Tag: creativity

Categories
BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence Political Competence

The Primacy of the Visual Image

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s latest meandering film-poem, reminds us of the primacy of the visual image over any other form of human expression of thoughts, beliefs, and yearnings.

Horses, bisons, woolly mammoths, cave lions, and bears roam, gallop, and fight on the cave’s ancient walls. The paintings may be telling the story of a successful hunt, or they may be an object of worship, part of a ritual aimed to guarantee success in future hunts.

These beautiful cave paintings were discovered in 1994 in a hidden cave in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in southern France by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Des-champs, and Christian Hillaire. They are thought by some archaeologists to be as old as 30,000 years.

By comparison, the earliest known written language, the Sumerian language of the Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) region, dates from around 3000 BC. The Cuneiform (“wedge-shaped” letterforms) system consisted of ideographs, which are graphics that represent an idea or a concept. The visual image is the earlier – and earliest – form of communication.

Thinking in images or visualizations offers a way to loosen your perceptive and sensory ties to concrete reality, so that you can dream up new ideas and solutions to various types of problems. Or an idea might appear in a dream or a reverie. Imagining is the act of “forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.”

The word ‘Vision’ is defined as “an experience in which a personage, thing, or event appears vividly or credibly to the mind, although not actually present.”

Here Kekulé, a German chemist, had one such vision. In 1865, after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds and trying to decipher their structure, he had a vision of a snake seizing its own tail. This image of a circular shape had finally provided the explanation for the structure of the benzene compound – it contained a six-part ring of carbon atoms. This new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be very important for both pure and applied chemistry.

Visualization, whether imagined while day-dreaming, or materialized as drawings, photographs, an arrangement of objects or any other material expression, can lead to breakthrough discoveries and innovation.

Organizations can enhance their efforts to invigorate their culture and innovate by incorporating design and ­visual thinking into their development process.

The visual image can spark the imagination the way nothing else can. A picture is truly worth a thousand words.

Categories
BLG Leadership Insights Creativity Leadership On the Edge Managerial Competence Proactive Leaders

Creativity≠Leadership?

Creativity; it’s what people are constantly clamoring for. Over the past couple of decades we have incessantly urged to “think outside the box” and “stretch the paradigm”.  Organizations are demanding new fresh ideas at every level,  so it would only seem natural that to be elevated to the exulted level of leadership you need a strong streak of creativity running through your every thought and decision.  Here’s a bit of a shock, it’s not really the case. Turns out that people do not always equate creativity with leadership.    In his  insightful and somewhat surprising article, “Are the People in Your Organization Too Smart to be Creative?“, Chunka Mui, the co-founder and managing director of the Devil’s Advocate Group, discusses the idea that most people within organizations are still unable to draw a direct line between creativity and leadership. Check it out and let us know what you think. And don’t worry, we want you to be creative.

Categories
BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence

Why No One Wants Creativity at the Top

According to a recent survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify “creativity,” the ability to generate novel and useful solutions, as the most important leadership competency for the successful organization of the future.   Creative leadership allows leaders to move organizations in profitable new directions, a view supported by management research showing that leaders with creative ability are more effective at promoting positive change and inspiring their followers than leaders who lack creative ability.  Clearly there is a great deal at stake when attempting to identity the creative leaders in our midst, but do people actually get it right?

My colleagues and I have found that although people claim to want creative leadership, people who voice creative solutions are actually viewed as having lower levels of leadership potential.  In other words, if you want the top spot, you had better keep your creativity in check.  We found strong evidence to support this assertion from three different studies using different methodologies and a diverse set of participants–both employees and undergraduates.  For example, in one study, we told participants they would be participating in a mock interview.  One set of participants were randomly instructed to come up with a “creative” solution (e.g. both novel and useful) to a business problem while another set of participants were randomly instructed to come up with a “practical” solution (e.g. just useful).  Each participant was judged by an evaluator who was specifically instructed to listen to the response and rate the applicant on their overall leadership potential and their potential for creative leadership.  Who came out on top?  Not the creative types.  Interviewers consistently overlooked the creative applicants in favor of their more practical counterparts.  They did so despite the fact that the creative solutions were just as feasible as the practical solutions, they were just more novel.  In other words, the creative applicants were expressing exactly the kinds of ideas that most innovative firms claim to be looking for.

The psychological process behind this bias is relatively simple:  Stereotypes of “creative people” and “effective leaders” clash in the minds of those who are responsible for judging leadership potential.  When deciding whether or not someone “fits” a particularly category (e.g. a leader) most people compare that person’s qualities to an ideal type.  The prototypical leader is expected to organize and coordinate groups to diminish uncertainty and promote order by emphasizing shared goals.  The prototypical leader is also expected to conform to group norms and goals in order to support the group identity and to promote collective action.  People who behave in ways that convey these characteristics to others are readily categorized as fitting the leadership prototype.

Does the typical creative individual fit this prototype?  As you probably guessed—no, not really.  The mere expression of creative solutions may actually introduce ambiguity or uncertainty, in part, because by definition, novel ideas involve deviations from the status quo and are not yet proven. People who express creative ideas are often viewed as unpredictable, rebellious, unorthodox, and unconventional – traits which run contrary to deeply rooted expectations that prototypical leaders diminish uncertainty and provide normative order.  So, it is no surprise then that creative people are filtered out on the way to the top.  We claim to want creativity but end up favoring, hiring and electing people who uphold the status quo.

Picture Credit: Smaedli