If the Industrial Age was built on people’s backs, and the Information Age on people’s left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people’s right hemispheres. We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we are progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern-recognizers, and meaning-makers.

Companies need highly creative people at all levels

No matter what business you are in these days or what role you have within a company,you are required to operate at a much higher level of creativity than your predecessor did 20 years ago.
As the rate of change speeds up companies that are full of change resistant and uncreative employees cannot stay competitive. These are people I call “Change Artists” — they can create something out of nothing, demonstrate high emotional intelligence, recognize patterns and create meaning out of chaos. These are all the skills that you learn when you study the arts. The trouble is, arts were often considered just an elective, not something you had to study in school. Therefore, unless you chose to study an aspect of the arts in depth, chances are you didn’t get to activate the skills of the “change artist” as often as you could have.

Given the right environment most people love to be creative

If you give people the opportunity to consume something creative or create it themselves, most people will choose the latter if they think it will be a safe environment to experiment. Luckily, creativity is innate and just needs to be activated. The best way to activate it is to give people permission to fail, to try new things, to break free of convention. It also helps to give people parameters — so their creative brains have a focus and a deadline. Finally, people tend to be more creative in groups than alone, so set people up in teams. Many businesses today are using some aspect of the arts as a teambuilding experience because it can help to improve problem solving, innovation, teamwork and performance in their employees.

Mercer Bradley – Group Paintings

One example is one of my clients, Mercer Bradley.

They specialize in recruitment and job fit analysis for accounting and finance professionals. The company was founded by Cliff Kanto in 2007 and he understands the importance of being as innovative as possible at work—for both his employees and the employees they place.

At their last all team meeting in January 2011 here is what they did:

We took our company and divided them up into 3 random teams of 4 people. The objective was to create a painting together as a team. Interestingly, there were 3 approaches to how the groups chose to do their painting:

Team 1 jumped in and began to just paint randomly

Team 2 divided up the canvas into 4 sections so each person had their own section.

Team 3 discussed how best to approach the painting and created a unified theme for the painting.

As the paintings began to develop, we had certain people move from one group to another. What became quite obvious was that people approached their painting the same way they approach their work and even though each painting started out differently they all ended up looking very similar.

At the end of the painting session, there was a greater feeling of cohesion and unity amongst the entire company because we had all worked together to create something and a sense of pride in what we had created.

We are going to hang one painting in each of our offices: Vancouver, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

– Zoya Kanto, Director of Operations

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Has your company or organization ever done anything together involving the arts — painting, theater, music, comedy, writing? If so leave a comment below, we would love to hear about it.

Teaching people how to learn, how to create something from nothing, makes more sense than teaching facts that will soon become irrelevant. Having spent years in the arts while also coaching change leaders, Carla couldn’t help but notice that leaders with some kind of artistic training could lead change more fluidly than those without. What did they have that others didn’t have? The ability to let go of assumptions, thrive in chaos, redesign and reframe … in other words they could learn on a dime.

The most indispensable people in the world today therefore are those who know how to learn. So is our education system doing enough to prepare students to be indispensible in this way, or is it just preparing them to be good contestants on Jeopardy?

There are thousands of students who would actually contribute greatly to the world, but who can’t survive a system that only rewards factual regurgitation. The good news is that the forest floor is alive with new life with alternative forms of education that prepare learners to thrive in our brave new world.

God, grant me the ability to be as good of a person as my dog thinks I am. – Anon

In a previous blog post we explored The 7 Mistakes Change Leaders Make, and how mistakes are necessary to actually develop success habits. Using the metaphor of the growing cycle we explored Mistake #1 which is Planting Your Idea in Barren Soil. Then we looked at mistake #2 which was Choosing the Wrong Kind of Idea Seed. The 3^rd mistake many change leaders make is to not watering or fertilizing your idea enough.

Linda wanted to help address exhaustion and tension at work. There was a bad “vibe” ever since the latest project went overtime and over budget. While a problem solving meeting had helped, she knew people needed something that buoyed their spirits but that didn’t take much time or money.

