Deliberate Creative Teams: How to Lead for Innovative Results

Introduction

You’re Not Creative

(or So You Were Told)

In my first year of college I eagerly signed up for a class called Studio Art for Non-Majors. I was a biology major, but the course satisfied one of the general education requirements. On the first day of class the professor said, If you don’t have artistic talent, you are not going to do well in this class. I remember thinking, "Wait a minute. Isn’t this class for people not majoring in art? Jerk. My next thought was Well, what the heck. I’ve made lots of art and have some talent. I’ll stick it out and see what happens."

What happened was I worked really hard and barely got a B. In high school I was mostly an A student, so I was not proud of this B.

I learned a lot in that class, but not much about art.

For sixteen weeks, I watched the teacher berate all of us about how we were not good enough. About twenty of us were in the class and we bonded over his ridiculous teaching style. Behind his back, we were all rolling our eyes because he did not teach, just demeaned. But the thing is, his message seeped in. I started believing I could not make art. I started doubting my creativity. He was the expert. What did I know?

Up until that year, I had taken an art or music class nearly every year of my life. After that, I did not do a single artistic thing for five years. He almost ended my artistic and creative pursuits. Almost.

Ten years after that experience, I found myself lecturing to art and quilt guilds about creativity. During my lectures, I often shared the story about the art class. After every talk, at least one person, and usually several, would come up to me and say, I have the same story. My experience was in fifth grade. Or seventh grade or tenth grade. Nearly everyone I know has had someone at some point in their life tell them they are not creative. It may have been a teacher, a parent, a boss, but always someone they believed had more wisdom than they did. The message gets buried deep in our psyches and we believe it, especially if it happens at a young, impressionable age.

Then all those people who were told they were not creative grew up and entered the workforce. Nearly every job needs some creativity. Yet those employees have no idea how to be creative. Not only do they not have the skills for it, but they also deeply believe they cannot be creative. This is a big problem and hinders innovation around the world.

This book is not about making art. It is about creativity. While creativity and artistic skills can be related, they are also two separate things. Whether or not you had negative experiences with art or creativity as a kid, certainly some of your employees have. You will learn ways you and your team can move past those old beliefs and develop your present-day creativity.

This book is also about teams, because they are critical for innovation. You will learn how to guide your team to be more creative and develop innovative solutions to real challenges. We need your creativity and your team’s creativity because you have so much to offer.

The Global Need for Team Creativity

In 2010, IBM did a study on complexity in the workplace and interviewed more than 1,500 CEOs and other business leaders from sixty countries.¹ The CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality for navigating the upcoming complexities facing the world. They also consistently said that one feature defines organizations that maneuver change well—creativity.

The World Economic Forum published the Future of Jobs Report in 2020 and listed the top ten skills needed for 2025.² Innovation was number one, creativity was number five, and ideation was number ten. The report also indicated that half of employees would need reskilling and upskilling to gain new skills needed for their jobs. This could include training on how to be more creative. Fortunately, reskilling and upskilling are great investments, and most employers expect to see a return in one year or less. Forbes simply says, Creativity Is the New Black.³

Creativity needs to come from all levels of the organization, not just the top leadership. In fact, ideas from the bottom up are sometimes the most valuable.⁴ Sometimes individuals come up with an idea, but they can rarely implement it on their own. More often, creative solutions are developed through collaborative conversations, interactive dialogue, and the deep teamwork needed for creativity. Given the complexities in organizations, teams are critical for innovation to take hold.

Creativity Is Innate

A year after college I was leading wilderness trips for teenagers in Colorado. During a rare day off, I wandered into a bookstore in Steamboat Springs. I bought two books about the creative process: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and Life, Paint, and Passion by Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley. When I look back on that day I have no idea why I found those books, but something drew me to them. They shifted my thinking. I started seeing that creativity is about the process as much as or even more than the product. I learned that creativity emerges from doing the work. It is not spontaneous or magical. It is not that some of us are born with it and others are not. Creativity is innate to humans. We all have it. It is like a well. It is just a matter of tapping into it and letting it seep out.

After reading those books I started digging deep into understanding creativity. Two years later, I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire and taught my first workshop on creativity. It was a small group that met weekly for five weeks. I facilitated exercises and assigned them homework to bring out their creativity. I was not sure it would work. In some ways, I was making it up as I went. But the conversations were rich and the results were energizing. Students said they felt more creative. I was hooked.

For years, I kept experimenting with the best ways to teach creativity. At first, I only focused on individual creativity, but then I started combining my background in experiential education and team development with teaching creativity to teams. I learned about a process called creative problem solving (which I will expand on later). I studied design thinking and human-centered design. In 2011, I started my PhD at Antioch University with the intent to research creativity in teams. By then, I had already led creativity workshops with many teams, and I was giddy with possibility.

Be deliberate to be creative.

I saw that teams could indeed become more creative with training. Developing creativity in teams could reverse the mangled messages so many of us received about creativity. If we reversed those messages and developed team skills around creativity, teams could effectively navigate the complexities the organizations were facing and bring positive change to their customers, clients, communities, and even the world.

Deliberate Creativity Together

As an innovation consultant, I have taught creativity skills to thousands of leaders in organizations big and small over the last twenty-five years. Sometimes when I am planning a workshop I get a bit nervous because I think, These are top executives for a billion-dollar company. They are going to know this stuff already. Or These are accomplished engineers with patents to their name. What could I possibly teach them? I would develop the workshop with lots of contingency plans for additional content or pivoting if needed. But every time, the groups embrace the content and experience. They do not already know the material. They are intrigued and energized to learn new perspectives on creativity. They generate loads of new ideas and later implement the best ones. It is fun to watch.

