Jo Bowman
Businesses that want fresh ideas and innovation need creative people. Sir Ken Robinson says too many people have got the wrong idea about what that means, and how to achieve it. Jo Bowman reports.
Originally from Liverpool in the north of England and now a resident of Los Angeles, Sir Ken Robinson was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick for 12 years and has advised governments, international agencies and Fortune 500 companies on creativity, education and the economy. He has just released an updated edition of his 2001 book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Robinson’s bugbear is the current state of education in the Western world. His position, in a nutshell, is that a system designed during the industrial revolution to churn out a mass of employees is no longer relevant to the business world future workers will enter now. Society has come to prize science and academia as the realms of the clever, and the arts as a distinct, curious but slightly inferior world occupied by creatives. This view, he insists, is not only wrong, it’s intensely damaging, and reform is not enough. Education systems need to be transformed. For parents, Sir Ken’s take on how school systems are failing to nurture their children’s talents and equip them for the world of work is panic-inducing. For anyone running a successful business, it’s only slightly less alarming.
The fates of education and business, he says, are intertwined. “Most schools are suffering from a plague of standardisation enforced by government, stunting (children’s) development in a way that’s personally tragic and economically catastrophic,” he explains. “Most children think they’re highly creative; most adults think they’re not. This is a bigger issue than it may seem. So many people have a low view of their own talents, what they’re really capable of. Many people conclude they don’t have any talents.”
Why does it matter to business whether people are creative or feel creative enough to describe themselves as such? “For businesses, creativity is a bottom-line issue,” he says. If people are emerging from educations without that creativity, then that’s a problem. He refers to an international study by IBM, for which 3,000 business leaders were interviewed on the current challenges to business success. Three strong themes emerged: businesses must be able to deal with the increasing complexity of people’s lives; organisations must therefore be adaptable to change; and they need creativity.
Years ago, many businesses trained people for a specific job and encouraged them to perform it more quickly. Thinking of a better way of doing things was positively discouraged. No longer. “We’re living in times of revolution, collectively facing challenges that no previous generation has had to deal with,” Sir Ken claims. “If we’re to meet these challenges, we have to think very differently about ourselves, the people we work with, and our children.”
Much of the problem with the current devaluation of creativity in education and business is a failure to understand what it actually is. “There’s a misconception that creativity is about special people, and the cult of celebrity perpetuates that,” he says. “My argument is that we’re all born with great creativity.” Thus the use of the term “creative industries” to describe fields such as music, film and advertising, is problematic because it implies that other industries aren’t creative. To thrive, he insists, all industries and all businesses must be creative.
New ideas, to order
That means all employers need creative people. But how to find them? And what is creativity anyway? Sir Ken’s own definition is that it’s a very practical process that consists of putting one’s imagination to work. “It’s the process of having original ideas that have value,” he says. “Innovation is putting good ideas into practice.”
A business that thrives on innovation needs a steady stream of these ideas. “Everyone occasionally has a good idea, but the challenge is to be able to do that to order.” Identifying people in a job interview who are likely to be creative is no simple task. And, if Sir Ken is right in asserting that some of the best ideas are the product of collaboration by a diverse team of people, how does a manager identify the person who will either come up with fantastic ideas, or help others to do it?
“First, people aren’t creative in general, they’re creative at something, and people creative at something in particular may not be creative at something else,” he says. One of his suggestions for assessing creativity for the workplace is that it involve a kind of audition process. “Put people in situations where they need to demonstrate their abilities in the field that you’re interested in, and you need to be clear to some degree what type of originality you have in mind.” How do you measure their success? “You know it when you see it,” he says. “You can tell if people are being innovative and if what they’re doing and saying is genuinely interesting. You’re also looking for potential – people who are able to respond to new training opportunities.” If this sounds rather unscientific, Robinson says that doesn’t detract from its validity.“A lot of this is not an algorithm, it’s connoisseurship and judgement. If you want to hire creative people and you want the fourth Beatle, a good bit of that is a value judgment, you have to feel it’s right. That doesn’t mean that it’s without foundation. A very important part of cultivating creativity is that you need to be cultivating judgement.”
