Teaching the Impossible: Creativity in Business

When people say, “That’s impossible,” what they usually mean is, “That hasn’t been done yet.” The vast majority of people in the world adopt assumptions that they never question.

Yet everything that’s possible today was once impossible, and nothing ever became possible without a commitment to try something new.

How do you teach the tenacity of one’s belief? How do you teach someone to ferret out their own assumptions and interrogate them with others? How do you awaken someone to discard limitations that they’ve placed on themselves? It is reminiscent of that old saying, “You can’t awaken someone who’s only pretending to sleep.”

Teaching creativity is a hot topic in academia right now, but even that was once considered to be an impossible task. People said, “You’re either born with it, or you’re not.” Eventually, somebody questioned that assumption and now creativity is being taught as a discipline across the educational landscape, from business schools to medical schools.

Art as Rx

In a drive to foster innovation and new business models, MBA programs are taking a closer look at how creativity is taught in medical schools. An article in Yale News reported, “While future physicians with heavy course loads at the Yale School of Medicine usually don’t have the time to ponder art, these students were visiting the museum for a required class — one that could someday save a patient’s life.”

At many medical schools, including Yale and Wharton, medical students are required to take a course on art appreciation. The evidence suggests that students emerge with an ability to make better diagnoses because they take a more holistic approach to the patient’s problems. Looking at the entire picture, instead of just looking at the immediate symptoms, yields better outcomes.

Business by Design

Medical schools are not alone in searching for creative ways to teach the skills that will improve outcomes. To succeed in a highly competitive and dynamic marketplace, companies need creative thinkers. But is it possible to teach creativity? Some of the leading business schools, including Stanford, John Hopkins and MIT, think it is and are encouraging students to take courses in design.

Brint Markle, cofounder of AvaTech, took design classes as part of his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He said, “Taking a design course is a really fantastic way to learn about solving problems in very different ways. It’s also really valuable to learn to speak other people’s language outside of the MBA community.”

The Art of Comedy

Art appreciation and design courses represent two pathways to original ideation in this new approach to teaching creativity. Something else that is gaining widespread acceptance in the business world is improvisation comedy. Many years ago, corporations did this as a means to promote team building, and today improv classes are part of the standard corporate training at companies like Google, Pepsi and McKinsey.

Last year Ramapo College invited two improvisation instructors from the Magnet Theatre in New York City to join one of its MBA leadership classes. The lessons learned during the improv session are consistent with the skills needed for success as a professional manager. The first one is that you can’t win alone – your improv team wins or fails together, there are no individual awards. Everyone learns to play off each other, magnifying each other’s strengths and minimizing their shortcomings. Improv teaches you how to listen, how to be fast on your feet, and how to get comfortable when presenting in front of a large, sometimes skeptical, audience.

The End of Certainty

There is one very important reason why teaching creativity has become such a high priority: the rate of change in our society. In a competitive global marketplace where disruption is business as usual, you need creativity in your corner just to survive.

IBM — which for decades has been synonymous with predictability and repeatable processes — released some fascinating survey results on creativity in business. In talks with more than 1,500 business leaders in 60 countries, IBM found that 80% of these execs expected their industry environments to grow “significantly more complex” in the very near future. However, just under half of them were confident that their workers had the skills to deal with those changes. What the execs all agreed on was that they urgently needed workers with creativity more than any other skill set.

The Rise of the Machines

Much has been written about the strides in robotics and artificial intelligence and the fears that workplace jobs are increasing at risk for disruption. The substitution of capital for labor has long been part of our economic history but until now it was largely confined to rote tasks or assembly line jobs. However, with the ascendancy of artificial intelligence, more sophisticated tasks are being threatened with substitution. IBM’s Watson Computer beat the reigning Jeopardy! Champions in 2011 and has since gone on to graduate from law school and medical school. Today it speaks multiple languages and can process 800 million pages of text per second.

What is likely to remain from the ascendancy of artificial intelligence is that tomorrow’s valued workers will operate in domains where cognitive abilities are robot-proof. According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The robot age invites people to be not drones, servants, or vagabonds, but creators. Technology will free us to ask questions that have never been posed, to envision beauty never before unveiled in the mind’s eye. To achieve this, though, we’ll need to educate people very differently.”

Is it fanciful to think that we can teach creativity or is it merely common sense? Perhaps. But it’s not hard to see why creativity is in such high demand. Appreciating the artistic genius of Picasso, designing something or performing in front of an audience may just turn out to be the best training for someone leading an international organization in today’s impossibly complex world.

Categories: MBA