Here's a sobering statistic. According to a major 2010 IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, they believe that more than rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision that successfully navigating an increasingly complex world would require creativity. Yet very little focus or instruction is conducted on this topic in the workplace or in the schools and even universities. Again, I applaud you all for taking this course because you recognized that there are better ways to approach the challenges you've been faced with. Here's what I've experienced when problem-solving in groups during my 45 years in the business world and academic worlds, and some of you will recognize some version of this. I have forgotten the number of meetings I went in to try to solve a truly complex problem, plan the future, or innovate some new product. The meetings were generally held in a conference room where all the chairs were lined up with military precision and a bottle of water, a pad of paper, and a sharpened pencil neatly placed at every seat. This all confirmed the ordered battle-ready perception of the room. To top it all off, the boss commander would sit at the helm of the table causing we underlings to stiffen with straight back to tension, literally or metaphorically. Sometimes in a futile attempt to signal a loose, informal environment, there'll be a bowl of candy being passed around, maybe donuts if I was lucky. As soon as I'd walk into such an environment, I would immediately go for the donuts and look for the seat that was going to be least likely to be called on by the boss, like right straight down the line where he can't see me or she can't see me because often I didn't have a single idea to come to offer up. Then the boss would look around and ask," so any ideas", and I will generally be called on despite my hiding place. People are asked to immediately jump into solution-finding mode and serve up suggestions for solving an issue without really understanding the problem and the impact their idea may have on the end-user, which can make their ideas ineffective. Generally, these places don't know how to problem-solve in creative and more opportune ways or maybe they do know, but they just reject the process. It's become critically important for organizations to embrace a new innovative mindset by encouraging and supporting it in their employees. An innovation mindset means they embrace failure and reward risk-taking. They're willing to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, they view challenges from multiple perspectives. They allow time for generating and refining creative ideas, and they create a playful environment that uses creativity-sparking techniques to brainstorm ideas. Having a culture that rejects mediocrity and fosters creativity, will help an organization survive and thrive in today's crazy world, but without it, unexceptional ideas are far more likely to be accepted than wonderful one's. Organizations can just be too risk-averse. They tend to reject new ideas, reject failure, prefer answers to questions, reward the aftereffect and prefer certainty. They reward the aftereffects of the solution if it worked, but are displease when some new idea fails. The problem with this is that it makes employees reluctant to take risks or to try out new ideas because they might get into trouble. The mind-numbing, brainstorming environments I just talked about are oppressive to the free flow of ideas because people don't feel safe. No one wants to say the wrong thing in front of the boss or their colleagues. People who are worried about sounding stupid or wrong or being criticized or ridiculed and may even fear their careers could be hurt in some way, so people censor themselves and do one of two things. They either clam up and let other people do the brainstorming or they offer up mediocre and predictable ideas. Another component to this is that people and organizations often think they're being really creative when they're really not. They fall in love with a mediocre solution they came up with and run toward implementation without really being certain it will accomplish what it's supposed to. One reason the solution can be ineffective could be because they didn't take into account what the end-user wants and needs as part of the solution, which I'll get into during week 4. I was in several meetings in academia to brainstorm ideas for improving the student experience, and sometimes there were just no students present in the meeting, just faculty and administrators nor were students asked about what they might like to see in a solution. Another reason our ideas can be mediocre is because our brains are wired to be safe and they hold us back from blurting out unusual thoughts that could make us feel unsafe because they go against the status quo. I heard once that it's not so much that people fear failure is that they don't fear mediocrity, that's because they don't often recognize mediocrity. In her Slate Magazine article inside the box, Jessica only and mentions Berry Shaw. He's a creativity expert at Berkeley University who says, "Most people are risk-averse", and he refers to them as satisfiers. Stars says, " as much as we celebrate Independence in Western cultures, there's an awful lot of pressure to conform. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea". I was reading another article by Lewis Anslow who said, "fearing failure more than mediocrity is often mistaken for not fearing failure at all". He says this because people who fear failure can still appear to throw caution to the wind and have a bravado about them when they blurred out their mediocre ideas. Anslow continues, "everyone fears failure, but those who do great things fear mediocrity more". A fear of failure works hand in hand with mediocrity because this fear allows us to rationalize knowingly or unknowingly our mediocre ideas. Failure is a big no-no in our society, something that can put us in to a shame space, and the reason it's so powerful in our lives is because many of us are unable to separate a task from ourselves so every failure chips away at our self-confidence and our self-esteem. Scientists view failure as merely collecting data. It comes with the job. You know the story about Thomas Edison trying to invent the light bulb, he says he didn't fail to make the light bulb after 1,000 failed attempts. He just now knows 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb. Fear, mediocrity, and dig deeper for those truly great ideas.
