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The NEW Integral Technique to Ignite Your Creative, Innovative, and Strategic Leadership

George Bragadireanu

The

Leadership SPARK

The NEW Integral Technique to Ignite Your Creative, Innovative, and Strategic Leadership

George Bragadireanu

Copyright © MMXVI George Bragadireanu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system without the expressed written, dated and signed permission from the author. Author: George Bragadireanu Title: The Leadership Spark ISBN: 978-1-77204-312-9 Category: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Mentoring & Coaching Publisher: Black Card Books Division of Gerry Robert Enterprises Inc. Suite 214, 5-18 Ringwood Drive Stouffville, Ontario Canada, L4A 0N2 International Calling: 1 647 361 8577 www.blackcardbooks.com

LIMITS OF LIABILITY / DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: The author and publisher of this book have used their best efforts in preparing this material. The author and publisher make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability or completeness of the contents. They disclaim any warranties (expressed or implied), or merchantability for any particular purpose. The author and publisher shall in no event be held liable for any loss or other damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. The information presented in this publication is compiled from sources believed to be accurate, however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this publication is not intended to replace or substitute professional advice. The author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability, loss, or risk that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this work. Printed in the United Kingdom

The

Leadership SPARK

The NEW Integral Technique to Ignite Your Creative, Innovative, and Strategic Leadership

George Bragadireanu

T abl e o f C o n t e n ts Dedication Acknowledgements.......................................................................................... IX PART I: INTRODUCTION Chapter 1: The Integral Future Of Work, Creativity And Innovation..........1 Chapter 2: Examples Of Sparking Innovative Executive Decisions In Business.................................................................17 PART II: THEORY Chapter 3: The Unending Definition Of Creativity.....................................27 Chapter 4: The Soil And Seeds Of Creativity And Innovation...................87 PART III: PRACTICE AND APPLICATION Chapter 5: Applications Of Integral Innovation (Ants’ Eusociality And Improvisational Theatre)......................99 Chapter 6: Giving Birth To A Creative Business Decision – The 6 Stages.............................................................................111 Chapter 7: Giving Birth To A Creative Business Decision – The 10 Possible Techniques....................................................125 Chapter 8: An Integral Stage Setting For An Innovation Generation Business Framework.................................................................149 PART IV: TIPS Chapter 9: 30 Tips For Increasing Your Business’ Creativity....................161 Chapter 10: 20 Tips For Increasing Your Personal Creativity.....................173 Selected Readings..........................................................................................181

Dedication I dedicate this book to the child you used to be: ‘Hey, little one, stay curious!’

Acknowledgements

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he idea for this book emerged during my creativity and innovation trainings, which I have presented before several hundreds of people since 2013. It also has a great deal to do with studying the ideas of certain authors. Therefore, I would like to thank all the people who ever listened to my thoughts on innovation: Through your questions and doubts I refined my ideas. Also a big thank you to all my favourite authors, especially Ken Wilber, who inspires and directs my research. This was my LL quadrant – you will read about it in the book After developing the idea for the book, there was a long gestation period, and I have to thank my wife, my kids and my extended family for putting up with me when I was sometimes absent from their lives, preoccupied with my ‘own baby’. Thank you, Dad and Mum, for teaching me sauciness (masculine side) and devotion (feminine side). This was my UL quadrant. And then I gave birth to this book, but only with the critical help of several people: Gerry Robert and the other people from Black Card Books (the determined ‘doctor’ and the caring nurses). Thank you, doctor, for not easing my labour. You knew from the beginning about the satisfaction that would come afterward, right? This was my LR quadrant. Now, this baby book is walking around, playing socially and hopefully generating laughs, serious thoughts and rapid actions. Other people financed its birth, kindergarten and school: People at Teamnet and cargo-partner. Thank you, guys! This is my UR quadrant. As you can see, this book is a creation, a product of my imagination, creativity and innovation. It is like a kid who is now no longer my baby (in a way, it never was anyway). I have allowed some raw information to pass through my five senses, which I have interpreted, while I was walking on a path greater than I am. This information comes from natural surroundings and it may lead to some kind of contribution to human progress. I hope you enjoy playing with the ideas in this book. As you try them out, you may learn from either failing or achieving success.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

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The Integral Future Of Work, Creativity And Innovation

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oday, we are facing a convergence of many systems for organising work, leadership, production and consumption, from instinctual-based to holacratic ones. And still, creativity has to do with conditions which are perennial.

Problems Treated By This Book Centuries have passed and we are still dealing nowadays with a vast executive male dominance in our businesses, politics and in entrepreneurship. How many women international business speakers are there? What is the proportion of the women leaders in top positions in various domains? How many wars have been led by women?

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Where the environment is a continuous, open exchange of views, creativity lives.

The Integral Future Of Work, Creativity And Innovation

Leadership today has a profound void of innovative ideas, in particular due to male dominance, its self-centred approach and its left brain ‘getting’ approach. The exceptions show the opposite of this situation: Where, somehow, the masculine nature of things confronts the feminine nature, leadership is sparked and extremely creative ideas are born. Where there is a mix of single ideas mirrored and shaped and provoked by other ideas, innovation emerges. Where the environment is a continuous, open exchange of views, creativity lives. This book is dedicated to this leadership spark: How we can (re-)kindle it. It is about the polarity of the masculine nature (logic) versus the feminine nature (intuition), the triple polarity among ‘being’ (imagination), ‘doing’ (acting creatively) and ’getting’ (having great innovative business ideas); the quadruple polarity among ‘I’ (as a source of ideas), ‘We’ (as the fertile environment for idea generation), ‘It’ (as ideas taking shape) and ‘Its’ (as our innovative artefacts and their meaning and purpose for bettering life). This book discusses how creativity is a spark kindled by polarities of any kind. And you will find here enough resources to spark your leadership creativity for the rest of your business life through polarising the generation of ideas. We pass by scientific facts and business examples today while weaving through the practical structure of an idea generation process that is ready and easy to use in your workplace. You will get in the end an 11-step process to generate innovative ideas, you will gain the ‘seeds of creativity’, ways in which you may work the ‘soil of creativity’ and, moreover, 51 shades of personal and professional creativity. The book is based on my extensive experience in working with groups of people in the search for creative ideas, sponsored by some of the biggest companies in the world. This book is also based on my continuous research on matters of creativity. This book is also based on my international coaching practice, which helps individuals and top businessmen and businesswomen reach their full creative potential on their own. It is also based on modelling some creative industries and activities (like improvisational theatre).

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In a way, this book aims to be creative in the same way it evokes and explains creativity: By connecting the dots among various mindsets, paradigms, findings, sources, individual and collective experiences, subjective approaches and scientific ones – all of which come together in a fractal system of explanations.

The Yin And Yang Of Creativity Why do human males have nipples? The consensus right now is that male nipples are a relic of a human development stage when the embryo had the potential of becoming either male or female. Male and female mammalian embryos start out along a common developmental pathway which, for a short while, has the potential to produce either male or female anatomy (around weeks eight to ten of pregnancy). In a way, it is like nature is showing us in one intriguing way that all our lives, we carry with us the potential of becoming male or female. And in a more psychological and spiritual way, this relic is one strange reason for saying that we are yin and yang (Eastern civilization) and androgynous (Western) all our lives. ‘Have you ever wondered why life comes in opposites? Why everything you value is one of a pair of opposites? Why all decisions are between opposites? Why all desires are based on opposites?’ (Ken Wilber, 2001b, p.448). Within you, there are two innate natures, colliding with, embracing each other and negotiating with one with the other, each day: Your feminine nature and your masculine nature. Whether you are a male or a female, both of these natures reside within you. Words for your yin (feminine) side are passive (docile), Moon, night, intuitive, cold, soft, dark, ‘to be’, quiet, relationship, cooperation, information, asking and listening, structure, earth, slow, humidity, fluids, death, calm, stillness, weak, submission, small, Eastern civilization, multitasking, care, responsibility, communion, connections and so on.

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Words for your yang (masculine) side are active (aggressive), Sun, day, logical, hot, hard, bright, ‘to do’ and ‘to have’, noisy, directness, telling, autonomy, function, sky, fast, dryness, energy and matter, birth, expressive, movement, strong, dominance, big, Western civilization, single-tasking, justice, rights, agency, rules and so on. Within yang, there is yin, and vice-versa. What does this tell you about creativity? From this point of view, creativity is the two sides which live together within the same ‘you’. Few people are creative from this point of view, as few people may embrace both of their natures. Few of us are able to transcend the socially solidified ‘ego’ and act from their feminine nature as males or act from their masculine nature as females. However, each of us is more feminine or more masculine in our daily endeavours. At the extremes, there are the ‘manly men’ and ‘womanly women’. A ‘manly man’ is extremely self-centred and egotistic, works only for himself and is alienated, extremely dominant and aggressive. A ‘womanly woman’ is completely dedicated to others and altruistic, lost in relationships and melts into others. In between, there are seven billion or more combinations of ‘manly women’ and ‘womanly men’. Look around you! Have you met a ‘strong’ woman today? Or a ‘weak’ man? Do you have bossy women around and reserved men? What are you yourself like? When one embraces both his partial (half) natures and acts in both ways, he becomes creative, becomes a complete human being, an integral one. Creativity needs both sides to erupt. Creativity cannot have any separated parts in the same way that hermaphrodite plants, animals and seeds, which exist on this planet, have both male and female parts. Somehow, nature caused creativity to be an act of two parts relating to each other, but did not impose a rule of clear separation. In the purest sense, creativity needs a copulative movement, the transmission of information, energy and matter from one side to another and back. As such, creativity needs a movement of ideas from one side to another. Hence the expression ‘let the ideas have sex’. 4

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You cannot have great ideas coming only from one side. It is necessary also to have the information, energy and matter from the other side to really appreciate something as a grand idea, an innovative one. If you look at the most famous people in our civilization, why did they remain famous after so many decades, centuries or millennia? Even our dearest cultural icons are such: Think of all our heroes! Don’t they express somehow both sides of themselves? Mahatma Gandhi (man): A life dedicated to his ideas (masculine), serving millions (feminine). Mother Teresa (woman): A life dedicated to her ideas (masculine), serving millions (feminine). And one of the most innovative leaders and creators, Steve Jobs (man): A life dedicated to his ideas (masculine), serving millions (feminine). And there are others, such as Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Rosa Parks, Eva Peron, Malala Yousafzai, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Charles Chaplin. All of them represent the more balanced self of the human species, the embrace of both their feminine and masculine natures. And they serve millions even after they are no more because ‘complete’ and ‘integral’ people like these are sparks in themselves. They carry the seeds of life, creativity and progress.

Scan this code for a FREE 60-minute virtual Integral Coaching Session on Innovation Breakthrough for your company. www.theleadershipspark.com/free-bonus-1

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The Integral Future Of Work, Creativity And Innovation

Seeds Of Evolution A seed contains everything it needs to be creative, to grow in a fractal way into the sun. Is this the same for a genetically modified organism (GMO) seed? No. Because a GMO seed is purposefully engineered exactly not to be creative, but to grow in a certain manner. A GMO seed is the exact expression of scientific creativity in spite of creativity. We are also creative at birth, and we have everything we need in order to be creative during our lives in a chaotic, natural, fractal way. But then formal education starts the ‘GMO process’ with our brains. Think of the most creative individuals in human history: They were kicked out of school, were misfits and social outcasts. This is the exact reason why we detect creativity in a person, for what is creativity but not avoiding the societal norms, the mainstream lifestyle? This is why studies on human creativity sometimes examine the close link between creative thinking and various mental disorders, or out of the ordinary ways of seeing life. The GMO education process did not reach those individuals, or it reached them in such a way that they became mentally disordered, or at least considered so based on our understanding of normality. As discussed in later chapters, current general standards of education aim at cloning and preparing pupils for a world ruled by a level of consciousness which is disappearing, the conformist-amber level (Chapters 2 and 3), while humanity nowadays is more and more an open space of a pluralistic-green colour or even evolutionary-teal. How can you get an individual to be more creative at an adult age? By cracking his ego, eliminating everything she or he learned to consider as normal, acceptable and consistent with society. So, getting back to your senses (five senses) is a way to get more creativity out of yourself: Go find your element (Robinson, Ken, 2009), your spirit and point of origin, become childish, stay foolish (Steve Jobs), have a dream (Martin Luther King Jr.). We have a terrible back pain, a pain in our spine. Both plants and also humans have spines. Our spinal cord collects all the 1,000,000 bits of data from the five inputs-senses. To be yourself is to have a straight spinal cord, to be integral, not mechanical, but natural. A crooked plant is one which grew in an unnatural way, a non-creative way, forced and pushed and pulled in a 6

George Bragadireanu

certain direction by something it encountered in its environment. Cloning is another way of removing creativity and imperfections from the human body. Jazz, child’s play and improv rely on imperfections, on the unknown, on uncertainty, as does nature. A bagger is fully creative as he or she has no ego shielding left; this is when a person has nothing to lose. This is a form of being creative. It is the same with jazz, with children playing or with improv. Leaving your employees title-less is the same. They will have no function or title to defend, and thus their ego is in check. You are an organic unity. You were seeded one day, as any other tree, in your mother’s uterus and started to compile your circumference. First was the centre, the initial dot, the seed and then the circumference, but now you live on this circumference, on this circle, and have forgotten about your initial seed, believing the circumference is what life is. The space covered by this circumference is your comfort zone. You are not creative as you walk around it. You are being creative only when you pass outside of it, beyond it, as if it were a fence and you are trespassing by going past the fence. The tools for travelling are your senses. The more you travel outside of your comfort zone, the more it becomes larger and larger, and the map becomes the real territory. To the point where you understand it now encompasses the whole world, all the different others and all the things they created. To the point where you understand the circumference does not matter but only the initial point. Creativity arises from the polarity between circumference, boundary and its initial centre; the more you are able to conceive them both at the same time, the feminine centre and the masculine conquering of the space, the more you are sparking in your wholeness.