She had heard about the simple idea of creating fun contests that would run in the organization’s online newsletter. She went to her boss and shared stories of other companies that did a baby picture contest and a cartoon caption contest and how it improved the mood at work, enhanced relationships between people, and sparked creative thinking. Her boss reluctantly agreed as long as it didn’t pull too much focus from their deadlines.

The pilot project included asking people to send Linda a photo of their pet for a contest in which everyone was then invited to guess who the owner was. Within half an hour Linda was inundated with photos of Portuguese Water Dogs, Persian cats, and love birds. One staff member complained that she wanted to participate in the contest but didn’t own a pet due to allergies. They decided instead that she would send a photo of her favourite Boston fern.

The next week the photos went out to all the staff with a deadline. By Friday, you had to guess the owner. The person with the most correct answers would receive a $75 gift certificate to a nearby restaurant. The restaurant owner had gladly donated the prize. The contest entries came through in droves and one man in accounting got all but four answers correct. He took his two colleagues out for lunch the next week.

Linda’s boss was thrilled with the results of the contest because he saw people laughing again while they tried to trick people into divulging the type of pet they owned. He noticed two people who barely talked to each other were now comparing notes on the idiosyncrasies of Portuguese Water Dogs. Meetings had a more light-hearted atmosphere, ideas about dealing with the project seemed more innovative than before, and less people seemed to be showing up late or calling in sick.

Linda got the green light to do a new contest each month. The only problem was that sometimes people attracted to leading change are not the same type of people who like to maintain the change. Change Artists are those who can do both or at least delegate to and steward those who will maintain it. Linda was enthused about the pilot project, but lost enthusiasm when it came to the on-going “watering and fertilizing” of her change initiative. The next month’s contest was to name the organization’s mascot (a wind up pig that grunted), which was successful, but not as successful as the first one. She skipped the third one because her idea ended up seeming too complicated. The fourth contest didn’t seem to appeal to people, and so by the fifth month she dropped the project.

Linda overhead one day, though, that people were disappointed that there were no longer any contests. She realized that she needed to delegate the on-going maintenance of this idea to someone who liked maintenance. She asked four people with that personality style and one of them agreed to take it on for the next 3 months. Walter in IT made the whole project take off again because he was already handling the “news” section of the organization’s web site, so it was easy for him to do. He elicited suggestions from staff and searched the web for new contests ideas. He made sure others helped him during busy months. And generally, he enjoyed the monthly attention to detail and the joy it seemed to bring people. After five years this organization still does about 10 contests a year. The role of contest maintenance has been passed along gleefully several times to people who enjoy this kind of task, and thus the spirit and purpose of the original idea stays well nourished.

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5 Ways to Mess Up your Office Party

Mistake #1 – Throwing it together at the last minute

Too often, planning the Holiday party ends up in the InBox of the busiest person and it gets thrown together at the last minute. We heard one story in which staff received one day’s notice for the event. They arrived to find an exhausted support staffer racing to put out a Box of Yellow Tail Wine and a bucket of KFC.

Mistake #2 – Un-Inclusiveness

A woman who worked at an insurance company told us that they received a group email like this (no joke): “Christmas Party tomorrow at 3 p.m. All staff attending MUST wear the reindeer ears supplied at the door. For those people who don’t celebrate Christmas you will be required to cover for everyone else. Please don’t invite kids or significant others, as we won’t have enough food or refreshments.”

Mistake #3 – Seating for Silos

Every year a municipal government office has an end-of-the-year party in which food and drink is laid out at round tables of 6 people. The meeting planner complained to us that people just sit with their regular office buddies and make fun of people they don’t like in other departments.

Mistake #4 – Alcohol Free-for-All

One of the most common mistakes we hear about are organizations that have an open bar. People get drunk and then do and say things that end up on Facebook. We heard of one individual that arrived hung over the next morning at work and was entirely surprised to discover he no longer had a job.

Mistake #5 – No Community Building

Too often we hear people say they dread going to the Holiday Office party. It’s boring or uncomfortable and they are just there out of obligation.

