Fresh Take on Leading for Creativity in Business (Pt 3 of 5)
Part Three (Building Strategic Foresight) of a five-part series bridging arts, science, and business to reclaim a sense of wonder in American innovation.
TWISTER!
A search for awakening and understanding in a world that often feels chaotic and bewildering.
I have always been intrigued by big natural phenomena, particularly tornadoes. I recently rewatched the 1996 movie Twister. Wow! I was stunned at its relevance today, nearly thirty years after its release.
“Twister” is a cautionary tale, illustrating that investing solely in technology without parallel investments in human skills like creative thinking, self-awareness, resilience, curiosity, and emotional intelligence can lead to catastrophic failure. The film’s story revolves around two teams of storm chasers. Team One, a ragtag group of brilliant scientists with messy personal lives, focuses intensely on perfecting their tech through the creases of their humanity. Team Two, a corporate-funded group of their former colleagues, goes all in on the tech without fully understanding it, coupled with a deep lack of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and adaptability.
Despite both teams having access to essentially the same advanced technology, affectionately named “Dorothy,” Team One’s breakthrough comes from a human-centered insight sparked from a sculpture created by the artist-aunt of one of their members and their earned intuition guided by human experience. The second team, relying on tech alone, met their demise.
Twister is a story that highlights that true success arises from a balanced integration of technological prowess and human ingenuity. This narrative underscores the critical need for businesses to cultivate durable human skills alongside technological advancements when navigating complex challenges while seeking to achieve sustainable innovation.
(Though I have not yet seen it, a reboot of this movie is in theaters now, featuring music from Tyler Childers, a southeast Kentucky powerhouse musician.)
Natural phenomena like tornadoes have the dramatic potential to radically change everything in their path. Scientists and technology can visualize data and measure these forces on maps, yet their unpredictability keeps us on edge until they hit. As anticipation grows with the data, so do our uncertainty and fear. Navigating these are among the most critical creative brain skills of today.
I am a full-on tech enthusiast and early adopter. Still, I sometimes experience a similar sensation with the twisters of technology (and culture) that are part of modern life, but with a crucial difference: there is no before, during, or after the storm—only the perpetual question of “what next.”
Do you ever feel like everything is constantly accelerating? I do. We are inundated with data, product must-haves, and policy must-dos. The funnel widens, and on many days, my brain wants to shut down. The sheer volume of information today often paralyzes our analytical and creative thinking. In these moments of overwhelm, how do we stay open? Open to each other. Open to new possibilities.
Strategic Foresight Means Staying Open to the Possibility of Another Possibility.
Our modern lives are barraged by a relentless technological influx of data, products, and policies; openness is critical for navigating today’s complexity. Research notes the value of openness to experience, encompassing imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. More than just a personality trait, openness is a vital cognitive and emotional framework. It fosters creativity, enhances problem-solving abilities, and promotes psychological resilience.
Openness enables us to stay curious and receptive, transforming information overload into opportunities for innovation and growth. It encourages the exploration of new ideas and perspectives, essential for adapting to the rapidly changing world. Studies show that highly open individuals engage in divergent thinking, leading to greater creativity and novel solutions. Additionally, openness is linked to slower cognitive decline in aging, promoting lifelong learning and mental flexibility. (Full citation list at end of this article)
By embracing openness, we bridge the overwhelming present and future potential. This mindset allows us to see beyond the immediate flood of information and find new pathways for understanding and collaboration. Openness is what helps us cultivate strategic foresight and benefit from the wisdom of the collective.
Artists have long demonstrated that art is a powerful catalyst for innovation, revealing new possibilities and contributing directly to strategic foresight and collective wisdom. Banksy's provocative street art, Yayoi Kusama's “Infinity Mirror Rooms” redefining immersive experiences, Guerrilla Girls’ advocacy for broader representation, Duchamp’s “readymades” challenging traditional artistic boundaries, David Bowie’s constant reinvention pushing the limits of music and performance, Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” setting new standards for multimedia storytelling and brand evolution, and James Baldwin’s insightful explorations of identity and society, which have influenced leadership thinking, are prime examples. Additionally, video games like “The Legend of Zelda” series revolutionized interactive storytelling and game design, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” blended hip-hop with historical narrative, reshaping musical theatre and expanding its cultural reach.
