Why adults have trouble reinventing themselves

A long time back I worked with a mother and her daughter. In kindergarten the girl was vibrant, playful, sociable and inventive. But in Grade 1, everything changed. The teacher, Miss Munroe, was disturbed that the girl couldn’t sit still, that she wrote letters backwards, that she couldn’t read and or do arithmetic as well as the other children. So Miss Munroe put her in the special learning class, or as the other kids referred to it…the dummies class. Her mother was surprised because the girl had always seemed so bright and so good at many things. But the teachers said it was the best choice for everyone concerned. The girl disliked this dummies class even more than regular class and sat sullen refusing to do anything at all. The other children began to exclude her on the playground. Her self esteem plummeted and she soon isolated herself from friends and family.

Learning HOW to learn rather than memorizing rote facts

Her mother grew upset about the situation and so did research on alternative school programs that offered a more flexible curriculum. She eventually got her daughter into a school with a self-directed learning program. This was where students were asked HOW they wanted to learn instead of having to follow one standard curriculum. That’s when everything changed. The students suggested that instead of learning plant science from a book, that they would make their own vegetable garden together instead. So that’s what they did for half the school year. Instead of memorizing the Pythagoras theorem, they constructed multi-colored models to learn about how it applies in the real world. Instead of memorizing facts about the inventor, Edison, they produced a short documentary about his life. This girl eventually became a top student in this experiential learning environment, because she needed to move in order to think.

Do you need to move in order to think?

In his groundbreaking TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?“, Sir Kenneth Robinson, tells the story of the great choreographer, Gillian Lynne. She was always a dancer at heart, and needed to move in order to think. Many people who are not thriving in the education system or their organization are actually very bright and capable, but they are stuck in a sitting position all day long, when they actually need to move to think properly.

This girl went on to finish high school and 7 years of postsecondary education with excellent marks. Soon after graduating she started her own business and she has been able to continually reinvent her career the last 20 years. Now this was someone who struggled with dyslexia for years, who had to go to the library for the blind to just get through a book. And this young student was me.

Here is my geeky Grade 8 photo at University Hill Secondary School. Thank goodness there was such a great program there in the 1970′s because it that made all the difference to me being a contributing member of society. I was lucky; I had a mother who stood up for me. I could have easily ended up like my friend in the special education class who was pregnant by 15 and spent her early adult years as a drug addict living on welfare.

Here’s a photo of my mother who went to bat for me. She died of cancer when I was only 27 years old but in the last year of her life she did get that chance to see me on a video speak before an audience of 1400 college students. A proud moment for a mother who worried her child would never make it in the world. I later learned to break free of dyslexia through Brain Gym. By doing the exercises every day for several years and going on to teach it to others I now read quickly with excellent comprehension and have no other traces of dyslexia. Many learning disabilities are now much more easily overcome through such excellent organizations as The Educational Kinesiology Foundation.

What happens when you don’t know how to reinvent very well?

An extraordinary number of the young people who went through this creative, self directed program went on to lead successful lives as adults in creative and dynamic professions, even if they came into the program as a “problem child”. One reason is that they learned to continually reinvent and therefore could thrive in a variety of environments. They were taught how to create something from nothing, how to choose their response, and how to ascribe they own meaning to situations. In contrast, in regular schools, children were taught only one way to learn and were allowed only a narrow range of responses and interpretations they could have about their environment. They were never taught to question assumptions, or how to consciously form their own opinions or interpretations.

Change resistant people hold organizations back

As a result, many adults with this kind of mindset can feel helpless when things like the economy turns down, or they have to learn new software, or they must take on another role at work. From years of surveying individuals and leaders in organizations the majority of people complain, resist, and even to sabotage a necessary reinvention …all because they just have a weak skill set for reinvention. They just don’t know how to create something out of nothing, or how to choose their response, or how to create a sense of meaning for what they’re doing.

