Creativity: You’re not alone

Growing up, my musical hero was Elton John. I had little time for David Bowie, icon of the cooler crowd. But I recently found myself immersed in Bowie’s live concerts and enveloped by his music, at Lightroom’s David Bowie: You’re Not Alone – a version of Bowie’s story that makes him a hero for more than one day.

If a blank sheet of paper is a scary proposition, how about starting with four exceptionally large, blank walls? Lightroom is a box without boundaries. Its visionaries have imagined a sensorial space in which babies can crawl across its vast interior floor while hardcore fans lose themselves in Let’s Dance.

Our MBA students could not find the words to do justice to Lightroom’s distinctiveness. Its unique form of storytelling has projected David Hockney’s playfulness with perspective; spread Tom Hanks’ passion for the moon; and let us adventure into the world of dinosaurs with Damian Lewis.

At London Business School, I have hosted as speakers both Richard Slaney, Lightroom’s CEO, and David Sabel, who has produced many of its shows, including Vogue: Inventing the Runway and this Bowie spectacular. They have created a slate of experiences that, in addition to educating, immersing, and thrilling visitors, also elevate a deep understanding of the creative process.

One surprise for our students and executives listening to Lightroom’s luminaries? Creativity, and particularly creativity in business, is so rarely a solo endeavour. You (and your ideas) are better for not being alone. Both Slaney and Sabel described Lightroom’s creative ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration. To render the “genius” of a Bowie, Hockney, or Wintour, or unite us with moonwalkers in space, or deliver us into the mouths of dinosaurs, in novel ways, requires the integration of hundreds of specialists from filmmaking, theatrical design, animation, spatial audio engineering, and more.

Collaboration is intense, and there is true togetherness in the process. Working directly with David Hockney, Tom Hanks, Anna Wintour and her Vogue team, actor Damian Lewis, or partners at Apple TV+ and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the commitment to generous collaboration from all is wholehearted. As Hockney himself said, “Collaboration is compromise.” You can be confident and humble too, knowing that someone else can improve your creative vision or its execution.

How does all of this apply to the world of business? We should banish the solos and bust the silos. If the ambition is to create and produce something that moves your people, customers, partners, stakeholders, you would be wise not to go it alone.

Bowie’s iconoclastic genius for experimentation, innovation, and reinvention pulsates with every pixel. He was a one-off, a self-appointed outsider, an original. He did not have access to Adam Grant’s book, Originals: How Non- Conformists Move the World, but he would certainly have approved of its disclaimer that “nothing is completely original, in the sense that all of our ideas are influenced by what we learn from the world around us.”

Bowie’s insatiable curiosity was one of the most remarkable features of the show. At one point, he confesses with wonderful self-deprecation to buying books “that were far above my head” but that, over time, informed his work; he went to the movies, the theatre, art galleries. He did the lot.

The late David Hockney had the same trait. I can still recall in Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) Hockney’s kind admonishment, “The world is very beautiful if you look at it. But most people don’t look very much. They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things incredibly well, with intensity. I do.”

There were other practices that fuelled the creativity of these two giants. Both were prolific. Both stayed at the forefront of their craft. Hockney remained fascinated with the infinite creative possibilities of new media, emerging technologies, and was an early adopter of painting by iPad; Bowie wrote, composed, painted and performed, producing an immense body of work.

Yayoi Kusama, the remarkable Japanese artist, who continued working until her recent death, aged 97, may be best remembered for her polka-dot pumpkins but her ideas were expressed as a poet, writer, film-maker, fashion designer and political agitator. Grant cites psychologist Dean Simonton’s research finding that, “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea are a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”

Surely it’s easier to keep the work coming if you are blessed with innate creativity? Not according to Henri Matisse. He said: “I have always tried to hide my own efforts and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors that it has cost. So I am afraid that the young, seeing in my work only the apparent facility and negligence in the drawing, will use this as an excuse for dispensing with certain efforts which I believe necessary.” Creativity without effort? Forget it.

“How can I be more creative?” is only partially answered by these individual traits: avoid being alone, collaborate purposefully, get out more, look with more intensity, and work harder to produce more ideas. Yet significant barriers stand in the way of our reaching creative heights. I have been collecting data from my classes with executives and degree students at London Business School using two questions: “What kills creativity?” and “What ignites creativity?” Put thousands of those answers side by side and a pattern emerges. The serial killer of creativity, the single most cited word across all cohorts, is fear – of judgement, blame, failure, and all its ugly consequences. It is an indictment of how most organisational cultures remain resoundingly unsafe. Other killers of creativity abound – lashings of bureaucracy, layers of hierarchy, opaque or non-existent decision-making, impossible deadlines, the demand to prove that something never attempted before will work. Creativity, people tell me, is being processed to death. “Sorry, David, we are going to have to stop you there. Legal are worried that asking Major Tom to take his protein pills might not be in line with current Health & Safety legislation.”

What executives do ask for – crave, in fact – are trust, autonomy, and explicit permission to be creative. These are the recognisable catalysts of a team’s ability to think differently and act decisively. The creative leaders we admire are not the ones who throw more money at the problem or extend the odd deadline. They are the role models who create permission inside and across the organisation.

People do not buy the leader who extols the adage, “Don’t ask for permission, beg for forgiveness later.” When job security, career development, other people’s money, and livelihoods are on the line, we need our leaders’ explicit permission and their sincere encouragement to fail.

That top-down permission needs to include not having the answer alone —permission to hand the problem to others, ask for help, invite surprising people into the room, and to say, “I have no idea, I don’t expect any of you to have a clue either, let's find out together.”

When the exploration is this open, a team needs more than an abstract appeal to collaborate. It helps to use a common approach to problem-solving, through a shared system and language. When I teach Creativity in Business, I use one inspired by my favourite primate, the baboon. Baboonery™ provides a disciplined method with which to create ideas and find fresh solutions and disrupts our natural temptation to race to the finishing line. It is not an exact parallel to the primates’ world, because strict dominance hierarchies are forbidden (and class participation grades are at stake). I give our diverse problem-solving troops an understanding of the context, the rules of engagement, the sticks and stones at their disposal (like baboons, they are free to invent their own, too).

After that, they spend time exploring the problem thoroughly, getting to its root cause. So far, so very conventional. The magic is in the next phase, where our baboons make mischief. Leaving nothing to chance, not playing by the rules, they go foraging for the freshest of insights on which their thinking will turn.

Our new Masters of Baboonery™ may not shift our perspective as skilfully as Hockney or beat Bowie for category-bending, culture-defining brilliance, but the troops, working together for the first time, equipped with collective practices, experience the challenges and joys of true creative collaboration.

The output? Radically different strategic thinking, novel actionable ideas, engineered rather than left to chance, and a newfound confidence in their own creativity. More important for when they return to their businesses, there is a commitment to embrace others’ ability to solve problems in fresh ways together.

As Lightroom’s shows embody, the genius was and is never solo, even for the genius.