“Your ego is like a stone hanging from your neck, it pulls you down; when you get rid of it, you become imponderable.” —Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living), 1999, p.87

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Boundaries/No Boundaries Open technology; the dissemination of power from nodes to a network; companies which access ecosystems rather than resources; artificially intelligent ads which self-create themselves; and self-organizing traffic lights – all of these are expressions of the falling of boundaries. Apparently, nature does not operate in opposites. It comes united, but we set boundaries. We set the good apart from the evil, God from Satan, beautiful from ugly, me from you, and so on. ‘Nature doesn’t grow true frogs and false frogs, nor moral trees and immoral trees, nor right oceans and wrong oceans’ (Ken Wilber, 2001b, p.16).’ We are the ones who cause these boundaries to exist, and their role is to ensure our existence, to mark the limits of the body. There is life and death in the world of nature, but this cycle is a natural one. We are the only ones to make our beliefs (ideas, passing concepts, after all) so solid that we regret them at the end of our lives as if they were really something real. We draw these boundaries all our life. To make a decision, for example, we draw a boundary line between what to choose and what not to choose. We create the boundary of ‘I am creative’ or ‘I am not creative’. Receiving a formal education nowadays is, in fact, an education in drawing boundaries.

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Creativity does not need real boundaries, does not really need polarity in nature. As nature is integral and complete, its creativity emerges naturally. For example, a leaf grows chaotically and complexly in the most creative and unique way. But we humans have to take polarity as our reference point as we tend to see only one pole at a time. Seeing both poles each time will train our mind to think in a dual way, in a complete way, in a creative way. The world of opposites is a world of conflict. By cherishing both our sides in conflict (our innate natures), we pass through the boundaries and find the unity of creation and creativity. Boundaries and polarities help humans find the wholeness of creativity.

The Future Of Work, Creativity And Innovation ‘Work is dead. Long live work. Everything you have ever believed about careers has To be aware and changed’ (Fast Company). Holacracy and responsible for flat hierarchies? Universal basic income oneself is the guaranteed? The peaceful protest (in fact, fertile soil of Gandhi’s satyagraha) of the workers? Buy creativity as it energy from friends or generate it yourself encompasses (as an individual or company)? Get off the the natural need corporate ladder? Women in leadership? to create, No more cubicles? Fiverr and other selfto adapt, to survive, employment cooperatives? Work is to go on. everywhere and nowhere? 24/7 work instead of 09-17? Changing jobs once a year? Working on a project base? No boundary between work and life? Work as a ‘passionate’ occupation; you work because you believe in a ‘movement’ or a ‘cause’; you have to love what you do? The death of the lecturing style of teaching in colleges and universities? From ‘garage ideas’ to viral success? Instant transparent communication? Employee as a customer? Blind hiring? Intrapreneurship? Technology as the greatest equaliser? Beware of corporate idol worship? Virtual staff? Working in retirement? Freelancing? Working in the cloud?

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Work, as we know it, is changing profoundly these days. How does this affect innovation and creativity? I would say it gives them a giant boost forward. As it triggers more and more autonomy, work is giving ‘the employee of the future’ more and more awareness of what he or she is really good at. It also gives one more and more responsibility for what one does. To be aware and responsible for oneself is the fertile soil of creativity as it encompasses the natural need to create, to adapt, to survive, to go on. In this age of moving toward adulthood increasingly, humans learn quickly not to depend on others for their daily meals, but to strive to find the place where they belong and can bloom into their full potential. The greatest innovations came from exactly this kind of environment: One finding oneself transformed by a grand idea one pursues obstinately in the midst of others giving one feedback. The same is proven in nature: A plant organically grows, following its seed’s predetermined scope in the middle of nature’s garden. Work is becoming fractal and so is creativity. The concentration of power started by the Industrial Revolution is now reversed. C.K. Prahalad called wikinomics ‘the democratisation of industry’ and he foresees an ‘economy of people, realised by people for the people’. From a cultural viewpoint, there is one single reason for a species not dying: The exchange of ideas. As Matt Ridley demonstrated at Ted Global 2010 (and also others before and after him), ‘you may have a culture without exchange’ but this kind of non-human culture will not expand as humans did until it develops better ways of exchanging ideas and artefacts. As you can see, exchange is life and life is creation. Two units of the same gender cannot create life as they do not have too much to exchange.

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The Future Of Leadership People like the ones mentioned above were and are great leaders precisely due to their ‘complete’ nature, that is, they have both yin and yang. As they embrace these two sides in a natural balance, they express them outwardly in both a masculine drive and a vision, and also a feminine caring for the followers, the dedication of this vision to others, for the benefit of others. More and more (holacracy, syndicated agricultural cooperatives, crowdfunding, crowd legislation, etc.), the world is restructuring its pyramidal form into smaller functional units which are independent, autonomous and self-reliant. The ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Euromaidan’ and other socio-political movements are all driven by such humanistic visions, by great ideas shared intensively by their constituents. It thus becomes harder and harder for a so-called leader (in a corporation, government or congress) to enjoy the same engagement with his or her followers as no more than 10 years ago. Power in itself is becoming much easier to gain and much easier to lose. Facebook is massively influencing political elections; WikiLeaks is massively disturbing interstate diplomacy; and information is widely and transparently available to anyone so that decisions are made instantly and decisively by large numbers of individuals (not by the ‘masses’ anymore). The future of leadership is one in which small units will be run, with small groups of people brought together by powerful, single shared ideas and in which leadership will mean more and more settling on the ‘framework’ and less and less guiding, controlling, motivating and giving direction. Leadership, then, will be less masculine, and will instead be more of a combination of masculine and feminine (androgenic) features. Sir John Whitmore posits that coaching for leadership triggers a greater awareness and responsibility and that, consequently, this leads to a greater awareness and responsibility on the part of the subordinates led by the leader. And these two aspects, in fact, represent, as you can clearly see, the feminine (awareness) and the masculine (responsibility) integration in each individual. Jeff Bezos is such a leader: Analytical, audacious and

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determined (masculine) on one side, and intuitive, careful and playful (feminine) on the other. He says, ‘The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn [yang] and flexible [yin]. The hard part is figuring out when to be which!’ (Alef, 2010, p. 15) - [my notes in brackets]. How does this influence corporate innovations? The vast majority of corporations will continue to be run by hierarchical-pyramidal achievement-oriented mechanisms. But these mechanisms will have to borrow more and more the features of organic corporations, of the naturally fractal innovation cultures. They have to let in the clients, suppliers and employees, their families, their real needs, their preferences, their visions. And the leaders of the future are the kind of men and women able to negotiate all these factors into a single river of progress, at all times and in each moment.

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“This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race. It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women […] Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilisation with their progress.” —Nikola Tesla in the 1926 Colliers interview, ‘When Woman Is Boss’ by John B. Kennedy

The future is that of the ‘crowd leading’ and of ‘integral leaders’.

Sets Of Beliefs And Empiricism (Religion And Science) We know what we think and what we do. We begin to find out how to do better, but we do not know yet why we do what we do. In moving civilisation from focusing on ‘making’ and ‘having’ (energy and matter) to ‘being’ (information), we are increasingly concerned with a more certain answer to this question: ‘Why?’ Why are we here? What is our purpose? Creationist myths and monotheistic religions cannot convincingly explain to the ‘masses’ our origins as a species; the more our autonomy and responsibilities grow, the more we take from life into our own hands. We do not need ‘someone’ as a ‘dad’ to tell us what to do. The operational hierarchy becomes obsolete, former organisational structures (gang-like, hierarchical, Star Wars types) become obsolete, and the evolutionary pluralistic one becomes more present. Keeping the necessary distance, ants have been

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organised this way since 200 million years ago, and this species may have already had its history, its childhood. We are just now getting out of our childhood and reaching the consciousness of a species in harmony with nature. There is no need for more neurons, but rather just a particular combination and use of those neurons within a set of synapses, which means a certain set of beliefs about ourselves, about other people and about nature. ‘We have created a Star Wars-type civilisation with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and technology which fits the Gods’ (Wilson, 2013, p.17). And this civilisation, both at its individual level and at a collective level, struggles and fights two conflicting tendencies which come from two million years of evolution: The tendency towards conquest (masculine, yang) and the trend towards collaboration (feminine, yin), both of which are easy to find in individual variations in the genetic code. Precisely the behavioural expression of these two trends brought this species here today, into the top position on the trophic chain. Natural selection at the individual and the group levels led to the unprecedented development of the skull and the brain and nervous pathways to accelerate progress, innovation and creativity for survival (Wilson, 2013). Science says the brain is ‘looking more like an orchestra, a multi-scalar vibrational resonance system, than a computer. Brain information patterns repeat over space-time scales in fractal-like, nested hierarchies of neuronal networks, with resonances and interference beats’ (Stuart Hameroff in the Huffington Post, ‘Is Your Brain Really a Computer, or Is It a Quantum Orchestra?’, July 09, 2015). But, for example, if we do not transmit and explain this pure scientific fact to each of the seven billion people on the planet to increase their knowledge and consequently raise their level of self-consciousness to a new level, we have no chance of really and beneficially facing the future. If we do not succeed in producing a complete scientific-religious explanation of the self, we will fail not only in searching for human creativity but also as humans existing as a species on this planet.

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Examples Of Sparking Innovative Executive Decisions In Business Adobe ‘Red Kickbox’

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simple red cardboard box, sealed with a fire alarm graphic that reads ‘‘pull in case of idea’ – this box is really the character box from the well-known saying ‘think outside the box’. The box is built to contain everything someone needs to hatch an idea – or, to be more precise, an idea that can be readily launched and tested through a website. In the box are some instructions, a pen, some Post-it notes, two notebooks, some chocolate, a $10 Starbucks gift card to trigger employees’ ideas and… a $1,000 prepaid Citi Card that Adobe employees can spend however they like (without ever justifying a purchase to a manager or filing an expense report). Any employee can request a Kickbox… and another one. It is not a program based on merit, and there is no deadline for turning in results. Wow! The Kickbox was invented by a creative mind, for sure. And it is meant to generate the space for individual and collective innovation. How come?

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Mark Randall, the artisan of this idea, first interviewed employees from Adobe about the things blocking them from coming with new ideas for Adobe products, and they all answered ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘logistics’. So he listened to them and gave them a tool for inventing products which would eliminate those two factors. It is a tool which is, in fact, a betting tool: For the price of funding a single $1 million project, he can place 1,000 $1,000 bets. ‘We only need one to work for the program to pay for itself’ (Mark Randall in www.fastcodesign.com/3042128/adobes-kickbox-the-kitto-launch-your-next-big-idea). Several months from launching, 1,000 employees at Adobe have cracked open a Kickbox. And 23 have seen their ideas graduate to receiving more investment from senior management. Only 60 of the 1,000 worldwide testers have completed the program so far. Of those, 23 people have actually sold management on their idea – at which time, they received a prize: A blue box (mystery). Wow again!

