Where Creativity Comes From |

Source: Xuan Zheng, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Small minds talk about people; great minds talk about ideas.

Ideas are food: food for brains, food for business, and food for human connection.

How you interact with ideas—how you generate them and how you process them with others—will play a huge role in your success in multiple areas of your life.

Meet innovation researcher, Dr. Karen Koepp, my co-author on this post. She recently experienced some of her ideas about ideas first-hand, both in recent conversations about ideas with some prominent business leaders and creativity researchers and, somewhat unexpectedly, by joining an improv comedy troupe.

According to Koepp, there is a golden rule in improv comedy—especially in short-form varieties, which involve co-constructing a scene in only a few minutes with no preparation. What is the rule? Two simple words: “Yes, and…”

The power of “Yes, and…” is found in the action of seeing, hearing, and affirming what your scene partner is offering. Then you build upon that by producing the next plot twist or elaboration of the idea. Your scene partner then sees, hears, and affirms your idea, and the goodwill and generative cycle of co-construction continues.

What unfolds is a psychologically safer, more playful, and more productive environment—with more creative results to boot. Perhaps it was this experience of, every Monday evening, feeling seen, heard, affirmed, and collaboratively productive that led Koepp’s own group of Comedysportz-classmates-turned-amateur-performers to adopt the name Cheaper Than Therapy. As psychologist Carl Rogers explained, becoming our ideal best selves requires this kind of unconditional positive regard and deep mutual understanding. In other words, our best selves and best ideas are found in living life as “Yes, and…”

According to the leaders she spoke with, innovative answers to our challenging problems are best found when we create safe environments for collaboration. Not only does this begin with establishing strong leadership support for innovation, but the language and culture surrounding innovation also need to be carefully cultivated. Jack Lungu, Administrator of Behavioral Healthcare at Adventist Health, observed: “The biggest challenge in coming up with innovative solutions is making sure you have the right people sitting around the table. You need people that are ‘can-do’ rather than those who always find reasons why we ‘can’t-do.’” Samantha Citro Alexander, CEO and cofounder of Bitewell, agreed, emphasizing that “a ‘yes’ type of mentality is required for innovation. The ‘no’ impulse of ‘We can’t do that’ or ‘It’s not in our scope’ are innovation killers.”

The reason environments become safe is because operating from “Yes, and…” forges kindness, fun, and mutual support, ultimately leading to novel ideas. Paul Syme, educator and leadership creativity researcher, pointed out that safe spaces tend to occur naturally in the informal outings and socials outside of work, where laughter and casual conversation prevail. Within this context, relationships strengthen and “conversations make their way to the work problem at hand, which is always at the back of their heads. Once they get onto the topic, the ideas start to flow.”

Creating safety as a means to innovate is so important that Bitewell stands behind “Kindness First” as a core value. CEO Alexander elaborated: “To really be innovative, you have to be unafraid of bad ideas, unafraid of failing, unafraid of thinking completely differently than anyone else has thought before. To do that, you have to feel safe and supported.” Patty Neil, vice president of human relations at Detail XPerts, explained that when these safe conditions are present “the creativity and energy of innovation flows, the synchronicities start to come together, and those magical moments of ‘Oh, look at that!’ unfold.”

This leads to another parallel between innovation and short-form improv: Both need to be aimed toward a specific objective. In short-form improv, the objective is to create a coherent, funny scene on the spot. In business, the objective is to ensure that innovation has real-world value. As Rain Growth Agency CEO Jane Crisan noted, “It’s not about playing around, it’s about getting this to market.” Bitewell CEO Alexander added, “You need to balance giving people space to think, innovate, and dream with the commercial pressure to grow and generate revenue.”

Want to increase the level of innovation in your organization? Try these three tactics:

1. Create innovation-supportive values. Innovation happens under “Yes, and…” conditions of acceptance and kindness. When these values are instilled, your people feel the freedom to take risks, fail, and learn. Entrepreneur Frank Carbajal pointed out: “Failure—specifically, failing forward—is an important part of innovation. That means taking those bumps and the failure to the next level.” Accordingly, organizations that accept failure and celebrate learning from failure tend to exhibit higher levels of innovation.

2. Identify your organization’s innovative capacity. Gaining a deeper understanding about your team’s or organization’s innovative capacity and pinpointing the sources of challenge can produce insights about how to best create a “Yes, and…” climate and optimize other levers of innovation. Here is a helpful assessment to help you identify your organization’s innovative capacity.

3. Create opportunities for play. A spirit of playfulness is needed to be open to creativity, imagination, and flow of innovation. When we are innovating together, the potential power is multiplied as we gain access to collective wisdom and imagination. Syme urged, “Our conscious mind is so fixated on answers that already exist. That’s why we have to recognize that together we have a big collective mind we can tap into. It’s that subconscious collective mind that makes the big connections. When we play together, we allow those ideas to come forth.” Play can be fostered through casual work outings, offsite team building, or even icebreakers and improv games built into the work day.

4. Organize sprints. A focus on timely solutions can be maintained by organizing sprints, which are time-bound, structured events for rapidly creating and vetting innovative ideas. Sprints typically bring together cross-functional teams to define the problem, generate ideas, and then create and test a prototype. Examples of sprints range from Shutterstock’s 24-hour hackathons to Kettering Health’s Nurses Week project boards, which are developed over weeks or months. Sprints help create the pressure needed for innovative-supportive values and play to serve your organization’s bottom line performance.

Living and working from the place of “Yes, and…” can help create the safe, collaborative spaces you need to elevate your own and your organization’s performance.