Creative – Page 26 – The Consulting Artist

Creative Leadership – Connections Part Three

This is the third and final post drawn from my recent talk and shared experiences around connections and creativity at the Illinois SHRM conference 2013. The first part of this series is about music, vulnerability, diversity and conversations, the second is about transparency and seeing the whole picture, and this third piece is about presence and art.

Be Here Now

We talked about the importance of presence as a way of reinforcing connections, and about that good feeling you get when you know you have the attention of the other person. Someone in the audience referred to this as ‘Be Here Now’, and as we talked through what this meant to people, other words like focus, appreciate and mindful came up in our conversation. We talked about how crappy meetings get in the way of doing good work and we shared a few ideas about how to make crappy meetings better.

Art for Art’s Sake

I spoke briefly about my ongoing artistic endeavours, and how my experiment with painting started purely for enjoyment. And the more I played – with paints, pencils, and inks…

Art for Work’s Sake

…the more I began to realise that the very act of artistic expression, is a gateway to better work. Importantly, this gateway is open to all, regardless of the level of proficiency. I am not an artist, but I have discovered and am discovering ways of using art both as an individual and in groups with clients, to help with gaining different perspectives, aiding divergent thinking and improving problem solving.

The form the art takes can vary. Photography, painting, drawing, mark making, sketching, collage, poetry, and adaptation of the work of others (the head shaped example above is cut from a piece of work that CreativeConnection recorded at a previous event we ran together), are all ways of helping you experiment, think more creatively, and find new answers to problems.

Trust

The curtain came down on our time together at Illinois with a reminder of the importance of trust, and with that we went our separate ways to make more connections and learn and share more experiences together.

I hope this review of connections and creativity has been useful. If you have any questions – or would like to explore anything I’ve written about in more detail, please get in touch.

Additional Resources

Here are the slides I used for my talk in full

Building Connected Leadership from What Goes Around

Here is a link to the work on Humanizing Employee Engagement that Paul Hebert shared with us in Illinois. This was my favourite session of the conference, partly because it linked to some of the connections stuff we spoke about, but more importantly, because Paul is a smart guy who thinks a little differently. If you’re not already connected with Paul, hopefully this link will encourage you to do so.

Artists and Thieves

I joined David Zinger’s Employee Engagement network back in March 2009 and since then I’ve gained a lot from being a part of this network. I’ve contributed, shared and learned, and I’ve met David twice on his visits to the UK. I think the network is a helpful resource for people curious about how to make work more enjoyable and useful, and if you’re not yet a member, pop over and take a look – and if you like what you see then maybe join in?

The reason I referenced this network today is that I received a super email from David this week in which he shared a video he’d posted on the network called Steal Like an Artist.

The video is an interesting tale told by Austin Kleon as he traces the roots of his ‘original’ ideas and thinking about creating poetry directly from the newspapers of the day all the way back to the mid 1700s. Not so original after all huh? Kleon acknowledges this and goes on to encourage us to steal and reinvent pieces of work we admire, and mash up the old and the new to create something different…ish. I don’t have a newspaper to hand right now, but I will buy one and see what poetic efforts I can ~~steal~~ extract from it soon.

Watching the video, I was reminded of being in the company of a few friends earlier this year, when among other things, we tried an experiment with poetry which went something like this: I encouraged people to think of a list of words around the themes of water and movement (we were in Greenwich close by to the River Thames), and once people had a few words and shared them with the group, we each then looked to integrate our words into verse. Pencils and paper were provided along with some ink pencils too, so that people could add colour to their emerging work. Because we approached the task in stages it seemed to make it easier for people to produce interesting work than if we’d all just tried to write a poem from scratch. Here’s some feedback from a few of my fellow ~~thieves~~ poets after they’d had time to reflect on the process.

I enjoyed the peace, the step by step building, delving into something deeper. I felt prepared and safe, yet ready for something unsafe. I was surprised at the emotion it created, although writing poetry myself, I realise it can be an amazing conduit. I felt it connected the group, and yet was an individual isolation. Paradoxically. Meg Peppin

What was unique about the experience was being with my creativity alongside others in a way that I had not experienced before. I very much enjoyed experiencing and seeing compelling aspects of others naturally surfacing through the process, linking me to their creativity, passion and power of their contribution. For me personally it provided an opportunity to access a different way to face a challenge. Simply by exploring one word, I found an ease of flow and depth. I took away a personal commitment to use the process whenever stuck, be it in writing, creating workshops or bedding down new thinking and new approaches. Natasha Stallard

Your session, like some of the others featured what i consider to be an important aspect of facilitating conversation and making things happen and that was – it was companionable. By this I mean we were doing an activity together which led to other things ie conversation, tears etc. I’m going to write about being companionable at some point because it so powerful for letting other things happen. This was my number one take-away.

So . . . really liked the fact I was sharing an activity with everyone else. I liked they fact I was free to do whatever i chose – bit of painting, poetry. Wasn’t sure where I or we as a group were going but I liked that and it felt OK. I was less concerned about what I would leave with, i.e. a decent poem and enjoyed more the experience.

I liked the sense of place and connections with where we were (Greenwich, river) and I enjoyed the way you facilitated the session – bit of nudging, suggestions . . . helping us along. I liked the context you provided us with – I thought that was a good bit of hosting, something I liked. I also really enjoyed seeing what everyone else did and their reactions. Some powerful responses which left me wondering about peoples’ past experiences. I got snippets of people but not the whole picture. Martin Couzins

On returning home, I ~~stole the idea~~ had a go too and produced this drawing/doodle/poem/video – called Slowly Bares the Soul

So what? Well I think the video David sent out and the experiences it reminded me of, point out the importance of reinvention and repurposing, of being open to new possibilities, and also to letting ideas percolate, layer and develop. Someone should write a poem about that.

Thanks to David Zinger, Austin Kleon, Megan Peppin, Natasha Stallard and Martin Couzins. Without people, you’re nothing.

Creative Leadership – Connections Part Two

A few days ago I wrote about some of the conversations we were having in Illinois at the very excellent annual State SHRM conference about connections and creativity. As promised, here’s a little more on that subject, and there’s more to come next week after the August Bank Holiday.

Transparent Connections

We all want to be kept informed right? Wrong. We all need to be kept informed. Nobody works well in isolation, and the timely flow of information is vital for doing good work, yet it’s hard finding a company that doesn’t wilfully keep secrets from itself. Strictly Confidential, silos, and locked doors all serve to stifle the oxygenating effects created by a free flow of information. I’m not really interested in ‘Thinking Outside the Box’ on this one, I think we need to be more radical. Just open the box, unpack it, and throw the box away. Rather than coming at this challenge from where we are now, with most things hidden from most people, what if we were to start with complete openness and work back from there? Scary? Yep. Exciting? Definitely!

Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant write compellingly about this approach in Humanize, which I shamelessly referenced again for my Illinois SHRM talk, and in it they suggest a number of key things about transparency, two of which I want to highlight here. First, it’s vital that you can be really clear why transparency is important to you. Second, when you are figuring out what to share, and someone blocks with the challenge ‘we’ve always done it that way’, that is no longer good enough.

Small Picture, Big Picture

I firmly believe that a part of what delivers world beating performance, is when everyone can clearly see the goal and can clearly see all the information they need to be able to contribute to that goal. So the woman who makes the screw which fits the seatpost to the saddle, onto which Bradley Wiggins places his skinny butt so he can PLF (Pedal Like F*ck) and together with Mark Cavendish win the Madison final at the World Championships at 2008. She knows precisely how to make that tiny piece of kit and someone else knows just how tightly to do it up, and so on, and so on. Transparency – it matters.