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5 Ways to Amp Up your Office Party

In case you aren’t interested in the possible side effects of the above, here are some tried-and-true approaches to ensuring an enjoyable event.

1. Creating a planning committee

Spread the organizing over several people who enjoy this kind of thing. Ensure there is enough planning time and a big enough budget. However, do survey what employees would most enjoy. In general, people enjoy events where they feel inspired, included and appreciated. Remember — substance is more important than flash. With some creativity you can do a lot on a little.

1. Being inclusive

A Christmas party may alienate some of your staff. If people are from diverse backgrounds, have a more generic Holiday party. If you have an office party during the day, make sure everyone can attend. Do invite significant others and children for at least one office party a year.

1. Helping them mix

Your company party may be the only time people get to meet the president, CEO or VPs in person, or people from other departments or locations. Make sure people don’t spend the entire event with their regular office buddies. Enhancing workplace relationships at all levels can create an invisible web of goodwill that can positively affect the bottom line, communication, enjoyment and overall morale.

1. Eat, drink and be merry — in moderation

If you serve alcohol make sure you serve food at the same time. Include plenty of non-alcoholic drinks and healthy food options along with the usual treats. If people overdo it they may associate your party with negative feelings about what they did or said, or how they felt the next day. Provide other forms of “social lubricant” such as interactive mixers.

1. Hiring a pro

To create the right atmosphere you might like to hire a professional speaker (like Carla J) who can ice break the group and get people laughing and learning some great ways to handle the stress of the holiday season. Just remember, that laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

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Carla Rieger offers a one hour program on Team Play that is perfect for a Holiday office event. She gets people interacting in a non-threatening, enjoyable ways while learning some important ways to stay centered during the Holiday Season. Call us 1-866-294-2988 or email: carla@artistryofchange.com.

Why the Gallup Q12 may now be an exercise in futility
For the key to employee engagement, all you need to do these days is to look to the Gallup Organization, right? They conducted hundreds of focus groups and thousands of interviews with employees in a variety of industries, and came up with the Q12. This is a 12-question survey that identifies strong feelings of employee engagement.

You can see a list of the 12 questions here.

But what if you can’t live up to standards of the Q12? Certainly managers who care about you, encourage you, mark your progress, value your opinions and allow you to learn and grow—all contribute to employee engagement. But, for many that is a radical new approach to management. What if you can’t find or train those kinds of people overnight? Plus, many people don’t know what is expected of them at work because the economy keeps changing, or the industry keeps changing. Employees may not have the materials and equipment they need for the same reasons. Maybe you can’t do “what you do best” at work every day, because “what you do best” has now become obsolete. Or, you can’t do quality work, because the market turn around time has significantly decreased. In short, trying to keep up with the Q 12 may now be an exercise in futility.

So you can’t feel engaged until the rate of change slows down?
If so, you might as well drop out of the rat race now and live in a cave. The only way out of this dilemma is to adopt new habits to deal with change. Due to profound economic, sociological, and demographic changes, we must evolve at a core level. In Seth Godin’s bestseller, “Survival Is Not Enough”, he states that “Most of us view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. The first step to help yourself and your organization thrive in the coming economy is to eliminate the anti-change reflex that’s genetically coded into all of us. Once a company learns to zoom (embrace change without pain), it’s much more likely to evolve.”

Creativity as the key to employee engagement
What Seth Godin is referring to when he says “zooming” is a form of creative thinking that is available to everyone. It is bundled with our bio-computer hard drive. We just need to learn how to use it more often. The problem with the Q12 is that the burden of employee engagement mostly lies on the shoulders of management. The truth is, many managers are even less engaged than their employees. How are they possibly going to inspire their workforce? The antidote to almost all Q12 is to teach people how to zoom, at all levels of an organization. The lowest level of creativity inspires far more vitality in a person than the highest level of consuming. In other words, if you can create a workplace full of creative thinkers who share enough of the same core values, the engagement happens all on its own.