Nosco ‘Idea Exchange’ Allianz and Danfoss use Nosco. And many, many others use similar systems. Nosco is a social platform for ideas, which is easy to implement in any company. It works like an ‘idea exchange’, a stock market for ideas. An employee may create and share ideas, post comments and vote for ideas they like. And the ideas which receive the most votes get credit in being implemented. Nosco lets administrators in the client company really tweak the ‘idea exchange’ platform. They may create campaigns for collecting ideas, create specific templates for idea generation, specify stages and gates, define the content required for ideas, follow idea metrics and analytics, and invite experts to evaluate and mature ideas. This process leads to an accurate measurement of engagement for innovation in the client company. Companies around the world use Nosco’s platform in specific ways: As part of innovation programs, in innovation contests, in the management of ideas coming from employees or clients. Some of them remunerate the best ideas in the end and some of them do not, depending on their interest. 18

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Similar to Nosco are BrightIdea, CogniStreamer, Critflow, Hype Innovation, IdeaPoint, Imaginatik, Induct, KPMG Innovation Factory, Qmarkets, Wazoku and others. But the two companies mentioned above (Nosco and Adobe) are really just struggling with the implementation of innovations or are proposing instruments to cope with this struggle. The companies of the future (and some of those which already exist and some of those which existed in the past) have ‘innovation’ circulating through their veins like sap circulates through a plant.

The companies of the future have ‘innovation’ circulating through their veins like sap circulates through a plant.

Teamnet Teamnet is a growing system integrator in CEE and Middle East and a constantly acknowledged business by the Deloitte rankings. It is also present in reputed ‘best employers’ studies. The company invests in advanced technology (such as Emergency, Cloud, Robotics, SCADA) for magnitude projects and for creating products like the Hirrus UAV system or Ymens cloud platform, but focuses especially on ‘invisible technology’, particularly in infrastructure, and is dedicated to making a real change in the society. Following a 15-year history and a 2015 collaboration with Airbus Defense and Space, they’ve created an astounding piece of technology named Signus. With a maximum 100-kilogram take-off weight, Signus can reach 3,000 meters in height and transmit valuable information for the safety of the sea and land border, among others. ‘The unmanned aircraft will have a significant impact for data collection and monitoring of the areas of interest, by providing easy access to the innovative solutions needed by the public and private organizations in the region’ (www.teamnet.ro). Seen from the outside, you can describe Teamnet as a company involved in collaborating and, at the same time, competing with other international companies; the company is involved in numerous European

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Union innovation programs, while constantly benchmarking itself versus the challengers. Teamnet is involved in numerous CSR and research partnerships with universities, research centres and similar companies. In 2013, after 12 years in the industry, Teamnet exercised a deep analysis of the organisation’s culture and all the surveys showed that the main value people cherish is ‘intelligence related to innovation’ (the others being ‘evolution with determination’, ‘collaboration/teamwork’, ‘involvement’ [working for a higher cause] and ‘learning/know-how’). As you can clearly see, there are values showing a masculine energy there (know-how, determination, innovation), balanced by a clearly feminine one (collaboration). This ensures that there is a considerable motivating force in this company, while taking care of clients’ and employees’ needs. There is a clear drive inside Teamnet. The group’s CEO, Bogdan Padiu, speaks about innovation being the main competitive advantage: ‘Without innovation, a more competitive company can immediately gulp you. We are building a company that is sustainable, not one that ranks first for two or three years and then completely disappears. Each year, we consolidate our leadership position on the market’. With an average age of 30, the company’s employees are extremely passionate about what they do and have a high level of technical expertise. ‘None of us followed an ‘innovation college’. We have the pleasure to create intelligent things, instead’, says Bogdan Padiu, CEO of the company. The ‘Zero to Hero’ annual training sessions aim at giving students the possibility to learn freely from the company’s experts the latest advancements in domains such as software development, business analysis and testing. The program is followed by a paid internship of three months and then students are recruited following an HR policy tailored to elicit creativity aptitudes from the start. There is a ratio of about 4/3/2 (‘Zero to Hero’/internship/employment) on the several tens of university graduates who finally become Teamnet members. At Teamnet, Bogdan Padiu, who is one of the four founders and also CEO of the group, says that the management always ensures a proper framework for employees’ creativity to spark. ‘At Teamnet, each of the employees enjoy creating intelligent products, and they innovate because they are preoccupied by their work and try to improve it (adaptive innovations)’.

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The Evolutionary Innovation At SEMCO, Morning Star, Gore Tex And HolacracyOne The company Morning Star (California) ($350 million turnover), founded in 1970, is the world’s largest tomato processor, handling about one-quarter of the tomatoes processed in the United States each year. This company has no managerial structure whatsoever. Instead, it has a president (Chris Rufer) and many ‘colleagues’ (i.e. as there are neither ‘employees’ nor ‘managers’). ‘Our company is operated by colleagues without titles or an appointed hierarchy of authority. Authority relative to other colleagues’ activities is lateral’ (Chris Rufer). Each colleague sets the pace, is a boss, is an internal independent contractor (establishing collegial partnerships with the others), is a purchaser, is a human resources person (doing hiring), is rewarded by the other colleagues and sets compensation for the others. This is a company where there is no hierarchy. All the managerial functions are performed by each ‘colleague’ in partnership with the others. Try to grasp this idea! It is like in any regular family. Each colleague makes a personal statement, a ‘letter of understanding’ (CLOU) at the beginning in which they state what they will bring to the job to benefit all the others and the company… like in a regular family! The company is ruled by the principles of ‘self-management’ (‘an organization of self-managing professionals who initiate communication and coordination of their activities with fellow colleagues, customers, suppliers and fellow industry participants, absent directives from others’ – Self Management Institute). SEMCO SA/Brazil is a successful global conglomerate in the services and industry fields. It is a company with a 900% turnover increase in 10 years. 21

Examples Of Sparking Innovative Executive Decisions In Business

The founder, Ricardo Semler, says that industries are based on ‘formats that are basically legacies of military hierarchies which neglect or deny the power of human intuition and democratic participation’. At 20, Semler was one of the few recipients of an MBA at Harvard Business School; at 21, he took over the company from his father and founder, Antonio Semler. Ricardo is internationally renowned as the creator of the world’s most unusual workplace. He was named one of the ‘Global Leaders of Tomorrow’ by the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. On his first day as CEO, at 21, Ricardo Semler fired two-thirds of management and eliminated all secretarial positions in SEMCO. That was in 1984. He dismantled the managerial structure to eliminate ‘corporate oppression’ and encourage core business values of employee participation, profit sharing and a free flow of information. Now in his fifties, he is the author of The Seven-Day Weekend (2003) and Maverick (1993), and his first Harvard Business Review article provoked intense discussion among senior managers worldwide and is one of the most reprinted articles in the journal’s history. At SEMCO, there are no five-year business plans (which Semler views as wishful thinking). Instead, a project takes off only if a critical mass of employees decides to get involved. Also ‘the staff’ determines when they need a leader, and then chooses their own bosses. The corporate personnel turnover rate is 2% over 25 years. Semler says, ‘We’ll send our sons anywhere in the world to die for democracy but don’t seem to apply the concept to the workplace‘ (Ricardo Semler in ‘Leading by Omission’, Sep 22, 2005, MIT World). His idol? Bill Gore from Gore Tex.

Creativity is a natural state. When there’s nothing against it, that’s the human condition.

At Gore (the innovators of Gore-Tex), everyone is an ‘associate’ in the business. And there is no organisational chart. How can you have a $3 billion business with 9,000 employees located in 30 countries worldwide and have no formal hierarchy? Bill Gore (the founder) maintained his commitment to keep the company’s operations small and informal. It generally does not allow a facility to grow to more than 200 people. That reflects another of 22

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Bill’s beliefs: Once a unit reaches a certain size, ‘we decided’ becomes ‘they decided’. And it mobilises its plants into clusters, like the 10 factories located in Flagstaff, Arizona. Gore conceived the company as a ‘lattice’ connecting every individual in the organisation to every other (this informal network exists anyway in any company underlying the formal hierarchy).

HolacracyOne HolacracyOne is the company spearheading the development of the Holacracy method. It was founded in 2007 by Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison. ‘We’re a non-conventional company in many ways: We’re based in the USA but all our business partners work from home. We don’t have any employees, we’re all legal partners in the company, and we’ve adopted Holacracy in our bylaws’ (from the company’s website at www.holacracy.org/holacracyone). In my personal interview with Brian Robertson, he mentioned that ‘what holacracy does is more about removing all of the obstacles and the things that crush creativity in most organisations. Creativity is a natural state. When there’s nothing against it, that’s the human condition. People are drawn to create, to innovate, to get stuff done. In most organisations, though, you face all of these obstacles’. ‘Holacracy is a new way of running an organisation that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss. The work is actually more structured than in a conventional company, just differently so. With holacracy, there is a clear set of rules and processes for how a team breaks up its work, and defines its roles with clear responsibilities and expectations’ (HolacracyOne’s site, www.holacracy.org). Try to imagine yourself now: Going to a workplace that looks like home, having friends working with you, giving you feedback, helping you ‘become’ better. You decide who your boss is, what his or her salary is, what your salary is. There is no worry about tomorrow. You work hard each day, enjoy it and have fun. You make a buck (even a fortune). You are inspired each day. You inspire each day. You create your future each day. You are happy… each day. 23

PART TWO

THEORY

C hapter 3

The Unending Definition Of Creativity Life Is Integral

N

ature is creative. Nature is polarity. Life emerges from polarity. Humans are nature’s creative creations. Humans make life spark through polarity. Creativity is the same, as it is an act of humans.

Just look outside and around you, and you will see two kinds of clusters of things: Natural and artificial ones. You will see nature blooming in the most creative ways, and you will mostly see human nature creating artefacts, unnatural products which are trying to survive in the middle of nature. How can we humans learn from nature and truly mimic its creative essence? If you look inside your common business environment, you will probably see and hear forms of ‘crowd’-working: Cloud computing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, self-management leadership and so on. These are all forms in which humans try to mimic nature by organising themselves, becoming better as a species. The nature of work in itself is reorganising once more since the time in the past when we took farmers from the fields and put them into factories and since we took workers from

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the factories and put them into offices. Nowadays, there’s a third wave of putting office workers into their homes, of working remotely, or of moving into co-working spaces and so on. Each time, the natural movement of the market has created new jobs. Nothing has disappeared, but we have believed it has and were scared it would. We try to copy it only because we understand that it is complete. Nature does not need anything else to be, and humans are just a part of it. The aim of all our trials is to find a better place for ourselves within nature. Just recently we have come to understand what the word ‘ecology’ really means, what the theory of complexity states about the cosmos, what our place and role on Earth might be. Only now we are on the verge of transcending our current understanding of life to move towards a higher stage. And from this stage, we can see nature through a kind of window with four panes, each of them showing us only a part of the whole. One pane shows us the mysterious energy of life, the sap in everything. Also, we can see through another pane that there are different kinds of saps leading to different kinds of its manifestation (plants, insects, animals, humans), which is the third pane. And lastly, there is a pane showing us the patterns of all these, the fractal organisation of everything into a giant and complex biostructure. Imagine you are looking through this window which has four panes of glass. If you look through each one of the panes, you see just 25% of the reality beyond the window. Through each of the four panes, you see only part of reality. Sometimes, we view life in an extremely self-centred way, or through the lens of our community, family and circles of trust, or through our facts, results and deeds, or through our pattern of life, meaning of life, system or process of life. Ken Wilber is considered as the greatest philosopher of our times. His works were published worldwide, and the integral theory which he continues to develop is constantly evaluated as... well, integral.

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“What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential – about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth – and put it all on the table? What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?” —Ken Wilber, The Integral Vision, Shambhala Publications, Inc., p. 16, italics by the author

Wilber states that those who are able to see reality through all four panes are the stress-free and blessed ones. But the vast majority act (one pane) based on what others (our circle of friends) say (another pane). Only a few are really able to extract a complete meaning and understanding of their lives from the perspective upon all the artefacts they created (one pane), while others are extremely self-centred (one pane). How can you be creative when you see business life only through one or two panes? The four panes are just a metaphor for the integrality of nature, as nature may be understood only by looking at it integrally. Otherwise, we just continue to disregard environmental issues or our impact on our environment or the impact of the environment on us and so on (as we see only parts of the full spectrum). Regarding the last part, recent studies have shown, for example, our preference for high ceilings, and the reason was discovered as being that we feel and are more ‘liberated’ and ‘creative’ when living and working in such an environment.

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Creativity is integral, as creativity is part of nature, which is integral.

The Unending Definition Of Creativity

Creativity Is Integral It is the same with creativity. Creativity is integral, as creativity is part of nature, which is integral. You have no chance to produce the greatest ideas if you disregard the integral soil of creativity. When Wilber was no more than 23 years old, he theorized the AQAL, and now we have this concept and may operate with it. AQAL stands for ‘all quadrants all levels’, but equally connotes ‘all lines’, ‘all states’ and ‘all types’. An account or theory is said to be AQAL, and thus integral, if it accounts for or makes reference to all four quadrants and four major levels in Wilber’s quadrants, described below.

