Busting Myths about Creativity

In 1815, a German music journal published Mozart's description of his composing process: basically, when he was quiet and in a good mood, the music came to him complete so that the only thing left was to write it down. The letter was a contributor to the myth of human creativity - a brilliant flash of insight that strikes a bona fide genius.

The trouble is, the letter is fake. Original Mozart manuscripts show many false starts and crossings out - in fact his composition process was iterative. But this myth, and Archimedes' Eureka moment and countless others, are still cited, and they have supported the notion that creativity arises when a sudden flash of insight strikes an extraordinary genius.

Kevin Ashton is the author of How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery where he debunks such myths about creativity. In a recent talk at Rotman, he argues that creation arises through a series of trials and errors, and we get to a solution through a long process of incremental steps, alternately refining the problem and the solution until a 'final' solution is reached, or at least until another problem emerges. In fact the word creativity wasn't even coined until 1926 by Alfred Whitehead. But recently, creativity has become a hot topic, as shown in this Google ngram:

(I describe Google ngrams in a previous post. Essentially, it's a measure of how often a particular word is mentioned in books.)

In Ashton's fascinating talk at the Rotman School of Management, he put humans' art of invention in a grand historic context, starting with the first human technology: the invention of the hand axe one and a half million years ago. We usually think of such inventions as the result of our increasing brain size. Humans' brain evolved to be larger as the amount of space in the skull devoted to jaws and teeth diminished. Without the hand axe, humans would have starved without those huge jaws and teeth. Ashton argues that we should think of the increasing brain being the result of our technology, which allowed us to survive with bigger brains and smaller jaws. Interesting twist.

I'm looking forward to reading Ashton's book, which I'm told is full of fascinating stories illustrating his thesis about creativity.

Christensen on Data

Rotman's Martin Prosperity Institute's hosted a conference today on Knowledge Infrastructure. The conference featured many great speakers, including Clayton Christensen.

Christensen's big message was that we have to be careful about depending too much on data, particularly data collected by other people. Data does not represent a universal truth: somebody decides what data to collect and what not to collect. That choice in and of itself can influence or even obscure truth.

He strongly advised people go 'dumpster diving' for their own data, so that they choose the pertinent data that exactly pertains to the question they're trying to answer. "Using somebody else's data won't lead to the truth". He argued that everyone who does important things creates their own data.

Direct data is similar to direct observation.  In my experience, observations have the greatest power when you observe them first hand. Just as physics tells us that electrical signals and waves attenuate over distance, so the power of observations attenuate for each step away from the original observer. Christensen was arguing that this applies also to data; it loses its power for explanation unless it's a dataset you create yourself to answer the specific question you have in mind.

Christensen also described the stages involved in creating good theory as a summary of some things he was currently thinking about. Clearly not an off-the-shelf presentation, Christensen said it was the first time for this presentation and that his presentations were crummy the first four times! Not crummy, for sure, but lacking the luminous clarity and inevitability of logical flow of the previous presentations I've seen.

I was saddened to hear that Clay is currently undergoing chemotherapy. He's suffered so many medical issues - heart attack, cancer, stroke, diabetes - but his cancer had been in remission.

What's in a Word? Digitalization?

"Good governance practices have focused on and strengthened audit oversight and risk oversight. But there's an IT tsunami coming and that spotlight should now shift to IT oversight". 

David Beatty

Smart words from the erudite and articulate David Beatty, Conway Director of the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics and Board Effectiveness at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto (what a mouthful!). David made the comment during an excellent Board Governance Day co-hosted by Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance. And he got me thinking.

I wholeheartedly agreed with his point, but was uncomfortable about the term IT. Since David thinks words are as important as I do, we had a stimulating conversation about what the right word was.  

The term IT primarily connotes back office systems to manage and track a business - particularly to the typical silver-haired denizen of a board room*. Granted, these systems have been the scene of many a corporate debacle featuring functional mismatches, missed deadlines, budget overruns and staggering security breaches. As such, they deserve deep board oversight.

But there's something much more important to worry about. Today, digital information infuses every single product. Nicholas Negroponte foresaw this evolution almost two decades ago, when he said "The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable." He was considered a futurist at the time. The future is here now. 

Companies can serve customers better by embedding smarts and connectivity into their products: think smart thermostats or driverless cars. For some products the smarts and connectivity actually are the product. Companies also need to consider a seismic shift in consumer digital behaviour: think the generation that has 'grown up digital' watching video over the web rather than cable.

Companies need to widen their vision beyond traditional competitors: Garmin has to think about Apple, not just Tom Tom, while trucking companies have to think not just about the other trucking companies but what happens when trucks don't need drivers. And they need to think about disruptive entrants with new business models who could displace them: think AirBnB or Uber.

Boards have a duty to exercise insight, oversight and foresight about all this. So question is whether IT suggests all these things to a typical director.

David is a great communicator and he's worked hard to improve corporate governance in Canada. So he sought a word that would have all the right connotations and raise awareness of this important issue with directors. We bandied about several terms, and finally settled on 'digitalization'. It suggests how every product has gone digital (not just been digitized) and it also makes an implicit reference to to the fact that people  have gone digital too. What do you think?

* A friend has pointed out that, as a silver-haired director myself (albeit one who spent her career in the field of information technology) perhaps I suffer from an outdated view of the term information technology.

Two Leaders - One Message

• Ed Clark, CEO of TD Canada Trust, speaking at the Rotman Speaking Series. 
• Stanley McChrystal, four-star US army general, speaking at TED 2011. 

 Leaders are not the most knowledgeable or 'perfect' individuals but those who can build strong teams with shared vision and culture.  The biggest challenge is molding a team comprised of individuals with vastly divergent backgrounds.  Leadership calls for  humility and the willingness to learn - and relearn - over the course of a varied career and varied conditions.