Dissolving negativity at work
Countless times, we have seen office politics dissolve; complainers become supportive; toxic emotions unexpectedly evaporate, and unethical people suddenly have integrity when an organization gets back in the creative flow. In other words, it learns how to zoom. Yet, we’d like to take it one step further. It needs to be creativity tied in to core organizational values; otherwise you can end up like Enron (innovation run amok because it lacks integrity). What we’re talking about here is zooming with integrity, or what I call being a Change Artist. To build a Change Artist organization is to create clear values and then teach enough people key habits that naturally unlock the creative thinking necessary to live those values. Once there is a high enough “vibe” of creativity, the permission for it, and the responsible demonstration of it, the Change Artist virus spreads. Others can pick it up by osmosis.

Do you have a comment?
Feel free to add your opinion to this post. For more tips, or to learn about Carla Rieger’s organizational programs, consulting and other resources go to www.artistryofchange.com.

1. Our work is very serious

2. There are too many overly serious people who work here

3. The management won’t allow us to have fun

4. We have too much work to do, there is no time for fun

5. If people had fun all hell would break loose

6. The public or customers would think we are not doing our jobs properly

Yet, here are the Top 7 Benefits I hear about why having fun at work is so crucial these days:

1. It is a low cost, easy way to build morale.

2. It enhances communication and builds social bonds that help people through the tough times.

3. It makes people want to perform well at work and be a contributing member of their team.

4. It re-vitalizes people so they are healthier and have more energy.

5. It opens up creative thinking which helps people be more resourceful with problems.

6. It helps staff build rapport amongst themselves and with clients and customers.

7. It creates a positive atmosphere that makes customers more likely to want to do business with you.

A few of them would ambush other fatigued staff and within minutes energy levels were restored. He says “This kind of thing turned around how we delivered services to the schools under my care as well as the morale of my entire department.” Ironically, by creating planned chaos, it made the actual work time more focused and organized.

She had just turned 64 and so we celebrated Cemetery Style. We made her a cake that looked like a burial marker with a tombstone and artificial flowers. We also did a Hawaiian Theme Party for Anika’s birthday because she had to cancel a trip to Hawaii for her vacation. We had Hawaiian decorations, Hawaiian Music, and we even sprayed the air with coconut room freshener.

Because staff make an effort to enjoy ourselves together it helps attract good people. One staff member told me yesterday that she didn’t know how miserable she was in her old job until she started working with us, because we have so much fun.

Our motto is ‘A Cemetery Worker is the last person to let you down!’

contributed by Ruth Payne of Cultural Affairs within the District of West Vancouver

Ruth writes, “Here’s what I did to motivate and inspire the District of West Vancouver staff.  It works like hotcakes!

We are just finishing the run of an exhibition entitled ‘I Am More Than My Day Job’.  It is for all Municipal staff, including Fire, Police, Transit, Library. The Mayor even has a piece of art in it!    Over 3000 visitors have been through it.I virtually go dept to dept to drag out of employees just what they do with their creativity in their ‘other life’.  The results is amazing!  This is probably one of the best exhibitions ever, and who would guess?

We have a big opening reception and the staff that are musicians performed.

The results:

1. the public love seeing staff that they normally associate with i.e. a Finance Clerk, now being exhibited as a textile artist, a wood carver, an accomplished photographer,  a jeweller, a mixed media painter…the list goes on.

2. the staff morale is on the ceiling…peel them off…they are so darned chuffed at being featured and perceived as artists.

THE BEST STORY YET:   The Director of Finance, very shyly showed me some photographs he took through the windscreen as he does the long daily drive home to Maple Ridge. He had no idea they were even worth showing to anyone. They are of the traffic when it is raining. They are very fresh, immediate and appealing. I took him by the hand to a frame shop, where he learned how they needed to be framed, then he did it himself to save money, and they have been the rave of the exhibit. All three sold, AND a gallery in W. Vancouver now wants to carry his work. He now has a whole new life. He just can’t get over himself!

