Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

(photo/illustration credit itr.1)

INTRODUCTION

THE HEART OF INNOVATION

When you hear the word “creativity,” what do you think of next?

If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavors like sculpture, drawing, music, or dance.

You may equate “creative” with “artistic.”

You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers, but CEOs, lawyers, and doctors are not.

Or you may feel that being creative is a fixed trait, like having brown eyes—either you’re born with creative genes, or you’re not.

As brothers who have worked together for thirty years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as “the creativity myth.” It is a myth that far too many people share. This book is about the opposite of that myth. It is about what we call “creative confidence.” And at its foundation is the belief that we are all creative.

The truth is, we all have far more creative potential waiting to be tapped.

We’ve helped thousands of companies bring breakthrough ideas to market—from Apple’s first computer mouse to next-generation surgical tools for Medtronic to fresh brand strategies for The North Face in China. And we’ve also seen that our methods can produce a new creative mindset in people that can dramatically enhance their lives, whether they work in the fields of medicine, law, business, education, or science.

Over the past three decades, we’ve helped countless individuals nurture their creativity and put it to valuable use. They’ve created housing optimized for the needs of service men and women returning from war zones. They’ve set up an ad hoc innovation team in a corporate hallway, generating so much energy and noise that the company gave them a dedicated project space. They’ve developed a low-cost system for screening and fitting hearing aids among elderly villagers in developing countries, providing benefit to some of the 360 million people in the world who suffer from disabling hearing loss. The people we’ve helped have many backgrounds but share one common trait: they all have gained creative confidence.

At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. It is the conviction that you can achieve what you set out to do. We think this self-assurance, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation.

Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.

Creative confidence is like a muscle—it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience. Our goal is to help build that confidence in you.

Whether you think of yourself as “the creative type” or not, we believe reading this book will help you unlock and draw on more of the creative potential that is within us all.

CREATIVITY NOW

Creativity is much broader and more universal than what people typically consider the “artistic” fields. We think of creativity as using your imagination to create something new in the world. Creativity comes into play wherever you have the opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. And we believe everyone should have access to that resource.

For much of the twentieth century the so-called “creative types”—designers, art directors, copy writers—were relegated to the kids’ table, far from serious discussions. Meanwhile, all the important business conversations took place among the “grown-ups” in boardrooms and meeting spaces down the hall.

But the creative endeavors that seemed fanciful or extracurricular a decade ago have now gone mainstream. Education thought leader Sir Ken Robinson—whose riveting 2006 TED Talk asking “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” was the most popular in history—says that creativity “is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

In the business world, creativity manifests itself as innovation. Tech stars such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have unleashed their employees’ creativity to change the lives of billions of people. Today, in every department—from customer service to finance—people have opportunities to experiment with new solutions. Companies desperately need employees’ insights from across the organization. No individual executive or division holds a monopoly on new ideas.

Whether you live in Silicon Valley or Shanghai, Munich or Mumbai, you’ve already felt the effects of seismic market shifts. Most businesses today realize that the key to growth, and even survival, is innovation. One recent IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs reports that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises facing the complexity of global commerce today. An Adobe Systems poll of five thousand people on three continents reports that 80 percent of people see unlocking creative potential as key to economic growth. Yet only 25 percent of these individuals feel that they’re living up to their creative potential in their own lives and careers. That’s a lot of wasted talent.

How might we shift that balance? How might we help the other 75 percent unleash their creative potential?

In 2005, David founded the d.school (formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) to teach design thinking—a methodology for innovating routinely—to future entrepreneurs from Stanford’s graduate schools. Originally, we thought that the primary challenge would be to teach creativity to people who saw themselves as “analytical types.” We soon realized that all of the individuals we worked with already had creativity in spades.* Our job was simply to help them recapture it by sharing new skills and mindsets.

We have been stunned at how quickly people’s imagination, curiosity, and courage are renewed with just a small amount of practice and encouragement.

For the people we’ve worked with, opening up the flow of creativity is like discovering that you’ve been driving a car with the emergency brake on—and suddenly experiencing what it feels like when you release the brake and can drive freely. We see this a lot with executives during workshops, or when we have clients in to collaborate side by side with us. They’ve sat through seminars about innovation before, and they are convinced they know how creative—or how uncreative—they’re going to be. So when we get to a point that’s fuzzy or unconventional—like doing an improv exercise—suddenly they whip out their smartphones, heading for the exits to make “really important” phone calls.

Why? Because they are insecure about their abilities in that setting. They instinctively fall back on the defense that “I’m just not the creative type.”

In our experience, everybody is the creative type. We know that if we can get individuals to stick with the methodology a while, they will end up doing amazing things. They come up with breakthrough ideas or suggestions and work creatively with a team to develop something truly innovative. They surprise themselves with the realization that they are a lot more creative than they had thought. That early success shakes up how they see themselves and makes them eager to do more.

What we’ve found is that we don’t have to generate creativity from scratch. We just need to help people rediscover what they already have: the capacity to imagine—or build upon—new-to-the-world ideas. But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas. That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.

Geshe Thupten Jinpa, who has been the Dalai Lama’s chief English translator for more than twenty years, shared an insight with us recently about the nature of creativity. Jinpa pointed out that there’s no word in the Tibetan language for “creativity” or “being creative.” The closest translation is “natural.” In other words, if you want to be more creative, you just have to be more natural. We forget that back in kindergarten, we were all creative. We all played and experimented and tried out weird things without fear or shame. We didn’t know enough not to. The fear of social rejection is something we learned as we got older. And that’s why it’s possible to regain our creative abilities so swiftly and powerfully, even decades later.

It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, your organization, and your community.

We believe that our creative energy is one of our most precious resources. It can help us to find innovative solutions to some of our most intractable problems.

CREATIVE CONFIDENCE IN ACTION

Creative confidence is a way of experiencing the world that generates new approaches and solutions. We know that anyone can gain creative confidence. We have witnessed it in people from diverse backgrounds and careers. Everyone—from scientists in their labs to senior managers at Fortune 500 companies—can approach life differently, with a new outlook and a larger tool set. Here are a few examples of people who have embraced creative confidence:

Creative energy is one of our most precious resources.

• A former Olympian entered the airline industry and developed the confidence to tackle her company’s crisis management problems head on. She gathered a volunteer task force of pilots, dispatchers, crew schedulers, and others to prototype procedures following weather-related flight disruptions, leading to a 40 percent faster recovery time.

• An army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan rallied over 1,700 people to petition for a pedestrian mall in the local community, proving you don’t have to be a general to have an impact.

• Going beyond just the raw facts of a case, a law school student took a human-centered approach to her mock trial. She had the jury picture themselves at the scene of the incident to imagine what it felt like. And through harnessing their empathy, she won—the first time a jury had ever favored her side of that particular case.

• A former government executive started a grassroots innovation movement in Washington, D.C., that has grown to over a thousand members. Through workshops and networking events, she is spreading her new perspective on organizational change to other leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs.

• After four decades of experience, an elementary school teacher restructured her curriculum into design challenges. Instead of teaching discrete subjects, she created projects that covered the same topics but got students to step away from their desks and think more critically. Their test scores improved, but more important, parents noticed their children were more engaged and inquisitive.

You don’t have to switch careers or move to Silicon Valley to change your mindset. You don’t have to become a design consultant or quit your job. The world needs more creative policy makers, office managers, and real estate agents. Whatever your profession, when you approach it with creativity, you’ll come up with new and better solutions and more successes. Creative confidence can inspire whatever work you already do—because you gain a new tool to enhance your problem-solving practices without having to abandon any of your existing techniques.