Humans view themselves as creative until they are taught not to

When I recently asked a room full of adults to raise their hands if they called themselves creative, only about 1/5th of the room did so. When I ask a roomful of kindergarten students the same question, all the hands went up. So the good news is that humans view themselves as creative, until they are taught not to. Therefore, the skill of reinvention, or understanding of the creative process, is actually an innate ability that some people just forgot. If you got dressed this morning in a different way than yesterday, you can reinvent. If you negotiated your way through traffic today, you used the creative process. All you really have to do is remember your innate skills and apply them to whatever situation you now need to reinvent.

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.

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

Email us a poem, short story, art work, or photo of the creative environment in which you work. Or tell us about décor your workplace created, or an innovative initiative to bring in more business, or to better service your clients, or something fun and creative that brought your team together, or anything that helped inspire a culture of creativity in your workplace.

Send it by July 31st, 2009. Winners announced by August 15th. Entries can be sent to me at Carla@ArtistryofChange.com.

See below for examples.

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Workplace Creativity Contest
Deadline for Submission – July 31, 2009

Here are some examples of workplace creativity:

1.   Hakia
2.   Motely Fool
3.   Google
4.   W.L. Gore & Associates
5.   Whole Foods
6.   BC Ministry of Children & Family Services

1. In the Manhattan offices of the search engine Hakia.com, employees can express themselves on blank canvases that hang on the walls.

2. At the offices of Motley Fool, a financial Web site, workers can unwind through a couple of networked Xboxes hooked up to a 5-foot plasma screen in a dedicated game room.

“Work has changed from being something you do with your hands to something you do in your head,” the New York Post quoted Alexander Kjerulf, author of ‘Happy Hour is 9 to 5,’ as saying.

“This means that how people feel at work is now terribly important, because you do better head-work when you’re happy,” he added.

3. Leading the ‘Fun at Workplace’ concept are the dot-coms, best among them Google, which got the top spot on Fortune’s “Best Places to Work” list this year, for its impressive perks such as game rooms that offer diversions like billiards, PlayStation, pingpong and foosball.

4. After rigorous evaluation Fast Company magazine finally voted W.L. Gore & Associates as the most innovative company in America. You’ve no doubt heard of its most famous product: Gore-Tex fabrics, which have a transparent plastic coating that makes them waterproof and windproof but keeps them breathable. They also make over 1000 different other products such as synthetic blood vessels, Glide dental floss, the first floss that resisted shredding, and its Elixir guitar strings, which last five times longer than normal strings. Yet, Gore’s uniqueness comes from being as innovative in its operating principles as it is in its diverse product lines. For example, they encourage risk taking. Since they are a privately owned company they don’t have to report their quarterly earnings, thus they happily allocate 10% of their resources to new initiatives and allow anyone in the company who wants to try a new initiative a generous amount of resources to develop it. Of course, some of those initiatives fail, but they expect that. And, when Gore people pull the plug on a failing initiative, they’ll still have a “celebration” with beer or champagne, just as they would if it had been a success. Because they know that lowers stress and validates trying new things.

5. Whole foods market ranked 15 in 2007 in Fortune magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. It’s mainly for their management processes and practices. That’s one reason why no competitor has matched the performance of Whole Foods Market, which has grown during the past 25 years to 161 stores. While other grocery chains have been slashing costs to fend off Wal-Mart, Whole Foods has been rapidly evolving an extraordinary retail model– one that already delivers the highest profits per square foot in the industry. John Mackey, the company¹s founder and CEO, says his goal was to “create an organization based on love instead of fear” and describes Whole Foods as a “community working together to create value for other people.

The basic organizational unit isn’t the store but small teams that manage departments such as fresh produce, prepared foods, and seafood. Managers consult teams on all store-level decisions and grant them a degree of autonomy that is nearly unprecedented in retailing. Each team decides what to stock and can veto new hires. Giving them this kind of responsibility seems to engender much more a creative working environment rather than a stressed out one. Partly because they have control over the decisions.