Who Killed Creativity? and How Can We Get it Back? | Andrew Grant | TEDxHongKong

when my son was five years old he put me to shame as the supposed expert on creativity I was preparing a keynote talk on creativity that night two 300 corporate executives and I had the whole talk worked out except the creative opening which you know is very important in a talk and I'm sitting in the car we've picked him up from school my wife's driving I'm sitting in the passenger seat I've got papers all over me and my son's having his afternoon tea in the back of the car and I'm thinking creative opening creative opening I I have to have a creative opening and my son takes a a bite out of his biscuit and he holds it up in at five years old super excited says look dad a racing car and I'm thinking creative a keen creative of me I'll have to have a craft and as a typical dad I turn around say not now son I'm busy and he takes another bite out of the biscuit and says look dad I mounted with snow on it and again I'm thinking not now son I'm trying to be creative don't bother me seven times seven times he took a bite out of his biscuit and could see something and then it hit me here was I as an adult desperately trying to be creative and my son was in the back of the car demonstrating divergent thinking raw shark and alternative uses as a five-year-old and I'm trying to be the supposed expert on creativity now by the next morning when I was moved by that night when I was giving the talk I still didn't have a creative opening so I brought out six executives onstage and I gave each of them a biscuit and I thought this would be a nice thing I over this was many years ago when I was ignorant about the research of kids and adults and I asked the executive to take a bite out of his biscuit and and and I knew as soon as he took a bite out of his biscuit what was about to happen because I was going to ask him what he saw and he took a bite and as I was walking with the microphone towards him he went pale white with fear and I said what do you see and he mumbled into the microphone a biscuit that's all he could see he was I trying to be as adults we're trying to be creative and kids seemed to be doing it naturally now put your hand up if you have children put your hand up if you think your children are creative now just to do a benchmark if you understand me put your hand up if you were once a child fantastic 90% of people want children and keep your hand up if you remember being creative as a child you enjoyed being creative now watch this one keep your hand up if you think you are more creative now than you were when you were 5 years old let's just look around the room we've worked with as Ben said with tribal groups through the CEOs we've been doing this for for many many years and the research that we've seen what we see out there reflects the real research in the workplace ninety-eight percent of kindergarten children score highest geniuses in creative thinking that drops to two percent when we become adults to go even a little bit further studies have also been revealed that while we are getting smarter from an IQ perspective 10 points per generation of what's known as the Flynn effect from a CQ perspective our creative quotient has actually been flattening or declining since the mid 90s now if you couple that with one of the biggest surveys that IBM have ever done with corporate executives to 1500 CEOs around the world and ask them what is the most important character as a leader going forward in the next five years creativity came up as number one so I would have to say there is clearly a problem and I'm going to call it a crime now we have created seven fictional characters from our research of what kills and blocks the creative process and I want you to imagine you are a detective and we're asking the question who killed creativity with what weapon and where we worked with a neuroscientist and a psychologist to try and validate the years of research that we'd been working with on what blocks the creative process and we came up with a game metaphor so I want to look at some of the key suspects today so the suspects are that I want to ask you is what kills creativity was it pressure with a weapon of crushing coercion in the bosses office or was it bureaucracy with a weapon of intractable intolerance in the finance department what kills creativity somewhere along the line these fictional characters get inside our heads they get inside our organizations and they can block the creative process preventing us from lifting off at one particular company we ran a workshop where every single table independently of other tables believe that what blocked creativity for them was pessimism with a weapon of noxious negativity in the canteen now if you compare that to a company like Google that have actually made a science out of creating creative environments Google knows how to harness the energy out of people rather than coax it out they they create places where people can go together and be creative where were where can teens used to be all about workplace productivity now it's about creating a sense of community now sadly the the CEO of the company that I worked with when we ran that diagnostic and we said it was pessimism the coffee shop with negativity came to me in the break and boasted he was proud of it he said Andrew I deliberately make the food and the coffee cheap so I can get people back to work as quickly as possible he had no idea that he was killing creativity and innovation no wonder the research shows that only 21 percent of the workforce are engaged at any one time twenty-one percent of the workforce now you might not have the budget of Google but let me ask you in your workplace do you have stained coffee cups piling up in the sink or food in the fridge a place where people want to eat and go back to work or how many of you eat at your work desk we need these places where ideas can collide where people can become creative so in our 15 years of helping companies with design thinking working with people to try and be creative we've been gathering excuses and as I mentioned we worked with a neuroscientist to try and validate those excuses and we came up with 7 killers of creativity 7 suspects and I want to ask you to think of those suspects in your own mind at one end of the line up is the blatant killer of creativity control and control shuts down what's known as the default Network in our brain the cost of bullying has been in estimated at 1.2 million dollars per year for an organization of a thousand people there are more psychopaths in executive positions than there are in English prisons it's been described as a psychopath in a suit has been described as madness without delirium now what about fear we've all felt the paralyzing effect of fear fear puts us into what's known as a dorsal dive shifting up shifting our brain from the prefrontal creative cortex to the back brace stem of our brain where the emergency fight flight or freeze mode happens and when that happens when you're responding to an emergency there is no chance to be creative which is great we need that to survive but how many of our workplaces today live in a constant state of fear where that Adrenaline's constantly kicking in you see fear moves the brain from open possibilities to proclivity and probability now as we go further down the line up we have the killer's the more sinister suspects that kill creative thinking using stealth and creating blind spots newsfeed algorithms filter out diverse opinions is they tailor our news to the ideas we've already explored so much so that comedian Steven Kolbert said that we have created a safe space where like-minded folks can hear things they already agree with from people's opinions they already know as a result our minds slip into pettiness we spend our life to being defined by 164 characters