Dan Erwin

The Zig-Zags of Creativity and Innovation

Given the choice between the myth of the natural genius and the sobering reality of hard work, popular culture usually opts for the myth.  ---BD Burrell

When you’re getting advice about creativity or reading one of the many books about the subject, you need to be careful—very careful—because many, if not most, perpetuate our highly Western, misleading and individualist cultural ways. That typically means that we’re going to have to go digging into our own mindset and belief system to deconstruct and reframe these wrongheaded beliefs if we want to really understand creativity and innovation.

In his marvelous book, Explaining Creativity, Keith Sawyer psychologist and jazz pianist, describes four key errors and summarizes their problems—all very useful for today’s organizational emphasis on innovation. His insights will liberate you from demanding, painful, unrealistic expectations. Admittedly, however, the truth will give you heartburn as well as a lot of often painful, hard work.

**Creativity is fun.  When you get into the state of flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and peak experience, creativity is extremely positive and self-actualizing. But it takes a lot of years and training to achieve flow.

So as Sawyer indicates, the “fun” is extremely, uncomfortable hard work. What a few would consider the “flow” of creativity is more deathly boring or extremely stressful. Once more: creativity and innovation are just plain hard work.

As a preaching pastor and seminary faculty member (22 years) and also as an evergreen blog writer (10+ years), the demands of creativity have always been part of my professional life. Creative writing is a mix of stress and self-actualizing. For the last three months, I’ve been working on a major writing project—a single chapter on the creative use of the humanities. It requires a lot of research, reading, writing and rewriting. And a lotta smarts on positioning and rhetoric. Sometimes it moves very fast, and other times it’s very difficult to get the writing moving.  It’s a strange mix of personal delight and satisfaction along with a lot of stop/start, stop/start pain.

“Sure you’re smart, but. . .”

A fascinating interview of Duke Energy's Lynn Good: “Effectiveness comes from those qualitative things that give you the ability to network, communicate and lead people toward an outcome they can’t see.”

Lynn Good
I regularly read interviews of senior officers and CEOs in newspapers and magazines. As often as not, my responses follow a number of critical patterns. The most typical response to the interview is so what else is new? Not that insights necessarily need to be new to be valid or significant. But just as often I respond with thoughts like, that’s really off focus, that wouldn’t make much sense in most companies, that’s not a transferable principle, you really don’t get it, why did you go there, or. . . well, you get the point.

But I found myself nodding in high agreement, even delight, with the comments of Lynn Good, the CEO of Duke Energy. It started out with the focused, analytical thoroughness of her answers to questions. The naturalness of her business identity as CEO, the straightforwardness with which she responded to the interview and her insistence upon the nuances and complications of business leadership are unusual in today’s business world.

Family of origin
Lynn Good obviously comes from superb parenting with a father as a marine turned high school principal and a mother who also taught school, both with a solid work ethic. You recognize her intense, almost matter-of-fact sense of accountability in the answer to questions about what she learned from her parents: They demonstrated accountability to me through actions. When I was growing up, we had a widow living next door to us. So the habit was that if we went to the grocery store, we called her first. If we cut our yard, we cut her yard, no questions asked.

Leadership
Yet unlike many of these interviews, this is not a “look at me.” It is an inquiry into the nature of leadership, enhanced by intimacy and a rich knowledge of the task. Intriguingly, the vocabulary reaches a level of emphasis that is rare: There is a comfort level with people you’ve known for a long time—when you’ve been in the foxhole with them. But when you bring an organization together (she led the merger of Progress and Duke Energy), you need to be agnostic about background, and to interview on capabilities and track record.

Good’s support of her work force is not a hollow, thoughtless allegiance. Rather, she demonstrates the ability to express solidarity and criticism simultaneously. With people at this level in their career, it’s no longer about whether you are the smartest subject-matter expert in the room. It’s whether you can be effective in leading a diverse team. Can you adapt? As you think about developing people through their careers, you’re looking for that transition from being the smartest person in the room — and caring so much about that — to being the most effective. It’s about how to develop a team. It’s about how to solve something where the solution isn’t obvious.

Career focus
Predicting career success, like predicting organizational success, can be delusional. . .

Eight Keys to Credible Political Candidates

These ideas have hit the shitter when it comes to a lot of voters. Still, it’s important to reinforce them, even in situations like today where a lot of voters belong to the category of the stupid. That’s a tough statement to make, but a recent Atlantic article by the ever insightful, always intelligent Jonathan Haidt, makes the point that a lot of voters fit the category. He begins with a rough translation of the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, showing how it fits the context for the last 10 years or so.

“In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’”

As Haidt points out, Babel is the best metaphor for confused, fractured America in the 2010s, and for the broken nation we now inhabit. “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

Growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, there were plenty of Republicans who were willing and capable of governing. And the East Coast WASPs (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants—a tautology if there ever was one—all Anglo-Saxons are all white) were a lot more interested in governmental leadership than building their financial edifice. Those days are dead and gone.

Given the Babel metaphor, it’s time to revisit voting and political credibility.

So, what makes for a truly credible political candidate? Back in August 2012 I shared David Banks Star Tribune article where he begins with some smart definitions of what makes for credibility.  And credibility, in Banks' mind, doesn't mean ideologically correct.  So, with sincere hope that this might be of value to voters, I'll list eight of Banks' keys, make a few comments about them, broadening his emphasis to all legislators

“Setting” Boundaries Versus “Negotiating” Boundaries

Is there a substantial difference? Or are they just two words for the same thing? And does it really matter? Prior to the 1950s, they would have been just two words for the same thing. That is, if anyone ever used the term “negotiating” boundaries. The practice of “negotiating” boundaries comes primarily out of the 1980s with the flattening of business hierarchies and the strong orientation to women’s rights. With the exception of sales negotiation, it was rare to talk about negotiating relationships until the mid-1980s. And since then there has been tons of research and some training solely in the practice of negotiating interpersonal boundaries. In simple terms, setting boundaries is one individual determining boundaries for others. Negotiating boundaries is two or more creating a workable agreement on the boundaries between them.