Clark, CEO of TD Canada Trust, a bank which emerged almost unscathed from the financial meltdown, is Canada's CEO of the Year.  McChrystal, author of many successes at the head of American forces in Afghanistan, is enjoying retirement after some, ah, blunt talk about Washington politicians.  Two highly regarded leaders from very different backgrounds, but delivering uncannily similar messages about what makes a great leader.
 

McChrystal described the imperatives in the military today, with increased speed, scrutiny and sensitivity around your actions.  He remembered the parachute jump he made on September 11; by the time he landed, everything was different, requiring totally different approaches in the military, and in his leadership style.

With the advent of modern technologies in war, there's an 'inversion in expertise', with people under you understanding those technologies better than you.  In fact, you often depend on reverse mentoring to understand those technologies.  So you don't become a great leader because you're always right, but because you listen and trust.

The army is dependent on trust -  trust that your fellows will not desert you in direst danger.  So the sinew of the military is built on relationships, transparency, and listening.  And as a senior leader, you must lead people whose life experience is totally different from your own and build a common vision despite that difference in background.  Moreover, with a highly dispersed force in 20 countries, and a need to communicate missions quickly, McChrystal often didn't have the luxury of face-to-face interaction.  He used everything possible - video, email, twitter - to build consensus, a contrast to his early career when leaders just issued orders.  

Clark sees himself as the custodian of a great Canadian financial institution, responsible for building a franchise that is sustainable in the long term for the benefit of the shareholder and the country.  He disdains financial leaders whose goal is to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible and exit while the going's good, using the excuse that they are looking after the shareholder's interests.

Clark, in almost an exact paraphrase of McChrystal, argued that a great leader is not the one who can answer all the questions.  Business today demands intensified product knowledge.  But one person cannot know everything; rather the great leader is transparent and builds great teams with a culture of pushback and challenge.

In his humble way, Clark stressed how much he'd had to learn - and how he was still learning, again mirroring McChrystal's explanation of the need to relearn things over his career.  Clark said that his biggest learning was the need to explicitly create an employee brand, because you want to attract great people who buy into the culture.  Cultural principles must be explicitly articulated, consistently over a long period of time.

In another echo of McChrystal, Clark described the challenge of integrating the very different cultures of TD and Canada Trust when they merged.  After external consultants had struggled and created a 'pablum' culture statement, he and one other colleague were more direct by simply writing down what would get people hired, fired and promoted at TD.  This is important mostly in terms of the signal it sends to employees, who want to know how they can contribute.  He has no time for people who 'manage' their careers - to him that smells of politics, and 'there's no room for politics' at TD.  Do your job well, and success and promotion will come to you.

Another topic touched on by both men was failure and how leaders respond to it.  McChrystal described a war game where the team he was leading was almost instantly captured by the simulated enemy.  He was totally deflated, but his commander told him "You did great", allowing him to get past the defeat to the learning from it.  When a mission he led was an utter failure in Afghanistan, this lesson was top of mind as he had to rebuild his troops' confidence.  Clark also talked about how TD's success in the US (7th largest bank in the US) had come about because they had the courage to go to the States and 'get bloodied and bruised' many times as they learned about the market.  (Parenthetically, he argued that the Canadian government was right to prohibit Canadian bank mergers, forcing them out into the world to learn and ultimately succeed.)

It was a fascinating juxtaposition to hear these two men speak.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The latest TED Book Club selections included The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live. This wonderful big book distorts world map so that the size of different countries is proportional to some particular factor. For instance, the map to the left shows the distribution of passenger cars, dominated by the US, Europe and Japan.


On the other hand, a map measuring number of people living in poverty has India, China, Africa and SouthEast Asia ballooning in size.

You can read columns and columns of numbers, but a map such as this really brings home the message.

This book shows 366 such maps in glossy colour, with explanations. What a great coffee table book to browse when you have a few moments - with each fascinating page being thought provoking. You can also browse through almost 600 maps on the Worldmapper site. On most maps, Canada is almost invisible. However, we do gain some prominence on the map showing water resources. You can see us up there in dark blue at the top of the map!


Many diverse topics can be illuminated by this type of sophisticated software map. For instance, at a past TED, Alisa Smith, President and CEO of Public Radio International, used these maps to dramatically depict the state of US new coverage. Based on the news in all US media in February 2007 a worldmapper map makes it look as if the US and Iraq were the only two countries on the planet. She couldn't have made her point about the parochialism of US media more powerfully.

Today, I attended the Rotman Business School's annual Lifelong Learning Conference, which focused on Wicked Problems - those problems in social planning that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. Anita McGahan has been studying and teaching about wicked problems at Rotman, with a considerable focus on global health care issues. McGahan made good use of worldmapper charts to show how different the health care issues are in the rich countries versus the poor. In rich countries, the major disease burden is from noncommunicable diseases, whereas the disease burden in poor countries is from communicable, maternal, prenatal, and nutritional diseases.

And of course, by 2050, we'll see the tremendous divide between the elderly in the rich countries and the young in the poor countries. The elderly rich will be dependent on youth in the poor countries as the productive, working people of the world. Again, dramatic charts showed this divide very clearly. McGahan hopes such impactful presentation will help the rich world to care more about the health care problems of the poor, even if only out of self-interest.

It's hard to make appropriate policy decisions without comprehensive and accurate data. Modern technology is delivering that data. But the sheer quantity of data can be bewildering. Our challenge now is to make sense of the data. Software tools such as worldmapper can unveil insights we might otherwise miss. And certainly the approach can help raise awareness about issues in a dramatic and understandable way.

Have fun browsing the book or the web site - or both!