These are just a few examples that illustrate how artists transcend boundaries, driving innovation and fostering new ways of thinking, which is essential for business success in today’s dynamic environment. Importantly, the creative process of art-making may well be the most visible example of how to effectively leverage collective wisdom into strategic foresight.
In his book No Man Is an Island, where Thomas Merton explores themes of spirituality and self-discovery through the lens of various forms of art, Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Merton’s words suggest that art allows us to confront and transcend our fears, losing ourselves in the creative process while discovering deeper aspects of our identity. This idea is an immensely valuable lesson for business innovation today. Especially through unending cycles of high-risk innovation, unprocessed grief from failures, and chronic identity loss that have Americans contracting inward rather than expanding outward.
Identity has become a transaction for Americans. From purpose-driven corporate marketing to our politics and educational choices, the transactional nature of identity in American society is at an all-time high, filled with unmet expectations and loss of trust. People claim to be motivated by love for America, yet from political arenas to corporate boardrooms and local community school boards, fear of the "other" has become a bankable business strategy. On this point, Thomas Merton offers more sage wisdom: “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Fear drives us into a protective “me” stance instead of exploring the expansive opportunities of the “we.” This is bad news at a time when we need to transform our collective imagination and dreaming into innovation.
Three Big Questions of Strategic Foresight
Growing up, I was fascinated by stories about ordinary individuals coming together to achieve extraordinary things. I especially loved The Wizard of Oz, a fabulous metaphor for a journey of co-creating strategic foresight together in a team.
My work as a Culture Futurist® has long revolved around leading innovation teams and promising companies in these efforts. Over the years, I have consistently found that successful teams are clear-eyed in being able to answer three things:
Question #1: Where do we take action?
Question #2: How do we ensure our action is wise?
Question #3: What does it take to stay curious and resilient when the unexpected happens?
Question #1: Where do we take action?
This is about knowing your “creative why”
Strategic foresight starts with understanding the fundamental reasons behind our actions. In "The Wizard of Oz," each character embarks on their journey with a clear purpose, seeking something deeply personal. Similarly, innovation teams must identify their "creative why."
In an era where technological culture often leads to homogenization, authenticity becomes a rare and valuable asset. A team's creative why is like a thumbprint—unique and impossible to replicate. It defines the team's identity and drives their innovative efforts.
It's impossible to prepare for everything, but knowing your team’s creative why can equip the team to handle anything that comes its way. This distinction is crucial for leaders. Preparing for everything suggests an exhaustive approach, aiming to anticipate and plan for every potential risk.
On the other hand, being prepared for anything requires a flexible and adaptive mindset. It focuses on building resilience, agility, and the capabilities to respond creatively to the unexpected. Instead of trying to predict and prepare for every specific situation, leading creativity in business requires cultivating skills and processes that enable rapid adjustment and creative problem-solving in the face of unforeseen challenges.
The graphic below illustrates the beautiful complexity of the process I developed for coaching teams in finding their creative why.
Question #2: How do we ensure our action is wise?
This is about having a reliable, creative process that guides the work.
Wise action in teams is the cornerstone of effective strategic foresight. The creative process is how it happens. The Wizard of Oz is perhaps one of the best case studies available on what this looks like in practice. It’s a story that aligns remarkably well with the creative processes inherent in innovation teams, as outlined by cognitive neuroscientists in “The Process Definition of Creativity” by Adam E. Green et al.
Internal Attention
Dorothy’s journey starts with a clear goal: getting back home. This goal means she has to find her way through unknown places and solve new problems. In the same way, innovation teams are driven by goals that focus their attention on creating something new and valuable, coming up with ideas that do not exist yet. According to Green and colleagues, this kind of focus means turning attention inward and blocking out distractions from the outside world. By concentrating on their own ideas and refining them to meet their goals, Team Dorothy came up with truly innovative solutions where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
Goal Constraints
Dorothy and her companions— representing different aspects of the innovation process— encounter various constraints that shape their path. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion each have specific needs (a brain, a heart, and courage), symbolizing different constraints and focus areas within an innovation team. These constraints ensure that their efforts are directed toward achieving their goals, mirroring how creative processes are structured around specific constraints and ensuring purposeful creativity. This constraint-driven approach facilitates the channeling of creativity into productive and innovative directions.