I am going to teach you the same process I teach in those workshops. It is based on my research, which was built on the research of hundreds of others. Through my dissertation, I identified three elements that teams need if they want to be creative together and if they want to innovate on demand (team purpose, team dynamics, and team creative process). I will share with you the process for how to lead your team to build their skills to be more creative together. I will also share a few of the activities I teach my clients so that you can apply the principles of deliberate creativity with your teams.

Through my research and consulting work, I have learned so much about creativity and innovation. The underlying premise is that creativity will not happen by accident. You are not going to just wake up one day with a brilliant solution for an unknown problem. It is only through deliberate work that you will be more creative. A process and a system for being creative have emerged from how we as humans naturally solve problems. I call it the Deliberate Creative Team system. The good news is that you can learn this system and use it in your work. If you apply that system with your team, the results can be mind-blowing!

If you are a leader who wants your team to be more creative, you are in the right place. We have the same goal. I want your team to be more creative because I know that creative teams produce innovative results that positively change the world.

Maybe you see the potential in your team. Maybe you know that by collectively solving your problems you can change people’s lives. Maybe you have felt stuck and have wondered if there is a better way to innovate. There is and I will show you.

I invite you to join me and embrace my mantra––be deliberate to be creative.

If you put in the work, the possibilities are endless. As you will see in the book, creative teams solve problems that do not have a known solution. They design, invent, develop, and create solutions that change lives, even save lives.

1

Why You Need to Innovate Now

March 10, 1973, was a good day for Frances for two reasons. She was getting married to Ron, and she did not have a headache. For the previous fifteen years, Frances had suffered headaches that continued to grow in severity. Some days there was no pain. Other days were so bad she could only sit in a dark, quiet room for hours and stay very still.

Back in high school, she had started seeing doctors to figure out what was causing the problem. Every single doctor dismissed her. They told her to just take it easy and decrease stress in her life. In 1961, during her freshman year of college, one doctor at a well-respected university hospital looked at her and said, If you are worried you have a brain tumor, you don’t.

Frances’s frustration and pain grew to the point that she could barely cope. Finally, a few months after her and Ron’s wedding, in a state of desperation, Frances and her parents drove a motor home from Orlando, Florida, to Rochester, Minnesota, to visit Mayo Clinic, which had a worldwide reputation as one of the best hospitals. Filled with hope and trepidation, they traveled over 1,400 miles seeking answers.

Mayo Clinic was opened in 1889 by the Sisters of Saint Francis and Drs. William and Charles Mayo.¹ From the beginning their approach to medicine was different. They designed an environment that was open, collaborative, and deeply dedicated to learning. Their drive to provide the best care led to continual innovation that influenced health care around the world. The focus was always on the patient, not about being right or about egos. Doctors with various specialties were assigned to a patient, and they consulted together to determine the diagnosis and treatment. Patients did not travel around the campus to the doctors; they stayed in one location and doctors came to them. When Mayo Clinic doctors consulted on Frances’s symptoms, they suspected she had a brain tumor.²

In 1973 testing for a brain tumor involved a myelogram. The patient is strapped onto a special table that rotates. Fluid is injected into their spine. As the table rotates, the fluid moves to different parts of the body. If the fluid hits a tumor, the patient experiences pain. When the fluid hit the back of Frances’s skull, the pain was so intense that she vomited.

The MRI machine had not yet been invented, but the EMI scanner had. It was the first machine to allow 3D views of the brain, and it would soon revolutionize medicine. In 1973 there were only two EMI scanners in the world. One was in the United Kingdom, where it had been invented, and the other was at Mayo Clinic.³

The EMI scanner had only been at Mayo for a few weeks, and they wanted to test it on Frances. Later when Frances was asked what it was like to be in the EMI scanner, she said, There was nothing to it. I just lay on a table in the dark. It wasn’t painful at all. The results showed the same thing as the myelogram. There was a brain tumor.

On July 19, 1973, Dr. Richard H. Miller, assisted by Dr. David Piepgras, removed Frances’s tumor. In the middle of the surgery, they tested the tumor for cancer.

By 1906, 4,770 operations had already been performed at Mayo Clinic, more than at any hospital in the United States.⁴ As early as 1893, it had an impressive surgery success rate of 98 percent,⁵ and soon doctors around the world traveled to the little town in Minnesota to learn from the Mayo brothers, who were continually looking at problems and devising new solutions.

For instance, an early medical challenge the Mayo brothers struggled with was that when surgically removing a tumor, they would have to sew the patient back up without knowing if the tumor was cancerous.⁶ It might take weeks for the tests to determine if cancer was present, and this could lead to a second or even third surgery, putting the patient at greater risk. To address this, in 1905 the Mayo brothers hired pathologist Louis Wilson. His job was to figure out a new way to quickly test cells for cancer. Months later, after countless attempts, he had a solution. With his new technique, it took only two minutes to determine if cells were cancerous. That meant surgeons could remove a tumor and test it for cancer while a patient was still in surgery. The results would give them valuable information about their next steps while the patient was still under anesthesia.

Seven decades later, Drs. Miller and Piepgras removed Frances’s tumor and it was taken next door to the lab to test for cancer. The tumor was benign.

But the tumor was about the size of a