Tag: creative problem solving

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Picasso, Windex, and Creative Leadership

Yesterday morning I washed windows. A cold winter led to a decision for inside storms on interior windows that border an unheated porch. Washing the windows wasn’t a big deal, but a job I put off. Then, an email announced the upcoming installation and a reminder that clean inside windows mean no need to remove the new storms anytime soon. I grudgingly left my desk, and got the Windex and paper towels.

Pablo Picasso reminds us it takes a long time to become young. I think I just learned something important about what he meant.

As I was spraying the Windex, I suddenly remembered how, as a young child, I begged my mother to let me wash the glass front door, and I turned it into a host of games.

I was a friend of Elroy on the “Jetsons,” and the Windex was my ray gun. I was Dale Evans, working with Roy Rogers to protect the Double R Bar Ranch from bandits. I was a museum employee, polishing the glass on a great work of art – and it needed to be spotless. I was a scientist doing important experiments: how long before the paper towel became too wet to clean without smudges? How much Windex was required to do the job without being wasteful? We had the cleanest front door in town! My mother was happy. And I had a blast.

So, yesterday I enjoyed the childhood recollections and spritzed away the morning with a smile. I played scientist again, and developed my own data-based tricks to maximize speed and quality – windows warmed by the sun needed a different wiping pace than the cold ones; cold windows needed drier paper towels than the warm; the edges of the panes needed special care and thorough drying, while clean damp centers seemed to take care of themselves. I complimented my inner child on her experimental design and mindfulness– and kept happily spritzing.

During rests, I took in the views. I watched a young mother stop and carefully lift her child from a carriage to look at an evergreen bough blowing in the wind. I saw how well the new robotic arm on our town’s garbage truck emptied the neighborhood’s heavy cans – saving, I’m sure, the precious backs of many a sanitation worker. I enjoyed two spirited Golden doodles romping down and around the sidewalk, repeatedly tangling their leashes to their walker’s dismay.

Then I suddenly found myself thinking in new ways about a grant application I was writing: phrases and data to include started to come freely. The idea for this blog post emerged, as did a playful list of leadership wisdom – useful ditties such as,

  • It’s more efficient to clean things up from the top down: dirty drips make a mess for the bottom and lead to a lot of wasted time and effort.
  • Sometime just in time is just fine.
  • Figuring out what’s on your side of the glass and what’s on the other is critical: if it ain’t your dirt to clean, you can polish to your heart’s content to no avail.

Play is the well-spring of joy and creativity for children and adults. It activates different parts of the brain, relaxes our defenses, and frees us to think outside current cognitive constraints.

There is plenty of research on the links among play, creativity, successful entrepreneurship, and the development of 21st century organizational skills. More than forty years ago, organizational guru Jim March  – in an extension of his work on decision making with Nobel Laureate Herb Simon — advocated for the vital role of playfulness in his landmark book with Johan Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations.[1]  Play, according to March, is an antidote to the natural limits in how humans think: we may think we are  looking at all our options, but we only see those that fit within our mental models and beliefs about what the world is and how it works.

Escape is possible, continued March, if we let ourselves play — deliberately embrace “the power of sensible foolishness” in order to open our minds to new ways of thinking and being.

Play gets a negative rap in the adult world – “grow up,” “stop being such a child,” “quit playing around,” and the like.  Play, however, is a critical leadership skill when viewed as an essential complement, not an enemy, of rational thinking – a kind of “Mardi Gras of reason” that affords our minds a planned occasion for creative experimentation, relaxed reflection, free and unrestricted associations, and openness to innovative solutions just waiting to be found. 

How are you going to productively play today?  What project could use some innovative thinking?  What will enable you to free your creative mind?

[1] March, J. G. (1976). “The Technology of Foolishness” in March, J. G. and J. Olsen (ed.). Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.

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Your Leadership Matters: Start by Building Resilience

The Leadership Professor announces her new blog, Your Leadership Matters.

She brings wisdom and strength from a journey rivaling that of Odysseus and celebrates new understandings garnered through her travels. Our current times require nothing less than high-impact leadership, and The Leadership Professor stands ready to serve as your guide so that you can rise successfully to the challenges ahead.

Leadership is all about making a difference on things that matter and the world a better place for us all. It comes in many forms and shapes – from creating and managing complex systems that do justice to employees, local communities, tasks at hand, and the environment to naming the injustice in an observed micro-aggression at the local supermarket against someone deemed different.

We all have opportunities to lead – whether we sit at the head or the foot of the table. The trick is to be ready when opportunity calls. So, where do we begin?

In my work, people regularly ask what it takes to lead well. The list is long, but at the top is resilience.

Resilience is the ability to adapt and strengthen in the face of challenge, uncertainty, failure, or trauma. It is a learned skill that builds with use. It includes steps like:

  • recognizing you always have a choice in interpreting and responding to events (even when you feel you don’t)
  • learning to keep things in perspective – for most situations, good enough is indeed good enough
  • looking for creative ways to make challenges work for you (and not add to your burdens)
  • practicing new behaviors and responses, and
  • reflecting on how well all this is working for you.