So, there’s a significant difference between setting and negotiating boundaries. Major business leaders as well as many community leaders recognize these differences even without distinguishing between the two terms. But, ask the right questions and they can clarify immediately. I’ve learned, sadly, that these same professionals are typically incapable of using the negotiation competence in their family. Shifting competencies from one context to another without training is highly problematic—even for top business school grads. Similarly, lower level bureaucrats, patriarchal families, pastors, the Roman and Evangelical churches, small and medium-sized privately held owner-firms lack insight to the distinctions and sometimes have a lot of resistance on their hands as a result of their ignorance.

Creating still more difficulty, my psychologist colleagues have no rhetorical format for negotiation. Common formats provide the means for improving, changing or even rejecting former ways of communicating. Without a common format, they’re always attempting to reinvent the wheel, a strategy which readily results in failure or limited success. They talk a good talk about “setting boundaries,” but lack awareness of the extensive implications of differing boundaries. This is surprising, because the counseling profession knows that ignoring or flagrantly setting boundaries is one of the major causes of family breakdown. And there are plenty of other people and organizations in the dark and looking at abject failure because of their ignorance and unwillingness to operate on the basis of negotiating boundaries.

The role of power
Although I’ve never heard anyone make the distinction between setting and negotiating, it’s time to start using the rhetoric much more carefully. Why? Because, the distinctions are primarily about power: who’s got it and what are the most effective ways to use it.

In business organizations power is traditionally viewed from three perspectives: vested, expert and network. Simply put, vested power is the legitimate power given to an individual to run teams, projects or disciplines within an organization. Expert is the power conferred on an individual who has the necessary knowledge others require for success. And network power is that of a person who knows a terrific amount of people who are capable of providing the necessary support and insight which individuals or groups require to succeed. Obviously simplistic, but occasionally useful clarity.

However, as a result of the unique work of the French academic, Michel Foucault, we understand that power is a lot more complex than the above little model. Foucault emphasizes that where there is power, there is also resistance. So, it’s all the more important to understand that successful power has much more to do, for example, with how a person or an organization chooses to organize ideas, make comparisons, and locate new ideas, often metaphorically, within highly respected old ideas. To an obvious degree, knowing what to say, how to say it, and what not to say in a given culture can be powerful negotiation strategies. That kind of expertise is usually necessary for successful boundary negotiation, which at its core is a matter of interaction around “I’ll do this if you’ll do that.” Simple relationships can sometimes be negotiated in three minutes, while major organizations or nations may take ten to twenty years to negotiate their differences in order to achieve mutual goals...

A Stupidity-Based Theory of Management

I kid you not. That’s the actual title of research reported in the Journal of Management Studies. One of the authors, Mats Alvesson, has a long history of ground-breaking research. And this is another feather in his cap. Not quirky, it’s really, really smart and very useful research.

This is one of those studies which tell you more than you want to know about how organizations actually work. The researchers don’t screw around. They nail organizational BS to the wall. What’s unique about the research are...

Big Data: The IT Fumble

If you read my blog, True data about big data, in which I proposed that Zero Dark Thirty’s lead character, Maya was a near perfect example of a data scientist, you’ll understand today’s blog title. The unstated subtext of that blog was that it’s unwise to turn big data over to the IT group. Sure, you’ll need them around, but their discipline differs significantly from what’s needed. And. . . I’ve found plenty of IT execs who understand that reality.

I argued the case from my experience and knowledge about the thinking styles and knowledge base of IT and other business functions. My cognitive approach is one way to go at the issue. But Marchand and Peppard arrive at the same conclusion from still a different tack in their HBR article, entitled Why IT Fumbles Analytics. They got right to the crux of their understanding in the first paragraph:

In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytic projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals.

What this implies is that rather than emphasizing information in the big data, information is viewed not as a resource that makes possible the design and implementation of more IT systems, but, rather as something that people themselves...

Three Skills to Thrive in the New Workplace. Hint: **Coding Isn’t One of Them.

We all know about STEM, but Geoff Colvin suggests that’s not the whole problem for our future work success. Instead high achievers know stuff that STEM, brilliant software and machines will never know or bring to the party.

In his Fortune article and new book, Humans are Underrated, Colvin certainly has his finger on the right three issues. What’s unique is his framing of the issue of technological obsolescence. Typically, the framing is around what computers can’t do. Year after year we try to estimate the answer to that problem. But year after year software developers and algorithms prove us wrong. Amusingly, the Germans have a new robot that can both load and unload the dishwasher. So, what next? Driving the car? Diagnosing your illness? You should know better than that. Figuring out...

The Death of the Lone Genius

Slowly, very slowly, the research and some journalists are killing off the notion of the lone genius. You know, that American mythology of individual superiority applied to creativity. Like John Wayne’s rescue before the barbarians get to you, the lone genius is all nonsense. But the myth of the lone genius will require a cruel death of many cuts. It’s one of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs--even though dead wrong.

The latest cut is delivered by William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic. He writes rather bluntly that the “truth is that the geniuses weren’t really quite as solitary as advertised. They also often came together—think of the Bloomsbury Group—in situations of intense sustained creative ferment.”

Does it really matter?
That’s the question. And the answer is a clear-cut affirmative.

Organizations succeed—or fail—based on...