Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 267

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work," by Natalie Nixon.

Wonder is our capacity to exercise awe, pause, dream, and ask audacious blue-sky-thinking questions. Rigor is our capacity to exercise discipline and deep skills, to pay attention to detail, and to spend time on task for mastery. Both are necessary for creativity to thrive. In fact, I define creativity as the ability to toggle between wonder and rigor in order to solve problems and deliver novel value. And I see inquiry, improvisation, and intuition as the practices that increase those capacities.

 

Pausing to wonder about something spurs new questions. After all, every sentence beginning with the words “I wonder” necessarily ends with a question mark. Wonder likes to test out new ways of being and doing, rebounding off of the constraints of current knowledge. The only way we get to make a creativity leap in the first place is by starting with wonder. Wonder is the catalyst. Then, rigor propels us forward and helps us to sustain the momentum of the leap.

If wonder is the equivalent of experiencing opening night of a marvelous theatrical experience, then rigor is all of the backstage machinations. It’s the cable cords holding the velvet curtains in place, the dark hallways and underground tunnels, and the rafters holding lights engineered to create surreal effects. It is the incessant practice that the actors, dancers, and singers must engage in all the way up to opening night. If we romanticize creativity as a mystical, magical process only accessible to a select few, then we miss the point. Creativity is not something you pull willy-nilly from your armpit. Rigor is that essential feature of creativity that anchors the wonder; puts guardrails up; and requires us to do the sweaty, muscle-bound work with whatever muse we choose. The rigor is the part of creativity that is often missed—or avoided. But it is essential if we are ever to go about the work of creativity in a sustained way.

In some ways, learning how to be a better question-asker is the easy part. The more challenging part is figuring out how to normalize inquiry in an organization so that it becomes part of the culture. Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, investigated the effectiveness of inquiry-driven leadership when he identified that the companies we think of as innovative, like Google, Apple, and Zappos, are actually quite good at leading with questions. He found that they start with asking “Why?” and then “What if?” and then land on “How?” sorts of questions. They start with divergent, big-picture, wonder-driven thinking and move to convergent, rigorous, and applied thinking. 

An inquiry-led company may start by asking, “Why aren’t we selling any products in the Southern Hemisphere?” or “Why do we recruit only from Ivy League universities?” It would then transition to some good “What if?” questions, such as “What if we started selling our products in Brazil?” or “What if we started recruiting from community colleges and sought out older adults with impressive work experience but a not-so-pedigreed formal education?” Finally, they might land on tactical “How?” questions, such as, “How can we start establishing contacts in Brazil?” and “How will we build relationships with less traditional educational institutions?”