Upper-Left (UL)

Upper-Right (UR)

‘I’ (The Interior of the Individual) / Intentional

‘It’ (The Exterior of the Individual) / Behavioural

Creative Thinking and Feeling

Creative Behaviours

(ex. Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2013)

(ex. de Bono, E., 1999)

Lower-Left (LL)

Lower-Right (LR)

‘We’ (The Interior of the Collective) / Cultural

‘Its’ (The Exterior of the Collective) / Social

Shared Creativity, Creative Culture

Systemic Creativity, Processes (ex. Robinson, A. and Schroeder, D., 2010)

(ex. Amabile, T., 1997)

The entire AQAL system is a lot more complicated, but for our endeavour it is enough to say that creativity is integral. How come?

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Some people view creativity as a single man’s talent, genius or perseverance (UL Quadrant). Some view creativity as existing only in creative things (innovations); some view it as the tools to be creative (UR Quadrant); some view creativity as sparking from the exchange of ideas among people (LL Quadrant); and others view creativity as a process (LR Quadrant). But creativity is all these views put together. If we can put them all on the table, we can have a complete definition and working process of creativity. None of the four quadrants is independent of the others. On the contrary: They are all linked by what Steven Johnson (citing Stuart Kauffman in Johnson, 2011, p.58) called the ‘possible adjacent’ – a certain limited space of possibilities arising from what currently ‘is’ in all the four quadrants of an individual. Therefore, you cannot have a total breakthrough from one of the quadrants, but are most probably just able to open another door to another door to another door. There is a limited space for creative possibilities around one individual, predetermined by his current state, current way of behaving, current material resources, collective and culture, and organisational system. But surely, you, as a leader, have more chances to achieve true breakthroughs when you combine several individuals with different ‘possible adjacent’ spaces.

Polarity Sparks Creativity Between all the four quadrants, there are polarities and tensions as they represent four clearly different views of the world. A purely UL person will see the world through the glasses of inner feelings and thoughts, thus projecting this inner world onto the external one; while a purely LL person will see the world in a collective light, as if he or she is dissipated and dissimulated among others (family, friends, colleagues, etc., in larger and larger circles up to a certain point). A person defined mostly by the UR Quadrant will have a very active take on life and see life as a series of ‘dos’ and ‘haves’, while the LR person is basically interested in the patterns, processes, flows and networks of life, in the general understanding of the ‘dos’ and ‘haves’ of many.

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So, as you can clearly see, there might be polarities between people from two different quadrants. Still, life in its infinite wisdom is arranged in a way that the vast majority can see it, the world and ourselves through more than one single pane of the larger four-pane window. Usually, you will understand the meaning of life from two or three perspectives. And this will give a kind of limited creativity in dealing with life, as this way of perceiving is pretty solid during your life. You can associate this kind of a common, beautiful life with a great symphony or a great stand-up comedy show: They both are great but still linear, imitable. But when you put people of different quadrants, of different life views in contact, sparks of creativity appear. And this might be compared with a jazz jam session or a show of theatrical improvisation, complex, fractalic, impossible to mimic. Nature is fractalic, impossible to mimic; therefore, our intent is just to enlarge the spectrum of creativity to embrace all the possible forms of expression in a way more keen to nature itself, and we do this by proposing to use the natural polarities and differences among people. This book is, in fact, an app (leadership creativity) to be used within the larger frame of the Integral Operating System (I.O.S.).

INDIVIDUAL

INTERIOR

EXTERIOR

UL Quadrant – Consciousness, ‘What I experience’

UR Quadrant – Behaviour, ‘What others see that I do’

In general: Subjective reality, states of mind, psychological development, mental models, emotions, will.

In general: Objective reality, brain, visible biological features, activation of bodily systems.

In business creativity: ‘Imagination’, creativity beliefs, creative mental abilities, will to creatively solve problems, higher motivation and will.

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In business creativity: ‘Innovation’, senses directed to creative input, neurobiology and genes of creative people, creative behaviours, creativity techniques, instruments to measure creativity.

COLLECTIVE

George Bragadireanu

LL Quadrant – Culture, ‘What WE experience’

LR Quadrant – Systems, ‘What others see that WE do’

In general: Inter subjective reality, shared values, culture and worldview, webs of culture, communication, relationships, norms, and customs.

In general: Inter objective reality, systems, environments, societal structures, economic systems, political orders.

In business creativity: Pollination of ideas, creative cultures, and creative collective emergence.

In business creativity: Business framework to spark creativity, systems of idea generation, and procedures for innovation implementation.

Upper-Left Quadrant – Imagination, Beliefs, Emotions, Volition Essentially, what we have in the UL Quadrant is imagination (you are born with it); an individual’s attitudes towards and beliefs about creativity (teachable); a desire to creatively solve a problem, including a business one (easy to stimulate); and his motivation and subjective explanations that he gives himself on the need to solve that problem. There is a direct link between individual creativity and organisational innovation, as demonstrated by innumerable studies (Amabile, 1997). Imagination To Creativity To Innovation – The Focus-Question

In my seminars in recent years on creativity, I have invited a few hundred participants to close their eyes and imagine that they are on the beach at the sea. After a few tens of seconds I ask them to describe what they have imagined. Then I ask them to shut their eyes again and imagine for a few tens of seconds that they are on the ‘planet’ Pluto. Each time, what is remarkable is how similar the descriptions of the inner experiences about the beach or the sea are among the participants and how different are those related to the ‘Pluto experience’. Why do you think this 33

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happens? Because we were all at the beach, and each of our experiences has ‘sand’, ‘heat’ and ‘sea water’, while none of us has experienced stepping onto the surface of Pluto. What we know about going to the beach is an experience many of us have had, while what we know about Pluto is an accumulation of bits of information and different images each of us have seen and heard in the media. In which of the two cases do people exhibit more imagination? When we look at creativity in the UL Quadrant, this is defined by the subjective inner experience. Therefore, the theories of creativity that are the focus here define creativity as an expression of the will of an individual, as an expression of the divine inspiration within a human being. What is contained in this territory is the unique way in which each of us really understands and feels that we are creative: Our creative psychology, our beliefs about being creative and the ‘I’m creative’ mental models that we use to produce technical or artistic creative expressions. Here lies the volitional aspect of creativity, the desire to be creative and imagine things. Here is one essential problem for you to solve: Motivate the placement of all the words in their respective circles below.

Innovation

Creativity

Imagination

Results

Abilities/Behaviour

Attitude

I have

I do

I want

What & What If

How & How Else

Why & Why Not

Matter

Energy

Information

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Some of us view the triangle ‘imagination’ – ‘creativity’ – ‘innovation’ in a quantitative manner (you need a lot of imagination in order to be able to generate several creative ideas and produce few innovations), while others, like me, prefer to have a qualitative perspective of things – imagination is the key ingredient, the nucleus and seed of creativity, which, in turn, leads to innovations. Evidently, both variants are true. What is of more interest here is the latter perspective. Moreover, what is the element which separates imagination, creativity and innovation? What is that one thing which connects, separates and morphs them one into the other? What do you believe? There is more imagination in the ‘Pluto’ than in the ‘beach’ example because there is more of the ‘unknown element’ in the first one. At this time, travel to Pluto would be a problem, and the imagination would transform it into creativity and then into innovation (a space shuttle). Well, in fact, this really happened in July 2015. Therefore, the element of linkage among the three circles is the existence of an aim, a goal and a problem. For the rest of the book, we will call such a problem triggering creative solutions the ‘focus-question’. Without it, any set of ideas remains imaginative and nothing more. Used to solve a focus-question, they become creative ideas or even innovations. ‘We innovate not to become a company which does that all day long, but one that succeeds in concluding the innovation process’, says Bogdan Padiu from Teamnet. Pure imagination is linked to the UL Quadrant. Regarding ‘Creativity’ as it is defined here, it is part of the same quadrant due to its ‘focus-question’ (aim, focus) and to the associated desire to solve the focus-question. Also, the belief in being able to solve the focus-question or not lies in this quadrant. Regarding the creative thinking instruments (as explained in the pages referring to the UR Quadrant), they belong to the UR Quadrant as long as they are not innate or automatic ways of thinking, but only instruments to be put to work. In the same order (from the smaller circle to the larger one), these three circles may contain ‘information’, ‘energy’ and matter’; or ‘attitude’, ‘abilities’ and ‘results’; or ‘I want’, ‘I do’, ‘I have’ (Erich Fromm) or ‘Why’, ‘How’ and ‘What’ (Simon Sinek’s ‘golden circle’). 35

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Creativity Beliefs

Many previous studies which have been dedicated to individual creativity (subjective) – which we discuss here, in this UL Quadrant – continuously reveal over and over the same set of beliefs of so-called creative people.

Beliefs which lead to creativity may be learned, modelled, copied and forgotten.

Each of us (and our ego) is built around an authentic own self, a unique set of values, beliefs and convictions leading to a set of certain abilities and behaviours and, consequently, results (from ‘why’ to ‘how’ to ‘what’). And this construction is a lifelong journey which starts in childhood and ends on one’s deathbed.

Until the age of five or six, each of us is somehow lacking solid convictions. But we surely have a set of values around beauty, good, healthy, safety, life and death built partially through intuition and observance of mainly our caretakers’ behaviour. After this age, it is presumed that we unconsciously start to build our convictions based on these values. These ‘rules’ upon which we interpret reality are clearly and mainly environment driven and in their turn determine the development of our intelligence, abilities and, furthermore, our behaviour. This is the exploratory and trial-and-error construction way towards our map or internal GPS. Convictions are formed based on two main types of bricks, which are interlinked and interwoven: • They follow fully emotionally charged personal experiences (rapid). • They follow an accumulation of information (much longer). ‘Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be “wrong”, which is what our education encourages us to believe’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.80). Innovators and creative people think and feel differently and therefore have different convictions than ordinary people; creative individuals believe in the openness and diversity of thinking. They believe each human being is valuable and good in his or her profound nature – therefore,

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they really are able to listen in a profound way to opinions which are divergent from theirs. They believe it is good to talk to and listen to people different from themselves. They think life is worth living each day. They think each problem is an opportunity, not an obstacle, because they believe someone may be able creatively to find a solution for anything. Beliefs which lead to creativity may be learned, modelled, copied and forgotten. ‘Modelling’ beliefs (modelling creativity) is a natural process in kids and youngsters, but a limited process in adults. A child learns to walk, talk, write and read in a universe which is unknown to him by modelling those people around him. Many of us reject, sometimes in an unconscious way, the chance to copy the good behaviours and beliefs and to be inspired by the results around us. In the learning process, a child uses all four main learning functions of the brain: Observing, processing new experiences, drawing conclusions and memorising in an integral, complete, cyclical and constant way. Each new experience he or she has is (unconsciously) analysed, processed and interpreted, translated into learning and reinforces old learning (theories, conclusions, convictions) or fosters new ones to be used in other future circumstances. The innovator’s mind works in the same way: It is new and constantly reset in the face of the reality it perceives and interprets. When we become adults, we lose most of our curiosity and desire to explore new experiences. Our brain no longer takes this step which it used to take in our childhood. Nevertheless, a curious adult is constantly interested in new experiences. Creative thinking is natural to some of us following our epigenetics (the way we were raised). We train ourselves to have creative (open) beliefs and abilities, and we freely manifest them. Our curiosity is not limited in our youth. For other people, this is something that might be learned in a relatively short time. An innovator does exactly the same thing: Is open to perpetually new surroundings (the same reality but as seen for the first time) and is amazed by the things he already knows. He is given the opportunity to manifest creatively and is encouraged to be open to new opportunities. From the

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multitude of new experiences, creativity is born. When you accumulate lots of experiences, you have more solutions at hand to solve an ever-increasing number of problems and focus-questions. Moreover, applying new solutions generates new experiences and so on. If we do not try anything, we find nothing, we experience nothing, we understand nothing and life does not mean anything. When we start something, anything, this means a new experience, new learnings, new mistakes and new errors out of which we may learn. This is a type of creative mindset, typical to creative individuals who experiment with error and failure, and embrace it. But ‘speech feels safer than action’, says the same Keith Johnstone (Johnstone, 1981, p.94). Usually we are blocked by a different kind of mindset which is based on beliefs like the following: • ‘I can’t change a thing’ (a creative person would respond, ‘How do you know if you do not try?’). • ‘Even if I strive a lot, I do not have the time to be creative’ (vs. ‘How much time would you save?’). • ‘This is how it is. It is hard to believe this might be improved anymore!’ (vs. ‘Evolution is flow and new trials’.). • ‘I am not creative!’ (vs. ‘Is it helpful for you to believe this?’). • ‘I was imaginative in my youth but not now!’ (vs. ‘There is nothing lost inside of you’.). • ‘If there were a better solution, someone else would have found it’ (vs. ‘Others think the same thing, and you might be the one’.). Your inborn creativity, your own particular way of responding in the face of life’s challenges, and the way you used to act in your childhood are not lost. You prove this each and every day. In an adaptive (evolutionary) or innovative (revolutionary) way (Michael Kirton), each of us is creative in our fashion. Some of us adapt in a creative way to any situation, and others in a more radical way. In the end, it is about adapting to new situations.

