions rather than coming up with all the answers?

I think that's a great, great point. And there's something so rewarding when you see people on your team having fantastic ideas that you would never have thought of.

Oh, it's tremendous. It's a very rewarding feeling.

Excellent. Well, Tim, thank you so much for talking with us today. I've really, really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about a topic that I think is pretty important.

That was tim brown, the CEO of ivo. For more, including articles from tim, go to hbr.org.