Anyone for coffee?
Sir Ken champions successful businesses which have embraced the idea that anyone within an organisation can be the source of creative ideas, and which invest in stimulating their staff’s imagination – even if there’s no immediate quantifiable business benefit. Pixar Studios, for instance, the animated film company behind the Toy Story series and Cars, runs a university on site, where all staff are entitled to spend four hours per week. Inevitably, they meet people they otherwise wouldn’t have, discover interests and abilities they didn’t know they had, and, often, end up working in a different role in the company – one they’re better at and happier in. “For innovation to flourish, it has to be seen as an integral purpose of the whole organisation, rather than as a separate function,” Robinson explains. IDEO and Google are also good case-studies in fostering broad-based creativity. Creating a working environment that positively encourages exchanges of ideas and is receptive to those ideas is something businesses should all be doing, he says, although there’s no promise that it will pay off.“It can help to have the groovy sofas and the cappuccino machines, but there are no guarantees,” he warns. “Creating favourable conditions is important if you can do it, but the real chemistry happens in the connections between people, and people are very sensitively attuned to that. If you’re going to be leading a creative team, they need to feel that you’re serious about it and will take them seriously.”
How do you measure ROI on that? “There’s lots of evidence from successful companies and organisations of the truth of these principles. The history of corporate life is full of corpses and wrecks of organisations that didn’t keep up – companies that were household names but didn’t keep up and didn’t see change coming. It’s not as if the evidence is that if you don’t innovate, it will all be fine. The evidence is quite strongly to the contrary, so the need for innovation I think is demonstrable. Whether your particular efforts will result in the innovation you’re looking for – of course you can’t guarantee that. All you can do is create the optimum conditions where it’s most likely to happen. It’s an investment, not a sure bet, but it’s an investment that you’d be very wise to make and very unwise not to make.”
Never too late
For those of us who are the product of education systems that failed to bring out our creativity, Sir Ken insists there’s still hope. “There isn’t a 12-step plan here,” he cautions. “It’s about confidence, personal commitment, circumstances … but above all it’s about your own attitude. Lots of people deny themselves things that they would love to do because they feel they’re not entitled to it, or they’re frightened of the risk of it.”
For future generations of business leaders and innovators, this means a radical change in their approach to education systems. There are plenty of fine teachers and administrators, he concedes, but they work in a system that largely stifles creative teaching and tailored learning, a system that, all too often, causes students to choose subjects because they’re a good fit on the timetable rather than their suitability to them. These fundamental, structural problems are at the heart of his call for change in the dominant culture and expectations of education.
Robinson is an advocate of alternative teaching systems such as that at the School of One, which gives students more individual teaching time and a personalised daily timetable that takes into account their progress and passions. Another school he identifies as producing better outcomes is an art studio in Scotland called Room 13, in which the students – aged just eight to eleven – comprise the management team. They really do run it, and have turned the school into a successful international business. Another approach, called Big Picture Learning, founded in the US and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, gives students responsibility for their own education and requires them to spend considerable time with volunteer mentors doing real work in their communities. Assessment is based not on standardised testing but factors like motivation, demonstrations of achievement, and behaviour.
But that’s not to say that all students in what we might call regular school now have dark futures ahead of them. “It’s not as if (the system) doesn’t celebrate any form of ability, it does, but it doesn’t celebrate a breadth of ability.” The idea that success in education is measured by students’ success in earning degrees from a short list of well-known universities is nonsense, he says. “Some people have the aptitudes and passions that the current system rewards, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are great schools everywhere, but they’re often doing well in spite of the culture, not because of it. We need to be celebrating diversity and individuality much more.”
The consequences of not making changes are already evident, Sir Ken claims, in the ranks of disenchanted young peoplestruggling in the face of high dropout rates and rising youth unemployment. Interestingly, many young offender programmes that succeed in getting people back on track are personalised and tap into individuals’ talents in the way Robinson has argued the school system should have done in the first place. “People say we can’t afford that; I say we can’t afford anything else.”
Sir Ken Robinson is the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative.