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In conclusion, beliefs containing the potential for ‘sparks’ and creativity are the ones related to being curious, embracing the unknown, engaging in perseverance beyond failure and suspending judgement of others (Amabile, 1997). So, basically it is about a lack of closed beliefs, an open (rewritable) map where opposite indications (beliefs) may polarise our actions. Memes (as defined by Don Beck in Beck,) of creative people are pluralistic and evolutionary. Emotions, Volition, Motivation, Desire, Vision – The First Essential Ingredients Of Creativity

Working without passion is like being a mercenary, an intellectual prostitute. You cannot have creativity without feeling a passion for solving a focusquestion by using your imagination. In the same image on the previous pages, next to imagination, in the same generic circle, you find the expression ‘I want’ followed by the circles ‘I do’ and ‘I have’. Everything starts with a display of will, including creativity. This is the notion that Steve Jobs used to boost his ideas when building the Apple universe.

The bigger the ‘why’ of a problem or a focus-question that must be solved using creative ideas, the stronger the solution to this problem, which sometimes can be revolutionary.

The bigger the ‘why’ of a problem or a focus-question that must be solved using creative ideas, the stronger the solution to this problem, which sometimes can be revolutionary. The small ‘whys’ (‘to have a good job’, ‘to receive a bigger salary’, ‘to increase my chances for a promotion’) are good because they introduce an ‘adaptive’ innovation type (Michael Kirton), local improvements to local problems. The greater the focus-question is, the greater the level of will and determination necessary to find a huge solution. Sometimes, this entails revolutionary solutions.

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A powerful inner ‘why’ gives rise to an extraordinary achievement level within each individual and releases the entire creative potential of the human being. It is the same with theories which refer to change (personal or institutional), to the motivation and self-motivation of employees. It is the one thing that really moves the world and human civilisation, propelling them towards progress. Children have a natural and innocent way of perceiving the world, where anything seems to be possible. This is why their natural association with concepts, objects and information is surprising. Human imagination ends when we have the answers to all the ‘Why’ questions, and starts again when the ‘Why Not’ question arises each time as adults. When talking about business teams throughout the world, those leaders who know how to use the creative potential of their employees have a lot to gain from progress because they will always be the first to sell new and innovative services and products, and will generate and control market trends. A businessman or a team leader needs to put a big ‘Why’ next to each business problem that needs to be solved, an ‘I have a dream’ or, better, a ‘we have a dream’ that should constantly ring out in the minds

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and hearts of as many of his followers as possible. Basically, it shouldn’t be difficult: Each business and business team must find their own ‘why’, hidden underneath technical and commercial techniques, and say it out loud. The purpose of each product and service is to try to improve people’s lives. When the employees know that they have solved a problem that belongs to someone else, they line up emotionally with this cause. The decision to contribute in a creative way to the improvement or innovation of a service or a product is taken more easily and more profoundly by people when it also has an emotional background, not just a mental one. The decisions based on arguments diminish as compared to the emotional ones (also called ‘irrational’ – Dan Ariely). Any attitude is defined by a certain mood (meaning a combination of emotional and mental states). When you work and evolve surrounded by people who are open-minded, creative and ready to solve problems, it means that you did the right thing. It obviously means that the vision you have is one that they share too. Strong visions, sometimes impossible, are the ones that have brought victories to humankind or have died in glory. Fame and glory go together anyway. The Upper-Left Quadrant Definition Of Creativity

As you can see, the UL Quadrant refers to the inner universe of each of us. Based on numerous studies and scientific theories referring to this quadrant of creativity focused on the inner inspiration of individuals, we know that the recipe for success as concerns ensuring the chances of creative ideas includes a set of beliefs which refer to the world, life and creativity (which is rather a set poor in absolute beliefs and full of open, non-judicative beliefs), plus strong emotions pointed towards an uplifting vision and the ability of each individual to imagine. ‘You are not imaginatively impotent until you are dead; you are only frozen up. Switch off the no-saying intellect and welcome the unconscious as a friend: It will lead you to places you never dreamed of, and produce results more “original” than anything you could achieve by aiming at originality’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.10).

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Upper-Left Quadrant Sparks In Business

How can you use this information as a businessman in order to make sure that you will obtain creative ideas from the employees in your firm? First, you must choose a certain type of people during the decision-making processes that require creative solutions. These should be people who believe they are creative, who can prove they have great imagination and who are proactive towards problems and want to solve them, who are curious, who embrace the unexpected and the reality, and who believe in self-motivation. These people consider each problem a challenge. These are ‘green’ and ‘teal’ people, as you will see in the next chapter. Second, you must make sure that the internal regulations of your firm allow the employees to use their imagination and to speak freely, encourage the development of attitudes and creative beliefs, and offer, above all, a motivated and inspiring vision regarding their purpose within the firm and the purpose of the firm itself. This idea is directly linked to the success of Steve Jobs and other visionary artists and businessmen who set big goals (a powerful ‘why’) that employees or followers embrace with open arms. Small stakes and insignificant visions do not motivate people. The question ‘Why not?’ makes people want to search for the impossible. You can find practical ideas in the chapter entitled ‘30 Tips For Increasing Your Business’ Creativity’, and inspiration in all the examples offered in this book.

Upper-Right Quadrant – Neurobiology, Genes, Senses, Creative Behaviours And Creativity Techniques As we said above, in the UR Quadrant, creativity is viewed through its observable external manifestations in a creative human being. Thus, we now discuss the neurobiology of a creative brain – special genes that have been discovered as having to do with creativity and the behaviours of creative people. Also, we have in this quadrant everything related to the instruments (mental models of creativity) used to stimulate creative behaviour or to measure it.

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The Neurobiology Of A Creative Spark (Using All 4 Cylinders)

The simplest explanation of the neurobiology of creativity is that our learning experiences pass through four different areas of our brain, each of them specialising in a certain operation (David Kolb and James Zull): One is dedicated to processing new experiences, one is dedicated to observing what the body experiences (especially when facing new experiences), one is hardwired to deal with drawing conclusions and making theories, and one with testing these formed ‘conclusions’. A child’s brain from zero to seven years old mainly experiences that each time it learns something new (say, walking), it passes through all four functions, day by day until the child’s body learns to do that thing, such as walking. It is the same with speaking a language, eating, writing and so forth. It is the same in adults when learning to kiss, make love, manage other people, drive, relate with the same gender, speak in front of a superior manager or any other new learning. With each new experience, a new learning cycle comes up and a new four-cylinder functioning of the brain is triggered until one learns and draws the necessary conclusions about that experience and transforms it into a ‘belief’, a ‘habit’, a view of the world. This functioning of the brain is stressful and gets you out of your comfort zone. Moreover, the brain, as the main energy-using organ of the body (almost 20% of what you eat or drink is used in various forms to support the brain’s functioning), has a fail-safe protection, like a computer’s ‘suspend’ function. The brain enters this state as often as it can. As children we are forced to learn to survive. After age seven, the brain enters the ‘suspend’ state more often and needs more ‘artificial’ boosts to learn new things (in fact, the brain learns to concentrate better, thus limiting the cone of passive attention). A great ‘contribution’ to teaching the brain to do so is the educational system as it is right now. It is a system which delivers great amounts of knowledge content without the brain’s need for it. The result is a suffocation of the brain. It also ‘learns’ the habit and the state of being a ‘passive receiver’ of information. Thus, the need to know, to explore and to employ curiosity slowly fades away as it is not cherished by the

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direct and authentic contact between body’s needs with the surrounding nature. There is a dynamic exchange at stake here: The brain enters a different stage, while the environment offers a different kind of learning experience, and these two aspects influence each other. Learning something new requires more learning cycles than just one. Speaking requires more learning passes than riding a bicycle, let’s say. Learning occurs more rapidly (sometimes instantly) when a new experience is accompanied by substantial emotional content. We instantly learn to avoid certain perilous events, people, animals and objects when first confronted with a pain caused by them. We instantly learn how to kiss when we are in love. We almost instantly learn not to be creative if we are judged in front of our colleagues in a classroom for a good but ‘creative’ solution to a math problem.

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After each learning is completed, the two main parts of the brain which are then triggered each time the ‘learning’, ‘habit’ or ‘belief’ occurs are the ‘theories and conclusions’ part and the ‘active testing’ part. This path between the two parts is named in many ways: ‘Fixed ideas’, ‘mind gremlin’, ‘voice in my head’, ‘ego’, ‘map’, ‘one’s view of the world’, ‘self #1’, ‘mindset’, ‘meme’, ‘set of beliefs’ and so on. It is basically formed from all the mental constructs built upon past experiences which were significant enough for one to remember them. They act as a constant GPS for one’s behaviour. They give meaning to our world. These constructs have the highest relevance the first time they are built, and their relevance continues to roll around in our heads even if, 20 years after that time, the circumstances are different. This is the main obstacle to creativity. If you ‘learned’ that you are not creative, you might carry this belief with you for your whole life. On a larger scale, this is the problem with creativity in business: Problems which need to be solved creatively are from the past, from a level of thinking and understanding, and we strive to find solutions to them from the same level of understanding. This leads at most to ‘adaptive’ solutions (continuous innovation’), while achieving a higher understanding of the problem will trigger ‘disruptive’ innovations and thinking of the present and future. Any thought is, in fact, one such path, one such ‘habit’ of thinking. When facing a new problem (potentially triggering new ideas, thoughts and solutions), people treat it with same old ‘paths’ learned before. However, a small child might solve a problem in many other ways as he did not learn yet ‘a certain way’. Such a path, a thought, an idea is made of, let’s say, one million neurons blinking together and forming a web of synapses – the same one million neurons, the same synapses, the same thought, the same path, the same idea. So, what would be a new thought, a new idea, a creative concept? Well, the answer is another one million neurons which have never blinked together, never formed a web of synapses together.

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The issue here is: How can anyone produce such a new connection of neurons? To do this, the existing ones must be polarised. Sparks (new ideas) appear when old habits, paths, ways of thinking, and learnings are provoked, and then face opposite ones. For example, meeting someone completely different from you in lifestyle will certainly trigger new experiences, new learnings. Going off into the wilderness will do the same if you have never been in the wild before. Eating something you have never eaten before will do the same. Doing everything you do with your right hand, and instead using the left one, will do the same. Wearing different clothes from your usual ones, speaking a new language, practicing new sports, hearing different kinds of music, changing places where you live or work, divorcing and remarrying, and so on. Thus, forcing your brain to act like a child’s brain, working on all four cylinders, forces it to spark new ideas. Interestingly, one main ‘path’ in dealing with creativity is the ‘Am I creative?’ path itself. People ‘learn’ through different experiences whether they are creative or not early in their lives. ‘Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school – hence the misbehaviour’, says Keith Johnstone (Johnstone, 1981, p.22, italics by the author). Usually the first learnings in this respect come through the educational system: ‘Raise your hand to say something’, ‘Do not speak over others’, ‘You are different’, ‘You are not allowed to…’, ‘You are great’ and so forth are all examples of epigenetic learning which trigger at adulthood paths or beliefs like: ‘Who am I to think of something new?’ or ‘I am not creative’ or ‘everything was already invented’ or ‘when I was a child I was creative, not anymore’, or their opposite: ‘I will find a solution’, ‘let’s explore’, ‘what is this’, ‘what if?’ and so on. ‘In a normal education, everything is designed to suppress spontaneity’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.15). This positive, optimistic and open inner voice is the voice of creativity. How can you ensure that it exists within the brains of each person surrounding you in your business and life?