how many Facebook posts we get and watching reality TV Dennis Miller despises our despairs about our our generation when he says that never have lives less lived being more chronicled never have lives less lived being more chronicled then as we go further down the line up there are the killers of creativity that spread like an infection apathy and pessimism when someone says I've done that before and someone says I yeah doesn't matter they're to be killers as well but who cares about those ones now let's talk about the let's put a magnifying glass on the killer that has the greatest effect on the audience's that we've worked with and that's the killer of pressure why is pressure such a big killer of creativity because we love it when I ask you in the workplace how are you today how do you answer we love to say we're busy corporate executives we're pressure as a badge of honor hello I'm Andrew and here's my friend pressure it's cool to hang out with pressure the other killers we can see coming but we welcome pressure into our lives and whilst we might leave control and and and narrow-mindedness back in the workplace we bring pressure home with us and my wife hates it when I bring pressure to bed because it's not her that wakes me up at four o'clock it's sometimes pressure waking me up at four o'clock saying hey Andrew remember that you have to send pressure a huge killer of creativity so let's leave the office for a minute and head home who check their emails or who checks their emails before they come to work in the morning who who checks things before they come to work in the morning put your hand up if you check your emails or do some work-related stuff before breakfast okay hands up if you do work-related stuff not just before breakfast but before you get out of bed in the morning addiction to email can lower your IQ twice as much as smoking marijuana we lose 2.1 hours of productivity every time in the day for wanting to touch our devices over a hundred and 50 times a day we're losing productivity as a matter of fact we start people early these days this is the new iPhone iPad porta potti now the problem with that is I'm Dyslexic and I wouldn't want to get my hands mixed up of what I did what with when I playing with that once our creative flow is broken it takes an average of 25 minutes to get back into a creative state of flow that means if you're being interrupted every 24 minutes and 59 seconds you can go hours days weeks months some of you even years and never get into a creative state of flow we fill up our working memory with so much stuff but our working memory can only actually take about five things at once and if that working memory is overflowed we have no room to be creative now overloading our brain through control through fear through pressure is the same technique the magicians use and pickpockets use to woo their audience so I'm going to ask Ben to come up here just a few minutes early before he should really come up here because I want to try something on him Ben would you mind just shuffling those cards for me and could you bring that to spring would you mind just coming up to make sure that you know we can we can validate this probably then just shuffle the cards take my jacket off because I know you've got something up your sleeve or you've got some so special jacket we've shuffled the cards and I want you now to just take a card please take a card as a matter fact Ben's going to do this trick not me just take a card pick your own card and give me the pack okay and show it to your your friend over there just to make sure that you're making shots a few people in the audience and then just pop the card just cut just pop the card back into the pack now it's very very important when you put it into the pack that you just hang on into the middle of the pack try again put it very very important when you put into the pack that you put it in the middle of the pack because I'll explain why that's important to me now just put the card down so we know that it's gone into the middle of the pack and now I want you to give the cards a quick shuffle again because as I said Ben's going to do this trick not me and just hand the cards back to me don't drop them and I want you to go and get that box that you got them out of just grab that box and make sure there's nothing special about that box it's just a normal box from the magic shop and we're going to put the getup with the cards back into the box and then we're going to seal those cards off in the Box seal the cards off there's the Box completely sealed with the lid on it and we're going to put those cards into Ben's top pocket all right now let's just recap what's happened Ben picked the cards up being shuffled the pack Ben then picked a card we put the card back into the middle of the pack and then he reshuffled the pack put the cards into the box sealed the box and put the cards into Ben's pocket now don't panic that's not the card isn't what would what would happen in a simple version of this trick is the magician would have permed the card right at the very beginning that's why I was important went into the middle he would have permed the card at the beginning of the trick and then all that banter and all that other stuff was just distraction priming overloading Ben's working memory and then what the magician would do is he'd put the card behind his hand like that and he would say I'm going to get the card out of that remember that's a sealed pack of cards inside his pocket I'm going to get the card out of that seal pack and he would bring his hand along like this and right because the I there their hands faster than the eye he would then say that's the card and everyone would clap and they would go fantastic now I want to try something a little bit different because I know Ben's a bit nervous up in front of a thousand people is that right and now while we've been up here I've been priming Ben I've been dealing with a bit of fear because the hearts probably racing at a high speed there's no pressure a lot of pressure out there and to a degree I've been controlling controlling the narrative so as a result of that I've been able to shut down Ben's creative problem-solving I don't want to I don't want to upset you but there is no such thing as magic well the magician does is shut down your ability to solve problems so what I'm going to do now with Evan we can bring the cameras in as close as you like right now with absolutely nothing at my sleeve with a clear set of hands nope arming no sleight of hand that card is somewhere in that pocket in a sealed pack of cards I'm going to go in there like a good pickpocket and see if I can get that out three two one yeah Ben what was the card that you chose and Ben what is that card you know just add a little bit more fun or could you please check that that box is still a sealed box of cards lids still on thank you very much man that was it that was a great job now those of you watching that on video you don't have the same problem the Ben head you can rewind it and and look at it and there's no fear and no control or no pressure but up on stage we were able to shutdown that kids are the worst people to do magic on because they can they don't ask those questions they they can't be controlled like that I practice this in front of kids yesterday and they went that's not a magic trick they could easily see the answer but us adults the tube than the 98% of us of adults that score low we struggle so I hope today has just given you a little taste of how we can lift off and how we can address the killers that are blocked in our lives in order for us to become creative thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 57,678

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Hong Kong, Life, Creativity

Id: OJgLhFa-rtQ

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016