Generative Goals
The characters' challenges—such as the Wicked Witch and various obstacles—require them to generate new solutions, pushing them to think beyond their initial capabilities. As Dorothy and her team move through the Land of Oz, they face numerous challenges requiring adaptation and innovation. Each obstacle they overcome symbolizes the iterative nature of the creative process, where teams must constantly refine and test their ideas and, perhaps even more importantly, the limitations of their own assumptions and beliefs. The ultimate revelation is that the power of transformational creativity was within them all along.
Question #3: What does it take to stay curious and resilient when the unexpected happens?
This is about having good data to make intelligent choices.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions face numerous unforeseen obstacles, yet they persist because of their unwavering curiosity and resilience.
For innovation teams, staying curious involves fostering a culture where questioning the status quo and exploring new ideas is encouraged. Resilience, on the other hand, is about maintaining momentum despite setbacks. This requires good creative brain data to assess what is needed to balance the team and provide them with the best possible chance to succeed. By leveraging data analytics, teams can develop their creative brain skills to spot emerging trends and potential disruptions, allowing them to pivot effectively when challenges arise that are beyond their control.
Predicting the future is inherently challenging, but we can forecast human responses to various scenarios using the Creative Brain Capital Index metrics. This index quantitatively benchmarks and guides the development of future of work skills proven to drive creative team performance, focusing on three main areas:
(Head) Creative Potential: Analytical and creative thinking skills involve processing complex information and generating novel solutions. These skills include critical evaluation, problem-solving, pattern recognition, and cognitive control, which are essential for innovation.
(Heart) Creative Motivation: Motivational drivers inspire teams to engage fully in the creative process. These include four core spectrums: Wonder, Trust, Moral Beauty, and Joy. Each spectrum has metrics to optimize innovation cultures and sustain creative efforts.
(Hands) Creative Collaboration: Team collaboration skills are necessary for working effectively within a group, leveraging diverse perspectives to achieve common goals. These skills transform potential and motivation into enterprise value, such as trustworthy communication, psychological safety, and shared problem-solving.
These metrics bridge cognitive neuroscience with industrial and organizational psychology to understand and drive innovation, promoting collective behavioral changes and increasing a company’s creative intelligence (know-how).
Looking Ahead: What’s Next in the Leading Creativity in Business Series?
We often discuss innovation as a technological endeavor filled with information and data. However, Steve Jobs taught us that innovation is a story that touches the heart first. He also emphasized that innovation is about the team rather than the individual.
Join me tomorrow for PART FOUR: DEVELOPING CO-CREATIVE ECOSYSTEMS, where we’ll continue with #TeamDorothy in the land of Oz. We will explore why shifting teams from the "me" to the "we" of innovation is one of our biggest human-side challenges in the years ahead.
Thanks for joining me this week to find unexpected answers for rekindling the lifeblood of American innovation: creativity.
ACCESS THE FULL FIVE-PART SERIES
PART ONE: QUANTUM CULTURE
Beyond the political, JD Vance and I can likely agree on four things about Breathitt County.PART TWO: MAKING THE HUMAN SIDE A SHARED VALUE
Leadership needs a glow-up to match the boldness of our visionaries, entrepreneurs, and innovators.PART THREE: BUILDING STRATEGIC FORESIGHT
Finding the intersection of technology with human creativity in our search for awakening and understanding in a world that often feels chaotic and bewildering.PART FOUR: DEVELOPING CO-CREATIVE ECOSYSTEMS.
Information goes in through the heart and other things Steve Jobs taught us about moving from the “me” to the “we” of innovation.PART FIVE: FUTURE-PROOFING TALENT
A hope-fueled drive to actively shape a more creative and kind future that pushes us to go beyond old notions of creative economy while reconnecting us to something greater than ourselves.
Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation™
©2024 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. Please credit the author when using any of this content. The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization with which the author is affiliated.
CITATIONS FOR OPENNESS
DeYoung, C. G., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2005). Sources of openness/intellect: Cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the fifth factor of personality. Journal of Personality, 73(4), 825-858.
Kaufman, S. B., DeYoung, C. G., Gray, J. R., Jiménez, L., Brown, J., & Mackintosh, N. (2010). Implicit learning as an ability. Cognition, 116(3), 321-340.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1997). Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, & S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology (pp. 825-847). Academic Press.
Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25.
Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92-96.
Silvia, P. J., & Kashdan, T. B. (2008). Interesting things and curious people: Exploration and engagement as transient states and enduring strengths. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(5), 785-797.