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How can you produce brain sparks, creative ideas in a business environment? Well, the next chapters will show you how. But, until then, some more discussion on the neurobiology of creativity. The Neurobiology Of A Creative Spark (Get Some Alpha And Theta)

We have more and more scientific proof that our brain is not a computer-like ensemble but more like a ‘quantum orchestra, a multi-scalar vibrational resonance system. Brain information patterns repeat over spatiotemporal scales in fractal-like, nested hierarchies of neuronal networks, with resonances and interference beats’ (Stuart Hameroff in the Huffington Post, ‘Is Your Brain Really a Computer, or Is It a Quantum Orchestra?’, July 09, 2015). Our brain lives and functions/vibrates in different ranges, in different moments of the day. This separation is not accurate, but it is scientific. We have known for 20 years that the brain is generally more actively engaged during the day. The neurological measurements express this activity through beta waves (the frequency range of the electrical activity is between 13 Hz and 33 Hz). In a way, a brain that functions as such is a brain that is running continuously the same mindsets, ‘paths’, ‘interior voices’ and ‘memes’ learned a long time ago, without being able to escape from their turmoil. When we fall asleep, exactly in those translucent moments between wakefulness and sleep, when our body is in a short and conscious state of languor, our brain enters another stage, alpha, defined by a frequency range of the electrical activity between 8 Hz and 12 Hz. We are in the same phase when waking up in the morning. It is also the same state in which children aged between 7 and 14 years exist during the day (even if we have the feeling that sometimes they are too active). An alpha state is characterised by visual imagery and relaxation, daydreaming. It is extremely efficient in creativity. Presumably, many of the world’s inventions occurred when someone was in an alpha state. Do you have insights, ah-ha moments when you are constantly and continuously working at a desk on a problem or when you take a break (say, to go to the toilet, take a walk in the park or discuss something to relax with a colleague)? 47

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This is a state that many Japanese corporatists induce in themselves deliberately during working hours. They call it Inemuri – ‘sleeping while present’ – and they take a 10 to 20-minute break, simply taking a short nap at their desks. They must sit down (not lie down) to show that they are still socially engaged with their colleagues. They do this because it is a state in which the entire body relaxes and gathers its strength; it is a state of physical regeneration. During sleep (and sometimes during the day), our brain is in a state of cerebral activity specific to theta waves. This is a state of dreaming. Dreams are, actually, a creative combination of certain images we have seen throughout the day and events we have lived which can mix in a funny way (or sometimes in a nightmarish way) with old memories. A theta state is also specific for the most creative among us who are awake. Scientific measurements have shown that the most creative people experience this state very often during the day, in association with the alpha state. In the theta state, the brain functions in a synchronous way, in which both cerebral hemispheres functions simultaneously, in tandem, and exchange a lot of information through the corpus callosum that links them. Hence, dreams, which are actually associations of experiences processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, combine with other sensory impressions processed by the right hemisphere of the brain. Metaphors are exactly the same type of associations. The theta state is considered the state in which we learn the easiest and the fastest, and make the most creative associations. From this point of view, creativity is not specific to the right hemisphere of the brain, as it has been thought for many years, but is due to the simultaneous activity of both hemispheres. Children aged between four and seven experience the theta state during the day. It is a combinatorial and advanced learning state in which representations and significations (right hemisphere) add up to the notions learned from reality (left hemisphere). In this state, the brain is curious and wants to explore.

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LEFT MODE CHARACTERISTICS

RIGHT MODE CHARACTERISTICS

Verbal: Using words to name, describe, define.

Nonverbal: Awareness of things, but minimal connection with words.

Analytic: Figuring things out step by step and part by part. Wholes.

Synthetic: Putting things together to form wholes. Concrete: Relating to things as they are, at the present moment.

Symbolic: Using a symbol to stand for something. For example, the + sign stands for the process of addition.

Analogic: Seeing likeness between things: understanding metaphoric relationship.

Abstract: Taking a small bit of information and using it to represent the whole thing.

Non-temporal: Without a sense of time.

Temporal: Keeping track of time, sequencing one thing after another. Doing first things first, etc.

Non-rational: Not requiring a base of reason or facts; willingness to suspend judgment. Spatial: Seeing where things are in relation to other things, and how parts go together to form a whole.

Rational: Drawing conclusions based on reason and facts. Digital: Using numbers, as in counting.

Intuitive: Making leaps of insight, often based on incomplete patterns, hunches, feelings or visual images.

Logical: Drawing conclusions based on logic: One thing following another in logical order – for example, a mathematical theorem or a well-stated argument.

Holistic: Seeing whole things all at once; perceiving overall patterns and structures, often leading to divergent conclusions.

Linear: Thinking in terms of linked ideas; one thought directly following another; often leading to a convergent conclusion.

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The theta state is also associated with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, in which the eyes move during sleep each time they ‘follow’ pictures and movies happening in the imaginative brain in this state. When we say, ‘Time flew today’ or ‘God! The hours passed so quickly!’ it means that we did something that engaged our full attention. In behavioural psychology, this state is known as the ‘state of flow’ (or state of excellence). When we do something that we love, our brain is concentrated on that thing and functions on delta frequency. This is the third state of the brain in which it relaxes completely and ‘dictates’ to our entire body to do the same. In this state, we have a deep sleep each night. We cannot generate this state during daytime. Through meditation, experienced yogis (those who practice Yoga Nidra – yogic sleep) can reach this state of relaxation while at the same time being lucid. Two-year-old children experience this profound, thoughtless and timeless state. We usually lose our memories up to this age. In this state, our brain produces all the neurotransmitters, the hormones and the other substances necessary for the regeneration of our body. We sleep more when we are ill because our brain tells us that we must do this in order to get better. An innovative person is someone whose brain functions mostly in the alpha and theta states. There are less well-trodden paths, and the existing ones are open to new experiences; therefore, the beta state of the brain is freed from ‘tasks’, ‘social norms’, ‘worries’, the ‘past’, from ‘following what is correct, good and socially acceptable’. This is why innovative people are energetic and always seem ready for action. In these two states, the brain is used almost entirely (the right hemisphere as well as the left hemisphere). Creativity (a scientifically proven fact) appears in such conditions when both hemispheres of the brain are used simultaneously (polarity sparks!). Creativity actually means the association of a rational thought (left side of the brain) with a sensory representation (right side of the brain). How creative are children? Do you ever see them analysing something in a rational way? Is there ever something to prevent them from trying to find new solutions in order to obtain something?

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In the process of generating creative ideas, which I am discussing here, I use instruments designed to induce creative states but also analysis, insight and evaluation states. The Genes And Hormones Of Creativity

New studies in recent years have provided evidence about the influence of certain genetic factors on creativity. Certain genes that influence the ability of neurons to connect and to form neural networks or double DNA strands that play an important part in the processing of serotonin (a key neurotransmitter) are recent discoveries which show how certain special conformations can influence the creativity of individuals at this level. The studies are all the more revelatory and interesting as on the one hand, they confirm and on the other hand, they contradict previous discoveries. In the case of serotonin, for example, this neurotransmitter is known to play a role in regulating the sleep cycles, the body temperature and sexual stimulation, but it also plays a key role in certain psychiatric disorders such as bipolar depression. Studies from the last few decades also show that certain severe neuropsychiatric disorders (such as schizophrenia) decrease drastically the level of creativity, while others (such as bipolar disorder) seem to stimulate it. In a way, this is not surprising at all, taking into consideration that geniuses like Ludwig van Beethoven, Ernest Hemingway and others have been classified as having bipolar disorder symptoms or other such symptoms. Let’s not forget, though, that, as other scientific studies show, in a human being’s life, his or her genetic background and conformation are responsible for 30% to 40% of his or her achievements, whereas epigenetics (the way the human being is educated and raised) covers the rest. From the perspective of hormones (triggering emotional responses), creativity may be linked to certain emotions and emotional states. Studies in recent years have shown that, somehow, ‘positive’ emotions are proportionally linked to increased creativity (happy, upbeat or elated), while ‘negative’ 51

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emotions are linked directly with a strong decrease in creativity (anxious, discouraged, disappointed). And this is valid for your emotional states as an adult and also for your mother’s emotions and general psychic state while she was pregnant with you. Fortunately, genes are responsible for only a part of the whole ‘creativity’ Upper-Right Quadrant recipe. Awaken Your 5 Senses And Clean Up (‘Chunk Down’) Your Perceptions

We have five senses, but we don’t use them fully, not in the least. Each second of our conscious life, we are assaulted by 3 to 40 million bytes of information, of which we process only 1%. Using our five senses, we extract from reality only what we need in order to confirm the mental maps (beliefs) we have previously formed. This is why we sometimes fail to observe reality as we are so used to it. ‘Ego is cunning. It hears only what it wants to hear. It interprets however it wants to interpret and never sees reality’ (Osho, 1999, p.70). Basically, the lack of real concentration of the senses in order to receive this authentic information from reality creates this ego. Our brain uses approximately 20% of the energy of our body, and the automatic mechanism it uses to save this energy for really dangerous or unfavourable situations is one of ‘suspend’, ‘hibernate’ or ‘power save’, similar to the functions used by modern laptops. This is the result of the evolutionary process through which human beings adapted during hundreds of thousands of years of environmental evolution. ‘Hibernation’ refers to the mechanism our brain uses to file away, classify, map and label big chunks of reality, making statistics and generalisations (a process called ‘chunking up’) that help the brain cover reality in the best and easiest way. An extended, complete functioning of the brain (as in the case of small children who are just developing their mental map of categorisations) would lead an adult into a state of continuous bewilderment towards nature and of accelerated chronic fatigue. The brain specialises in processing and not recording information, and uses its own heuristic methods to select those pieces of information that are worth being recorded. Basically, it uses a series of statistical processes

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in order to collect information and store only those pieces of information that match the ‘indexes’ (‘paths’, ‘interior voices’, ‘memes’) that are already formed. The five senses are connected through the spine in that part of the brain which unconsciously processes the information, which is presented to the brain (up to 40 million bytes/second) as to an editor. The unconscious ‘cuts’ 99% of the information presented as irrelevant and presents the rest to the conscious mind (16 to 50 bytes/second) with a delay of almost half a second. The brain thus functions to give the conscious mind the possibility of making a fast decision as to the reality that surrounds the body. I believe that creative people use their five senses in an active and curious way, continuously scanning reality in order to observe and discover the small discrepancies, ‘errors’ and differences between the immediate reality and the one already registered by the brain. They have fewer reference ‘indexes’ (fewer beliefs). Every day, creative people pay closer attention to what needs to be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted than normal people. Creative people’s brains process more information from the reality that surrounds them, chunking it down into more specific pieces. ‘Feeling’ the world in this way is an effect of a free childhood, without useless restraints, without imposing a ‘parental’ map on the world. Their native intelligence (Howard Gardner) is developed in a balanced way because all their five senses have been equally stimulated by complete and natural life (childhood) experiences; thus, these people become both intra- and interpersonal. They manage to be ‘out there’ (LL Quadrant – interpersonal intelligence) and with themselves (UL Quadrant – intrapersonal intelligence), a combination that means emotional intelligence. They manage to be equally receptive and to have spatial intelligence, being good mathematicians (Einstein), and to be receptive and to have kinaesthetic and spatial intelligence (the great dancers and choreographers of the world). And so on. Children are different from adults because their brain acts differently at a young age. A child does not know the world yet. He hasn’t ‘indexed’ it yet; he hasn’t formed those neural paths that we call beliefs, and he processes the information perceived through those five senses in a more

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primitive, raw way. As we grow older, we lose this ability to relate to the reality that surrounds us with the same curious thirst for information. But we experience the same thing when we visit new places, meet new people, have new activities, eat new foods or try new tastes, listen to different music or read new information. ‘Receptive people, sensitive people are imaginative people. When you are receptive, you become a child again’ (Osho, 1999, p.77). Reverse And Polarise Your Behaviour To Be Creative

The behaviour of innovative people can be a good indicator of their creative personality. Creative behaviour can be immediately noticed in stressful situations, like ‘being in a locked room you need to escape from’. Basically, creativity can be understood as the ability to find solutions for apparently impossible situations.

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Innovative people play (physically but also verbally, using metaphors and innovative comparisons), have few social rules or do not keep tabs on the social norms (thus, often they are considered eccentric). They would rather analyse and observe before acting. They have multiple life experiences from which they learn permanently. They continuously find and solve problems in the surrounding reality and have an unbeatable interior logic even though sometimes it does not have a direct connection to the logic of the surrounding reality (hence, the surprising results of some medical studies on some neural diseases which show similar behaviours between creative people and those diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for example). Moreover, in the biographies of many creative people we can find references to rather antagonistic habits (polarity). Creative people know how to relax but also know how to work continuously and constantly. They are able to do things completely differently from others in their profession (artistic vs. scientific), have knowledge in various domains, try to solve problems using various methods and learn from each failure, analysing it and improving the next variant. Sometimes, they are persevering and obstinate. Basically, all these types of behaviours reflect a spirit which is rather playful in the sense of a mental activity similar to that of children, who assimilate and make surprising connections and combinations and who allow themselves to be permanently surprised by the surrounding reality using their five senses in a ‘fresh’ way. The behaviour of creative people is, of course, closely connected with the way in which their brain and mind function, as explained in the previous chapters. Their brain functions at full capacity (new experience, observation, theorisation, storage), and their mind is thus capable of achieving a permanent refresh of the things already known in light of the new things.

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Reverse your habits or mimic creative people’s behaviour for a certain (medium to long) period of time to get close to your inner creativity.

