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.

According to Alan Deutschman’s article “Change or Die” in Fast Company Magazine, these are the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience. Stories can change a person’s “frame of view” much more powerfully than dry concepts.

Instead of fear-based facts told in conceptual form, offer people a compelling, positive vision for the future told in narrative form to open minds and motivate new behaviour.

For example, instead of only telling people that your organization will go under if the numbers don’t go up, try painting a picture in people’s mind of an ideal circumstance for your organization to move towards.

Being a great storyteller will make you indispensible on the job

In his groundbreaking book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink suggests that understanding how stories work will help you become more indispensible on the job. He talks about how our culture has now shifted from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The Information Age valued the Left Hemisphere of the brain, the side that deals mostly with logic, language, math, structure, and rational thought. He notes that now in order to survive and thrive in today’s work culture you need to use the Right Hemisphere of the brain much more often, or a kind of thinking that involves creativity, playfulness, story, design and synthesis.

Why Right Brain dominant people will rule the future

Pink also says that the three forces at work in this shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age are Abundance, Asia, and Automation.

Abundance refers to the fact that people in North America now have an abundance of choice. There isn’t just one mp3 player, there are hundreds. There isn’t just one type of shampoo, there are thousands. The wide variety of choices now mean that many jobs will require someone to act as a highly creative matchmaker between the wide variety of choices and the needs of the individual end user of a product or service.

Asia refers to the fact that many of the logical, linear left brain jobs have now been outsourced to Asia.

Automation means that many tasks once done by humans are now done by technology. That means that what’s left for people here are jobs that can’t be outsourced or automated, which tend to be jobs involving the Right Hemisphere: design, synthesis, reframing, or jobs with a need for high emotional intelligence.

Here is a summary of the top traits you need to develop to be an Artist of Change:

1. ACCEPT PARADOX: To accept paradox is to see an issue from many different perspectives. It means being vastly empathic not just towards people but towards circumstances. For example, seeing how to improve customer service even though you have just been told the budget is being cut.

2. DESIGN AND RE-DESIGN: The ability to Design is now a form of workplace literacy like knowing how to use Microsoft Office. If you can’t Design then you need to take a crash course. Design is a multi-faceted skill that involves envisioning a new possibility, then re-configuring existing information, tools and resources so that it’s usable to others. For example, instead of accepting that your industry will always be high turnover, you might envision the possibility of attracting stable employees. Then you would re-design your recruiting strategy for an entirely new population segment.

3. THRIVE IN CHAOS: The Conceptual Age is filled with possibilities that point to no single “right way” anymore. Breakdowns, turnovers, mergers, acquisitions, upgrades are all happening more frequently. At the beginning of any change process you will always find chaos.  People who get stressed and resistant when chaos reigns will lose out. Those who can thrive, and even enjoy, chaos will be able to stay in higher performance states and therefore be better able to carry on and get the job done well.

Bottom Line

You’ll have to be creative to stay employed. But who doesn’t want to be creative? It’s inherently more rewarding to be creative than to be an information drone.

By the way, you can only transform if you develop on-going practices or habits that allow those traits to flourish. For more ideas, tips, workshops, staff development programs, keynotes and products go to The Artistry of Change website

You should be suspicious because change is not the issue anymore.

Unless organizations make quantum leaps now, they will be unable to cope with what’s coming.  Check back tomorrow when I will explore the habits we need to cultivate to thrive in the new Economy.

We are now in The Conceptual Age

Traditional Change Management strategies were born in the Information Age. We are now in the Conceptual Age according to Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind. We need transformational leaders rather than change management scripts. We now need people at all levels of an organization to think in transformational ways rather than only be good at giving or receiving orders.