Creative – Page 28 – The Consulting Artist

Creative Leadership – Fishing for Ideas

I spent a fascinating morning with an enthusiastic management team last week, workshopping conversations and ideas around improving sharing and communicating. By way of a little context, this team don’t see each other very often. They are spread all over the globe, and although the distances between people, both physical and in time, make getting together a challenge, this point was simply observed by them, not put up as an ‘excuse’.

At one stage in our time together, someone drew a picture on the whiteboard. Now this was a fairly crappy whiteboard, a fairly crappy pen, and without wishing to cause offence, the drawing is unlikely to make it to the Royal Academy any time soon, Summer Exhibition or not. It was a simple sketch of a boat, on a lake, and some fish. The boat represented transition. The lake was huge, so big we couldn’t really see land after we’d sailed a little while, and the fish in the lake, they are the ideas.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Sketchcognition, which is in essence using sketching to figure stuff out. This sketch, hastily scribbled on a whiteboard, has begun the process of fishing for ideas, and we moved from the picture to thinking about people in the boat, about the journey, the distance and the fish, and about how we might catch some of them.

The drawing was copied onto a piece of paper so we have a record of it, and it is in the process of being sent to various points on the globe, along with a few fish, the accompanying ideas. Pencils and paper were passed around to take away before we broke for lunch, and though we didn’t eat fish at the lunch break, the team has the opportunity to sketch plenty more of them now.

This process is simple. Anyone can do it, even all those people I meet who say to me ‘I can’t draw, I’m not an artist’.

In early July I’m launching ‘I’m Not An Artist’ which is a one day exploration combining basic art and drawing techniques. The workshop is all about creating excitement and progress, accelerating and embracing failure in order to succeed, and seeing work through an artistic lens to aid problem solving. We will explore a broad range of techniques designed to help you understand and experience creativity, and importantly, apply them to your work. Watch this space.

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How to Change Education – from the ground up

Now there’s a grand statement eh, ‘How to Change Education – from the ground up’. Fear not dear reader, you do not have to rely on me to deliver on such a grand aspiration, instead you must look to a master in the art of creativity, Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken is giving a talk on how to change eduction at the RSA on July 1st at 13:00 UK time, and if you are anything like me – you were a little slow out of the blocks and missed out on the chance for a ticket. Don’t beat yourself up too much – the talk sold out in a blink of an eye, and importantly the RSA will livestream it, so join me and other ticketless hordes as we sit in comfort at a distance and violently (or otherwise) agree and disagree with Sir Ken, whilst eating crisps at the kind of noise levels which would surely get us thrown out, were we in the auditorium.

‘What does this Robinson feller have to say about education anyway?’ I hear you ask. Well quite a lot actually, and if you are tempted to listen into the talk – maybe check this neat RSA animated video where among other things he challenges the practice of anaesthetising kids through school and the model of standardised education.

Divergent Thinking

Something Sir Ken talks about in this video is divergent thinking, or the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question. He describes this thinking ability as an essential capacity for creativity and collaboration, and then proceeds to talk about some tests carried out to assess our ability for divergent thinking.

Typically when asked to explore a question like ‘How many uses can you think of for a paperclip?’ we will come up with ten to fifteen suggestions. Someone who is very good at divergent thinking might come up with over a hundred. In the book Breakpoint and Beyond, 1,500 people are tested for their ability to think divergently. The percentage of people who rated above genius level for this ability was an astounding 98%. When they were first tested, the 1,500 people were at kindergarten level in school. The same group were retested at the ages of 8-10, and at 13-15, by which time the percentages had fallen to 32% and 10% respectively. The researchers then tested a large group of adults over the age of 25 and this group returned 2% of people considered genius level in divergent thinking. When you consider the importance work places on creativity and particularly on collaboration – that seems like a pretty alarming tail off in our ability to deliver against a collaborative agenda, don’t you think?

Increasingly my work focuses on helping people unlock pathways to creativity and collaboration so I’m intrigued to hear what Sir Ken will have to say on July 1st. Making changes in such a calcified system will not be easy. This week Neil Morrison laid into workplace platitudes such as ‘Raising The Bar‘ and for sure, the boldness and persistence required to make worthwhile change in eduction stick is not well served by over simplifying the challenge. In the meantime, and before Sir Ken lays his ideas out for us all, if you’ve got any thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them.

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Hey Ho – Let’s Go. R.I.P. Arturo Vega

Arturo Vega: 1948 – 2013

Arturo Vega has died, aged 65. Pretty much everyone with even a passing interest in punk knows of Arturo Vega’s work. He was the man who designed the iconic Ramones logo, and many of their album covers. As much as The Ramones were at the vanguard of full on live and loud three chord punk, so too was the logo, representative of the US presidential seal, with the American Eagle sporting an apple branch and a baseball bat.

In 2011, Carole, Keira and I, along with a few others were fortunate to spend a morning with Arturo Vega watching him work. He was screen printing a design of his for the art installation Never Records, which in turn was part of the Better Bankside festival that year. Only around 20 or so items were printed by him with the Never Records logo. Keira and I each have one and so too does Neil Usher, who at the time I thought would appreciate a t shirt as a gift.

Keira's Never Records T Shirt — Keira’s Never Records T Shirt

This is not one of those cringing ‘What can HR learn from Vega’s artistic approach?’ or ‘How can HR be more like The Ramones?’ type posts. It’s simply an acknowledgment of the death of an artist. I’ll leave you with – what else but The Ramones kicking the ass out of Blitzkrieg Bop at The Rainbow Theatre in 1977, with ‘that logo’ as the backdrop. Hey ho, let’s go.