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What you can do is to reverse your habits or mimic creative people’s behaviour for a certain (medium to long) period of time to get close to your inner creativity. Creative Thinking Techniques

There is a concept in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) called ‘modelling’. NLP stands on the pillars of modelling as its creators founded NLP by modelling the excellence in several psychotherapists of the ‘70s. In essence, modelling presupposes that you elicit everything in a person and somehow copy those mental states, attitudes, patterns of thinking and behaviours in order to become better at something similar or identical with what that person does. The creativity techniques I am referring to are those ‘patterns of thinking’ specific to the most creative and innovative individuals of human civilisation. At a neurological level (identity, values, beliefs, abilities – falling under the UL Quadrant, behaviours – falling under the UR Quadrant), creative techniques are identical to certain inner abilities of innovative people. If you do not have them (UL Quadrant) innately, you may use them as techniques (UR Quadrant). They are like muscles already trained or to be trained and exploited. You can model (copy) attitudes, behaviours, mental states, inner capabilities (mental, emotional, relational, etc.) and so on from Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and so on, and then apply them yourself to be able to solve problems as they did. Nowadays, over 190 such techniques of creative thinking have been documented and are being used worldwide by people in search of creative ideas and solutions to their problems. Each of us has them innately and uses them sometimes unconsciously, depending on our epigenetics, on the way we were raised and on things we have learned so far. What is true is that we can fake using them and they will produce great results. You just do not have to be Michelangelo to produce an outstanding outcome. Sometimes, depending

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on other conditions, you may find a genius idea by just using one or several of these techniques. You have better chances when you arrange all the conditions in all four quadrants of creativity. Creative thinking is part of the UL Quadrant in our AQAL map. What you find in the UR Quadrant is the creative thinking instruments, techniques that might be borrowed and used as proper ways for finding extraordinary and novel ideas. ‘In the case of the creative genius, there is a tolerance for unpredictable and playful thinking fashion. The result captures the whole paradoxical process of mixing unpredictability and intentional tactics’ (Michael Michalko, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques [2nd Edition], Ten Speed Press, 2006, p.127). Starting from the repeated use of such instruments, anyone may become even more creative because one trains one’s mind to think in new ways, in ways in which the most innovative people of humanity thought. This is the ‘fake it, fake it till you make it’ principle in action. One such instrument is exactly the Red Kickbox at Adobe, a complete set of tools for extruding innovation out of any employee of the company. Edward de Bono says that ‘lateral thinking means cutting across patterns’. I would say ‘across the brain’s obsolete pathways’ or ‘mental illusory boundaries’. He says these techniques and ways of thinking are not natural, but I have found them especially natural in children, artists and trained adults. The way you think is re-trainable and may be learned. We discuss 10 such techniques in the chapter entitled ‘Giving Birth To A Creative Business Decision – 10 Possible Techniques’, as the main role of this book is to provide any manager or entrepreneur with a certain (still debatable) recipe for generating great business ideas. The Upper-Right Quadrant Definition Of Creativity

A new idea, an innovation or a creative idea is, practically speaking, a new network of synapses, a new association of neurons which didn’t associate like this in a person’s brain until now. New neuronal associations and networks occur (or can be forced to occur) when we use our brain (creative

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behaviour and thinking) in new ways by placing our body and our senses in new situations, in new experiences that make our brain function at full capacity, alpha + theta, exactly like in the case of a curious child. Upper-Right Quadrant Sparks In Business

As team leader or business manager, you can increase the chances of coming up with revolutionary ideas for solving your problems if you can succeed in encouraging your employees to: • Place themselves in new, unfamiliar environments which allow their brains to learn new things, to embrace new perspectives. Let’s call this ‘environment polarity’. • Feel restraints/restrictions related to their way of thinking and acting in light of the information they receive from their senses: Many inventions have come about due to a lack of certain resources. Thus, the brain is forced to create new synaptic connections in order to ensure the survival of an idea or to solve a problem that might otherwise seem impossible. Let’s call this ‘resources polarity’. You can find more ideas and resources on how to use the UR Quadrant to increase the chances for sparks and creative ideas in the chapter entitled ‘30 Tips For Increasing Your Business’ Creativity’.

Lower-Left Quadrant – Collective (Crowd) Creativity Collaborative Emergence

If we consider creativity from a cultural point of view, the main idea is that of a cross-pollination of ideas. That is, the more our ideas come in contact with other people’s ideas, the more likely it is that new ideas will be born. Culture is often defined a set of social norms, traditions, symbols, myths and archetypal collective images. Any human being belongs to a certain number of cultural networks, starting with the close ones (friends,

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family) and ending with the extended ones (organisation, nation, humanity). Worthy of note is that, basically, a culture represents an aggregate of all the above-mentioned facts and, consequently, it represents the individual only partially, as one’s individuality, one’s inner universe or behaviour, or the civilisation to which one belongs does not represent one completely. Very often, the creative revolutionary ideas of some remarkable representatives of humankind were transcultural, non-cultural, or did not belong to the culture of the time in which they were created (anachronous). The more vivid and dynamic the cultural networks to which an individual belongs, the greater the chances for individual creativity. Metaphorically speaking, the more a plant spreads its seeds into unknown territories, the greater the chances for its survival (the creative power of nature). At a macro level, there are notable cultural differences regarding the Eastern and Western cultures. Whereas Eastern cultures are more focused on nature, Western ones are more volitional, more centred on the individual’s autonomy and will. The chances for individual creativity increase when an individual ‘visits’ both cultures and is able to belong to both of them. One culture appreciates freedom as a fundamental value (masculine, Yang, West), and the other appreciates stability (feminine, Yin, East). The polarity between them gives birth to creativity. In any case, they often meet due to digitisation and economic globalisation.

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Cultural differences mean different memes of certain norms, traditions, symbols, myths, mindsets of individuals and so on. The creative people who left a mark throughout universal history were universal people who did not belong to just one culture. Modern companies (Green or Teal – cf. Laloux, Wilber) tend to generalise transcultural, non-cultural or supra-cultural social norms. The future of organisations is clearly linked to their ability to give up their value judgements concerning certain types of clients, marketplaces and the origins of their employees or manufacturing facilities, and to embrace the beauty of diversity. At a micro level, the creativity of groups and of working teams operates as a ‘collaborative emergence’ (R. Keith Sawyer). In the case of jazz or theatrical improvisation, or in the case of children’s play, creativity is, first of all, the result of a cultural collaboration (but it also belongs to the other AQAL quadrants). It has a striking resemblance to the creativity within the organisational structure of management and operational teams, as I demonstrate in another chapter. The key rules at work during a show of theatrical improvisation are ‘yes, and…’ and listening at a deep level while suspending one’s own agenda. These two main rules make the actors seem empathic or even telepathic and create beautiful masterpieces, as has already been shown in the previous chapter. ‘The liquid network’, as defined by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, operates at this level, recalling the experiment that Kevin Dunbar performed on scientists belonging to different universities and academic and research environments, in which different specialists organised meetings or met at the university café and shared their latest discoveries or research, their failures or doubts. It is the moment when a new theory or an amazing discovery can appear. This is the exact same phenomenon that happened at a macro level during many eras in human history (for instance, the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution). These discoveries show once again that a new neural network (a new idea) is a representation of certain macro processes which lead to ideas, of natural processes such as cross-pollination; the migration of species; interregnum exchanges; food chains; or even the movement of the planets or the collision of orbs, which can give birth to new galaxies which form from the old ones. 60

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We ourselves are the product of a collaborative emergence. Homo sapiens were only one of a dozen hominid species living some 200,000 years ago. What is certain is that this species of ours had a superior ability in exchanging information across tribes and communities, thus evolving and coming to dominate the Earth. And you see this in its current proliferation over this tiny planet within the universe. The fantastic increase in the number of our species is only due to its capability of sharing, exchanging practices and using all the available resources. When humans work together, they evolve as a species; however, when they do not listen to one another, they start to decimate themselves in wars. Ants are also one of the best examples for collaborative emergence. A few of them from a colony will scout for food and leave chemtrails behind. When they find food, they go back along these trails, leaving more chemicals behind and therefore strengthening the traces for other ants to understand that there is food. When searching for a new home, they have an elaborate ‘procedure’ of involving everybody more and more until each ant that is a member of the colony is relocated. They know precisely through their means of communication (antennae and sounds) how the members of the colony share roles so that they breed the exact numbers of ants needed to become soldiers, workers or ‘nurses’. And so on. ‘With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, SETI@home is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time’ (Wikipedia). Koinonia is a word which expresses a set of three rules that Socrates and his friends obeyed for years in ancient Athens during their discussions, which led to the establishment of European civilisation. The rules were: ‘Settle the dialogue’ (exchange ideas without trying to convince others of your ideas); ‘be equal to others’ (everybody is equal to anybody else, no matter the rank, age or other conditions); and ‘clarify your thoughts’ (suspend all your presuppositions). As stated in Wikipedia, ‘The word [koinonia] has such a multitude of meanings that no single English word is adequate to express its depth and richness.

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Koinonia is a complex, rich, and thoroughly fascinating Greek approach to building a community or teamwork. Koinonia embraced a strong commitment to kalos k’agathos meaning ‘good and good’, an inner goodness toward virtue and an outer goodness toward social relationships. In the context of outer goodness, translated into English, the meaning of koinonia has the idea of joint participation in something with someone, such as in a community, or team or an alliance or joint venture. Those who have studied the word find there is always an implication of action included in its meaning’ (Wikipedia). And this word also expresses beautifully the concept of collaborative emergence. Linux operating system; Wikipedia; Uber taxi services; the mountain bike; Rap music, We Are Smarter Than Me, a collectively written book (on collective intelligence); Sugar CRM; www.marketocracy.com; www.zopa.com; www.threadless.com; the 2008 XLI Super Bowl ad; the creation of the 787 Dreamliner – all these are expressions of this collaborative emergence. And more than this, they are expressions of disruptive innovation coming from the users and consumers, not from suppliers (organisations). As Charles Leadbeter says, big organisations tend to reinforce their successes in the past. You never see many examples of large organisations making giant risky leaps on the market because they are too structured and less fluid, and are more from the ‘stability’ side of the yin/yang polarity.

The organisations of the future have to take on the risk of accepting that employees’ ideas may lead to different things than the intended ones.

This is why any future organisation or party or enterprise or government has to widely open the doors to its consumers, voters or users, as they will innovate instead of the organisation or company. You just have to listen. The era of journalism as we know it is about to come to an end as any of us may now blog, copyright and edit our own text, video or audio material. The era of venture capitalists will also end soon, as anyone may post a request for funding for a project on Kickstarter. Since Kickstarter’s

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launch in April 2009, over six million people have pledged a total of more than $1 billion, supporting more than 60,000 projects. And Kickstarter is just one of 3,000 such sites. Nelson’s Column was partially crowdfunded back in 1840. The Oxford English Dictionary received over six million entries back in 1850 from the public. This very book you are now reading was partially financed by an Indiegogo campaign which ran for one month in July to August 2015. The terms of the future are ‘cloud labour’, ‘cloud computing’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘crowdfunding’, ‘distributed knowledge’, ‘open innovation’ and ‘equity crowd investment’. Conclusion: Wikinomics. Each of the first 25 best global brands uses crowdsourcing in one form or another. Thomas Frey (the ‘futurist speaker’) lists tens of jobs of the future, a big share of which are linked to ‘collective’ in one way or another. The organisations of the future have to take on the risk of accepting that employees’ ideas may lead to different things than the intended ones. This is also the history of SMS (mobile texting), which the companies did not know how to use but which, once it got into the hands of youngsters, became one of the main communication channels today. This is the history of the telephony, which initially was meant to be a way of listening remotely to concertos and which consequently became also a means of remote communication among people. The Lower-Left Quadrant Definition Of Creativity

‘Let ideas have sex’. However, just having sex does not lead to ‘baby ideas’. So instead, we should ‘let ideas make lots of love’ so that new ideas may emerge. The more you put together different mentalities and individuals representing different cultures, and the more you mix the cultural background of each individual, the greater the chances for creativity and innovation. In this respect, the communication of ideas represents the main factor for new ideas. When an employee is able to mix his professional life with other cultural environments (family, friends, etc.) he belongs to and does this together with colleagues who belong

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to different national cultures who do the same thing, new ideas begin to form. The cultural definition of creativity is that it is quite similar to the chaotic, fractal and polarised way in which nature functions. Dr Bruce Lipton says that ‘nature has two aspects – it changes and, at the same time, remains the same. Combine a circle (cyclical changing aspect) and a vector (directional progress) and you will get a spiral’. Complexity (fractal) in nature is not complicated but a pattern evolution. It is the same with the LL definition of creativity and innovation. Lower-Left Sparks In Business

As a team leader or business manager, you can increase the chances for producing new revolutionary ideas for your business-related problems if you can convince your employees to discuss their ideas together or with others. Thus, their ideas will generate new ideas, new neural associations will form in their minds, new borrowed behaviours will appear, and they will have the chance to analyse their own ideas and to detach themselves from their emotions in order to be able to reflect upon them. If they were alone, their thinking would remain the same; however, if they are surrounded by other people, their thinking will be multiplied and diversified. Let’s call this ‘social polarity’ or even ‘social pollination’. You can find more ideas and resources related to how to use the LL Quadrant in order to increase the chances for sparks and creative ideas in the chapter entitled ‘30 Tips To Increase Your Business’ Creativity’.