I love this example of the arts helps people reinvent themselves. And the best part is that other employees now perceive this quiet finance guy in a whole new light.”

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The judges for the Workplace Creativity Contest were:

• Carla Rieger, The Creativity Catalyst
• Marisa Cohen,Creative Writer and Blogger
• Phyllis Harber-Murphy,Creative Virtual Assistant
• Carol Ann Fried, Fun at Work Expert–Training, Speaking and Coaching
• David Gouthro, Creativity and Innovation Expert–Training, Speaking and Facilitation

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Click here to see the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place winners

Several prizes are being given out and the top place winner receives a free spot in our 4 day Artistry of Change retreat at Hollyhock!

The judges were:

• Carla Rieger, The Creativity Catalyst
• Marisa Cohen,Creative Writer and Blogger
• Phyllis Harber-Murphy,Creative Virtual Assistant
• Carol Ann Fried, Fun at Work expert–Training, Speaking and Coaching
• David Gouthro, Creativity and Innovation expert–Training, Speaking and Facilitation

To be informed about our next contest, feel free to subscribe to our email list and this blog’s RSS feed.

Here are the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd place winners for the Workplace Creativity Contest:

Fourth Place – Having fun with lack of storage space

from Lorian Markin of the Justice Institute of BC in New Westminster BC, Canada

Lorian writes, “We are very short of storage space at the Justice Institute and often the only place to store boxes of classroom materials is literally under our desks. I always joke about someday making a little fort out of them, and one morning I came in and my co-workers had built one for me!”

Third Place – Olympics at the Beach

from Bliss at Symantec in Bellingham

Bliss writes, “A few years ago when working with Symantec, we took two teams of folks who worked in different groups–but needed to communicate flawlessly–to the beach.  Once there, we mixed them up in newly formed teams and conducted Symantec Olympics on the Beach.

Seeing each other slipping as they raced, and limbo-ing on the sand and passing eggs on spoons had everyone laughing together in no time.  As I bet you would agree, if you laugh together, you can work together.  I was the one with the stopwatch and whistle, and can attest to that fact. As for other companies, you don’t have to go to the beach to have your own “Olympic” events.  You can be anywhere, from the park to the office hallways, just being willing to get silly together does wonders.”

Second Place – Re-inventing a child’s play area at Salmon Arm Credit Union

Contributed by Louise Delaney, Salmon Arm Savings and Credit Union

I work as the Manager, Marketing for the Salmon Arm Savings and Credit Union. Our main branch had an old run down kids “play” area which featured hand me down books, a painting on the wall and a wooden rocking horse from the 1950;s. We called him “Horsey”.  Horsey entertained generations of children who waited for their folks while they did their banking.

As cute as he was, Horsey seemed dangerous to me. He slid along a metal contraption which could easily slice off little fingers. He was rickety so tended to buck off excited children. And worst of all, he stood in front of a plate glass window.  I couldn’t stand the potential risks we could incur and so I turned a hazard into a creative opportunity.

I lassoed Horsey one night and took him to my office pasture, much to the complaints of the kids, parents (now really, would they allow Horsey to live in THEIR playroom – safely?), and from staff who had to deal with disappointed kids and aggravated parents.

I needed to bring “Horsey” back in a way that didn’t pose any hazards, that enabled staff to work without too much noise, and that would satisfy parents and their kids. I thought about how to design something using local imagery, local design talent and local business to produce it. I put our Ad agency on the case (Mediability Communications and Creatability Design).

After many design drafts: here is the interactive, magnetic board which lines the walls of our kids area. It is 10 feet wide by 5 feet high and surrounds two corner walls. The elements in the design can easily be taken off and can be moved wherever the spirit takes those who dare to play (kids and adults alike). It features local bird life, it is close to the ground for little kids and it corrals little folk into a manageable area.

The kids love it, the parents love it, the staff love it and Horsey remains peaceful in the pasture but reincarnated in the new design. The design is now being custom produced for in home use thereby increasing business for those involved.

See the next blog post for The Grand Prize Winner of The Workplace Creative Contest