Think about a recent situation that was deeply challenging for you.  How well did you stay centered and focused? Agile and creatively flexible?  What made the situation so challenging for you?

How, for example, did you frame the event? Disaster? Opportunity? End of the world? Intriguing fun? Bump in the road? How did your framing fuel your energy and reactions?  Enable you to see and understand what was really happening for you and others? How quick were you to think of creative options to make the situation work (beyond blaming others, remaining perplexed, or expecting others to fix things – and getting mad when they didn’t)?  How easily did you let go of any angst or anger?

Do you see any similarities between your strategies in that situation and in others at work or at home? 

We can never control the demands of others – and as much as we’d like demanding others to make the world right or simpler for us, they often can’t or won’t.  But we can control how we understand and respond to their demands. And sometimes just remembering that is enough for us to take a step back and a deep breath, to recognize that we have control over how we interpret events despite our frustration, and to think creatively about how to turn a crummy situation into something good – or at least something manageable.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at U-Mass Medical Center, has a wonderful reminder about life: You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

That spirit, sense of personal agency, and confidence are at the heart of leadership effectiveness – and make for a happy professional (and personal) life.

It’s easier for some to approach life and work this way than for others – genes, early life experiences, brain wiring, past trauma, and educational experiences make a difference. The good news: wherever we start, we can all get better.  Being resilient lets us live more complex, global lives gracefully; and it’s less costly to body, soul, and relationships.

Resilience at its core involves learning to “wear life loosely”[i].  We’re more creative problem solvers when we do. How do we build the capacity to wear life loosely yet productively? As someone for whom resilience did not come naturally, I’ve studied and thought deeply about that. Five suggestions from my work:  

Start with what you know you can control or change – you. It is easy to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for us all. But you have the best control over the process when you focus on changing yourself, your response, your way of framing the situation. This is not to say that you should cocoon, pull back, withhold your preferences or observations, or refuse to engage challenging others or ineffective situations. It is more a question of how, when, and why you do that work – and a reminder that you stand a better chance of influencing others when you know what you want and when you are trying patiently and openly to make things work.

Embrace your control over your full range of choices and options.  It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out or only one way to understand a sticky situation. It’s always harder to think of options – so much of life rewards us for being on automatic pilot. Resilience comes from being a stronger, more deliberate, and broad thinker – no one-trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that you are.

How do you develop those capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask yourself questions like, So what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? Why else might others be acting as they do? Once you get into the hang of it, these kinds of questions become second nature. They also enable you to see a broader and richer world.

Learn to reframe. That means being able to stand back and look at a challenge from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and others). This is especially important when you feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.

If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I see an opportunity, it’s always there.

When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to vent, but to what end? Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge. What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating or over-whelming situations?  Try an alternative framing. You’ll see your mood lighten and options grow.  

Accept: not everything is equally important. This may sound trite, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff.  We do it all the time.

Despite what you may have been told by well-meaning grammar school teachers, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.

Sure there are consequences to your choices. Choose to not do something, and you haven’t done it. This is where knowing yourself comes in.

What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss anything or make a mistake? What are the issues or areas where you can cut yourself some slack? Be less perfect?  Punt without shirking your responsibility to self or others? 

That’s the essence of managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to that.  As you climb in responsibilities, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly.  How can you learn to accept that in yourself?  How can you use the supports and resources you have to share the load? Build networks of trust? That’s not easy for people with high expectations and needs for control, yet it’s essential.      

Laugh.  A good sense of humor is mandatory for resilient leaders – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a grand time.

Onward!

[i] B. Siegel (1993). How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health. New York: HarperCollins.

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Leaders, Boost Your Creativity in 2012: Five Suggestions for the New Year

It’s resolution time. I’ve made my list and share five suggestions for yours to boost creativity in 2012.

Times are tough, and every industry is rethinking how it does business. Creativity and the capacity to think deeply and flexibly can pull an organization ahead of the crowd. How can you enhance your capacities and help your organization claim its competitive advantage?  Suggestions to boost your innovation brainpower:

1.  Read more fiction. There are plenty of benefits. Build new neuronal circuits. Deepen your knowledge of the human condition – and learn about yourself as your reflect on your responses. Improve your vocabulary, beef up those communication skills. Expand your cultural intelligence. Leadership is all about influence, communication, relationships, and seeing the simplicity on the other side of complexity. 

No time for major tomes? Try The Art of the Novella Series: short novels by some of literature’s greatest – Melville, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Twain, and more. The tiny classics tuck easily into a brief case, purse, or pocket – and their colorful contemporary covers are great conversation starters.

My first was a holiday gift – The Dialogue of the Dogs by Cervantes. Turns out the creator of Don Quixote also wrote the first talking-dog story. Ever wonder what your pet is really thinking, and what Fido can teach you about ethics and fairness?  I loved it: a quick read and deep ideas. I was hooked on the novella.

