Vision can be defined as a preferred future. Phil Jackson, the current coach of the LA Lakers basketball team, once said that “vision is the source of leadership”. I agree because leadership without vision is simply a recipe for confusion. An appropriate metaphor for a vision is a map. Without one, the leader and his followers will be lost. A vision helps the leader navigate the journey ahead.
On the 6th of May 1954, three thousand spectators watched a 25 year old British medical student run the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Roger Bannister became the first man ever to run the mile under 4 minutes. The miracle four-minute-mile was considered by experts to be an impenetrable barrier until that historic day in May when Bannister proved the experts wrong and put himself in the record books.
I linked to this Wall Street Journal essay called the “The Genius of the Tinkerer” by Steven Johnson in my last post. It is an interesting piece which I will recommend that you read if you have not. He just released his new book last week called “Where Good Ideas Come from: A Natural History of Innovation” which l can’t wait to get my hands on. The Amazon reviews so far have been positive.
This is the last post in the creative leadership series.
A lot of leaders are always looking out for the next big thing in their industry. They check out what the competition is successfully doing and copy it shamelessly. This copy-cat syndrome is prevalent in the business world.
There is nothing wrong with studying what your successful peers are doing and there is nothing wrong with benchmarking your organisation against successful peers. The problem arises when you copy everything extensively. The idea of adopting everything that works in one organisation and replicating them exactly in your organisation can be dangerous. Leaders who adopt extensively realise that they don’t always get exactly the same successful results enjoyed by the benchmarked organisation. This is because there are a lot of intangible variables that are unique to that organisation which do not exist in their own organisations. Leaders should, therefore, always seek to take the context into play when they copy the good ideas or approaches of other successful companies.
I mentioned in my last post that leaders need to acquire fresh eyes to see the creative opportunities and solutions that surround them. Creativity is not always about running with the first solution or idea that occurs to you, rather, it’s searching for a better one. This is because most of the time, the first idea or solution is not usually the best one. It is hard work to dig deeper for more ideas because the natural default is to settle for the first ones. Creativity demands perseverance. Thomas Edison, the famous inventor of the light bulb and who is widely regarded as a creative genius, said that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”. This also applies to creativity. Creative leaders may make it look easy but there is a lot of sweat and toil involved.
Joyce Wycoff defined creativity as the act of “seeing things that everyone around us sees while making connections that no one else has made.” This involves seeing the problem or challenge from different perspectives. Goethe said that “the hardest thing to do is to see what is right in front of your eyes.” This is the reason why creative leaders have primed minds and open eyes. They find ways of staying mindful of the problems or challenges that confront them while staying open to the unexpected.
I would like to conduct two thought experiments to illustrate the power of creativity for leaders in an increasingly complex world.
Scenario A, imagine I present you with a jigsaw puzzle as a gift. I mean one with lots of small pieces. The type that comes in a box with an image on it which the small pieces are meant to look like once fitted together. Do you think you will be able to put them together with relative ease?
In scenario B, I simply present you with lots of small jigsaw pieces without the box and the image on it. Now do you think you will be able to put them together with relative ease without the picture on the box to guide you?
I said last week that how leaders perceive the challenges of complexity determines how they will act, because perception determines action. Schoemaker and Day, in an MIT Sloan Management Review article, stated that once managers or leaders lock in on a certain picture or idea for their organisation, they will often reshape reality to fit into that familiar frame. Humans tend to judge too quickly when presented with ambiguous data because we have to work extra hard to consider less familiar scenarios. Whenever crucial information is missing, our minds naturally shape the facts to fit our preconceptions.
IBM recently released the results of a global study called Capitalizing on Complexity, in which they interviewed over 1500 CEOs across 60 countries representing 33 industries. One of the key survey questions was on what these CEOs considered to be the most important leadership qualities over the next five years. 60% of the CEOs regarded creativity as the number one leadership quality, with integrity a close second at 52%. I have attached a full list of all the leadership qualities to this post.
A friend sent me a video link by Derek Sivers in response to my last blog post -T.E.A.M. This short TED conference presentation (3:10 mins) is on how leaders start movements. I found it very interesting so I decided to share the video with my blog’s readers along with an overview of the key points I gained from it. Sivers communicates powerful leadership principles using video scenes from an outdoor music concert.