The Duel by Heinrich von Kleist (a 19th century German author I knew nothing about) was next. Read it, and let me know how your thinking about loyalty, everyday assumptions, and trust have changed.

I’m on The Lifted Veil by George Eliot now — her only work in the first person with eerie similarities to  Eliot’s claiming her public identity as a woman author. Next in line The Lemoine Affair by Proust — and a look at why humans are so easily conned!  Think shades of Bernie Madoff. 

2.  Discover the power and joy of quiet. We live in a world of 24/7 stimulation and news. We text, email, surf, and sit in front of screens (computer and TV) more and more (and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains paints a dire portrait of the neurological, intellectual, and cultural consequences). Creativity requires quiet – the time and space to think. Find ways to build that into your day. Mindfulness is not a luxury for strong leadership.

3.  Break the work addiction. All work and no play makes for dull, burned-out people – and maybe even dead ones. The Chinese pictograph for “busy” is two characters: “heart” and “killing.” Loving your work isn’t the same as being a slave to it. You’ll work better and smarter when refreshed. Play is productive.

4. Think gray. It’s simple and counter-intuitive: train yourself to not make decisions quickly. You’ll fall into your regular thinking patterns easily: you need to push yourself to think slowly and carefully about what you’re not thinking about. That’s where you’ll navigate through the shades of gray to identify the best course of action. It’s hard to think gray: humans love binary, right-wrong, yes-no, black-white thinking. The concept comes from Steven Sample (the highly successful president emeritus of the University of Southern California) and is developed in his chapter in Business Leadership.

5. Embrace the novice role. Experience the world with new eyes. It’s good for mind and soul. A good way is to try something you’ve never done but have always wanted to or that you know you don’t do well. The process of learning slows life down, encourages mindfulness, and fine-tunes your skills as a reflective practitioner – a definite leadership plus. You might discover a new talent or passion in the process. 

Onward to a creative 2012 for us all! 

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The Arts Can Teach Us to Lead, Part 1: Embracing Diversity Brings Innovation — The Compelling Case of Sissoko and Segal

I am a firm believer that we can learn much about how to lead from engaging with and in the arts. This post begins a series on the topic.

It’s a set of ideas I’ve been thinking and writing about for a long time. Quite simply, the arts “traffic in understanding,” in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness. 

The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.

The arts lay out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invite us to reflect on and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by some recent events.

The first was a Ford Foundation conference held May 4, 2011 called "Fresh Angle on the Arts: Reimagining Culture in a Time of Transformation" – a day of discussions and performances exploring the role of art and artistic expression in times of social transformation and revolutionary global change.

Different cultures, ethnicities, and social traditions can separate us. But understanding our own history and heritage and then broadening our perspectives on other cultures through education and collaboration can take us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences.

Listen to excerpts from the CD called “Chamber Music” as performed by Ballaké Sissoko (an African musician playing a traditional lute-harp from Mali called the kora) and Vincent Segal (a French musician playing the classical cello) at the Ford Foundation conference.

Through the music of Sissoko and Segal, you’ll hear and experience quite simply and enjoyably exactly what I’m talking about – and chances are you’ll understand the importance of leading through and with diversity in today’s global world faster and deeper than you might from a lecture, essay, or class on the topic. 

“Chamber Music” has been reviewed as “one of Europe’s most buzzed-about world music recording.” It is also a clear and powerful illustration of fusion without loss, synergy without dominance, differences as the springboard to innovation, shared leadership through true collaboration, and globalization without fear. 

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Responsible Service: Key Learning from the Current World Crises

News from Japan grows darker by the hour, and happenings in the Middle East and Northern Africa tell no better story.

All raise questions about the meaning of real leadership, the trust and transparency that must be part of all healthy leader-follower relationships, and the importance for leaders to accept their responsibility to serve the larger good before they serve themselves.

It is tempting when title or influence dub us the leader to think that the job is all about us: what we want, what we can do, what we want others to do. That couldn’t be further from the truth. A leader’s work is to put ego and self aside so as to facilitate the power and possibility of shared commitment, shared vision, and creative solutions to nagging problems that are better than any a leader or a follower working alone could devise.

That’s the magic at the heart of leadership. Two (or more) heads are always better than one.

When leaders serve for personal gain, when they deny others the honest information or influence they need, when leaders act to preserve their power and pockets, when they make decisions to guard their reputations or ego at the expense of others, they are far outside the leadership realm.

Let’s not forget that truth. We see it so clearly today in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern hotspots. And when we look closely at the crisis in Japan, there are plenty of questions about the lack of transparency and about how and why decisions are being made (or haven’t been made thus far).     

It’s easier to judge when we stand as critics, viewing crisis or deadly conflicts from afar and evaluating the choices and ethics of the leaders involved. But what about how we enact our own everyday leadership?

How will we remember that leadership is all about responsible service?  If we do, we’ll avert our own crises – and deny our critics the pleasure of all those negatives judgments from afar.