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Lower-Right Quadrant – A Process And System For Creativity How To Ignite The First 3 Quadrants

Nowadays, organisational creativity is considered to be a set of actions concerning employees, processes, products, environment and leadership (Pucio, Gerard J. and Cabra, John F. in Kaufman, James C. and Sternberg, Robert, 2010, Chapter 8) aimed at improving and transforming them in order to increase the chances for producing innovative ideas. In this respect, the individual creativity of the employee is considered as the key and the beginning of corporate innovation. I have discussed this in detail in the paragraphs referring to the UL and UR Quadrants. There is relevant published literature on this subject, beginning with Torrance and Guilford in the ‘70s and, more recently, with Amabile, who talks about nuances concerning the sets of abilities linked to creativity. As regards environmental factors (culture), they were analysed in the previous paragraph referring to the LL Quadrant. Basically, seen from this point (window pane) of view, creativity means a ‘framework’ which is more or less organised. The smallest and sometimes the only thing a company needs to do in order to generate creativity and innovation is to set up a framework and an inspiring direction. The power of a vision framework and an adequate context in which employees can listen is enormous. All the TEAL organisations that I refer to hereinafter enjoy this type of context. You can have the most solid and well-thought processes, and stimulation and rewarding procedures for creative ideas, but if there is no inspiring motivation for the existence of the business, employees will not embrace the idea of innovation. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a dream created and offered people this kind of framework, as did Mahatma Ghandi’s fight for freedom and Ricardo Semler’s or Chris Rufer’s vision. Semler says that ‘the purpose of work is not to make money. The purpose of work is to make the workers, whether working stiffs or top executives, feel good about life’ (Ricardo Sempler, ‘Maverick’, Business Plus, 1995, p.290). Gore’s culture is based on the ‘belief

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in the individual to do what’s right for the company’ and on the ‘freedom for associates to achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts to the success of the corporation, to take action, to come up with ideas, to make mistakes as part of the creative process’ (Bill Gore cited by Gary Hammel in ‘W.L.Gore: An Innovation Democracy’, from The Future of Management, Harvard Business School Press, 2007, p.117, italics by author). According to Gallup and other global public opinion polling institutes, there is a sharp worldwide decline in the commitment of employees from all types of organisations. The inertia of organisations, which are conglomerates, is greater than that of individuals. Individuals ‘wake up’ faster than organisations, which are, afterwards, just a result of the desire to organise (or the delegation of this desire to the leaders). People’s level of consciousness is today increasing considerably because the technical process leads to clarification about the meaning of life, about the true reality of the world and of the universe, about the human body and about our planet, and the crazy rhythm of the world in recent years. What is already obvious to people at an individual level is not obvious to ‘organisations’ which have an endemic systemic inertia. The bigger the organisation, the greater the inertia. Organisational creativity and innovation is the main secret of mobility and success. Organisations that have understood this have overtaken other ones, do not have financial problems, and their employees are happy. Managing People To Have Ideas

The force of the ideas of employees is amazing. ‘The suggestion box’ in the industrial world has disappeared. Who has the best and most creative solutions for business problems today? The employees. They never lack ideas. Toyota has known this for several centuries. Frederick Taylor was wrong when he said that ‘managers should take over the thinking part of the work and employees should do the work’. This notion may have worked in the industrial world that we have left behind. However, a modern organisation (TEAL – Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber) is a living system, a collectivity integrated within itself, along with its clients, suppliers and third parties. 66

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There is a permanent black market within each firm, a ‘marketplace of ideas’ which should improve the products, services and internal life of the firm. This black market needs to be ‘whitened’, brought to light and legalised. ‘Small’ (adaptive) ideas must circulate in order to generate revolutionary creative solutions (disruptive, innovative – in Kirton, 2004). Employee reward systems are dead. How many of the ideas that have revolutionised the world, have been paid for and how many have been FREE? Employees want to like what they do, to learn constantly and to evolve in their work (Gallwey, 2001). There are no monetary incentives involved in innovation at Teamnet; Bogdan Padiu does not believe in this. We should let them do that because people want to see that their ideas are used. The employees who feel responsible for the implementation of their ideas will be self-motivated. We should let them do that. International statistics show that at least 70% of employees lack motivation at their workplace. One of the main factors in this is the degree of free thinking which is allowed and the freedom to implement their solutions in order to solve a problem related to their work. The number of ideas that a manager receives from his subordinates shows beyond doubt how well he motivates his team. Good managers know and take advantage of this situation. Weak managers fear the ideas of their employees because they feel that they could lose their high position, be replaced or be considered stupid. The companies with the flattest organisational structures in the world are the most creative and innovative companies. The hierarchy of ideas has died. Long live the ‘holacracy of ideas!’ ‘I have all these great ideas and impulses to build something useful and then I would have endless meetings to get them approved. I would have bosses who were too busy even to hear me out or who just didn’t get what I was saying,’ says Brian Robertson from HolacracyOne (Robertson, personal interview with author). He continues, ‘In such an environment (holacratic) most people will step up and get a lot more creative; not everyone, though. Some people, in fact, will leave. They don’t want the pressure in an environment where they actually have to add value to. Holacracy doesn’t force innovation to happen. People can drive disruptive ideas too, even when they are unpopular’.

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Middle managers play a crucial role in taking up and processing the ideas of employees because they function as ‘relays’, meaning they can block or stimulate new ideas. They have the power to encourage or inhibit the development of new ideas. ‘The bottleneck to creativity and innovation in most companies, I don’t think, is a lack of creative thinking or innovative ideas; rather, it’s the lack of being able to drive them into the system because the whole system is set up to reject them. The corporate antibody comes out and attacks the ideas’ (Robertson, personal interview). The solution to any problem is adequate when the ideas for solving a problem come from ‘below’ and when ‘below’ is responsible for the implementation of the solution. Chris Rufer (Morning Star) says, ‘People are actually taking initiative because they feel unbounded by having to go through various folks to get something done’ (Kirkpatrick, 2010). ‘First question after an idea comes is “Where do we find the resources to finance it?”’ says Bogdan Padiu from Teamnet. As you may read here: It is not ‘why should we finance it?’, as this question is somehow always answered by the work itself. Bureaucracy and excessive paperwork represent characteristics of any big corporation. Why not make this a focus-question and everyone affected by it come up with solutions that could be implemented? Maybe today’s paperwork has formed, ‘coagulated’, extended and consolidated in time because managers have constantly added norms, procedures and forms. These managers have considered the problem in a superficial way, and then generalised and designed bureaucratic systems that cover ‘types’ of problems. Perhaps those problems have disappeared in the meantime; perhaps, meanwhile, new methods of keeping a form have appeared (for instance, electronic forms); perhaps, in reality, the flows are no longer linked to the norms elaborated and implemented many years ago. Why not transform this permanent rethinking of procedures and their simplification into a continuous focus-question for those affected by these norms and procedures? The purpose of any company and employee is to make a profit, not to follow procedures. Sometimes, we are trapped in this way of thinking.

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The most innovative ideas are born in a favourable environment in which small ideas are respected, listened to, evaluated and implemented. All the revolutionary periods in history, politics, economy and art were and always will be built on well-organised social systems (sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally). In the case of any modern company, the way in which it is organised internally and the way in which it relates to the environment of its business will have a direct impact on its degree of creativity and innovation. Theories about creativity that focus on the existence of organisational creativity and innovation systems show how systems for stimulating creativity by rewarding ideas have sometimes led to an increase in economic and commercial innovation. Even these practices are currently disappearing, as recent studies show the negative aspect of rewarding employees for imaginative ideas. With what should we replace this otherwise good system? We should replace it with a way of collecting small ideas from employees, with a permanent request for ideas from managers to their employees, accompanied by a strong vision for their usage. Otherwise, hierarchical organisations are places in which ‘everyone has their face toward the CEO and their ass toward the customer’ (Jack Welch), as we shall see in the next chapter.

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Leading People To Have Ideas

When we talk about the most adequate leadership system in which the employees of a company can be extremely creative and generate remarkable innovation, we are talking about a type of leadership system that is almost non-existent nowadays. It is that type of leadership that ensures both freedom and adequate constraints, in a mix which is favourable to the corporate environment. When we look at the way in which businesses are run at the highest level, we see mainly men who hold the position of shareholder or CEO. Why? As we have previously explained, males are conquerors. They are more dominant, aggressive sometimes and competitive, and undertook the dominant role of running businesses hundreds of years ago. The way in which we organise ourselves and the way in which we rule today is just an avatar of the short history of Homo sapiens on this planet. A great number of psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists have analysed this human journey of consciousness. Man’s comprehension of life has evolved throughout history and continues to evolve. The forms of organisation have evolved as well. With every major step in this comprehension (self-awareness), humanity has invented new forms of organisation and collaboration with the aim of producing goods and services. It is as if humans, as a species, have climbed slowly but surely up Abraham Maslow’s pyramid or in the classifications made by Jean Gebser, Jean Piaget, Clare W. Graves, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, James Fowler, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Robert Kegan and W. R. Torbert. Ken Wilber is the only one who succeeded in drawing an allembracing and complete map of this evolution, without forgetting to take into consideration his predecessors. All these types of organisations coexist in our world too, and we can easily classify them as follows (according to Ken Wilber, Frederic Laloux, Jenny Wade): ‘Reactive’ organisations (infrared colour), ‘magical’ (magenta), impulsive (red), conformist (amber), achievement (orange), pluralist (green) and evolutionary (teal).

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Teal Green Orange Amber Red Infrared

100,000 years ago

Magenta

50,000 years ago

Now

Source: Frederic Laloux – ‘Reinventing Organisations’

It is obvious that we are making a statistical generalisation when we talk about ‘red’, ‘orange’, ‘amber’, ‘green’ or ‘teal’ corporations. Basically, these ‘colours’ represent certain sets of beliefs, mindsets, memes (Beck, 2006) of employees and of management in the first place. Therefore, these colours, these ways of thinking and acting accordingly can be found in most individuals belonging to an organisation (UL, UR, LL Quadrants). Nowadays, ‘Red organisations’ are the mafia or street gangs or tribal militias, in which all the power is concentrated in an ‘alpha’ around which a wolf pack gathers. The ‘alpha’ has the right to execute. ‘Conformist-Amber’ organisations brought forth two major breakthroughs: Long-term planning and stable and scalable organisational structures. ‘Historically, Amber Organisations are the ones that have built irrigation systems, pyramids, and the Great Wall of China. Conformist-Amber Organisations ran the ships, the trading posts, and the plantations of the Colonial world. The Catholic Church is built on this paradigm – arguably it has been the defining Amber Organisation for the Western world. The first large corporations of the Industrial Revolution were run on this template. Amber Organisations are still very present today: Most government agencies, public schools, religious institutions, and the military are run

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based on Conformist-Amber principles and practices’ (Laloux, 2014, p.37). The leadership of these corporations is similar to a militarist style: A tough leader dictates based on what feels good now, controls the freedom of everybody else and tests the worthiness of others who seek his attention. ‘Achievement-Orange’ organisations are characterised by three additional breakthroughs: Innovation, accountability and meritocracy. Walmart, Nike and Coca-Cola are all embodiments of this kind of organisation. Innovation refers to the fact that these organisations (and their leaders) dream of what might be. They are not conformist but challenge the status quo and find ways to improve it (innovation); use complex processes, projects and structures; and stress research and development, marketing, product management and so forth. Orange corporations are still hierarchical but also invent project groups, virtual teams, cross-functional initiatives, expert staff functions and so on. They are viewed and run as ‘machines’. Departments are parts of this machine, and they have to run smoothly altogether. The leadership is based on fierce competition inside and outside of the company, on bottom line results and on material gain. ‘Pluralistic-Green’ organisations leave ‘power’ aside and sometimes also the hierarchy, as they might give all the workers all the power, decide by consensus and rotate leaders. Some of the most successful companies in this category are Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, and The Container Store. They are ‘families’ where everybody has something to say and do.

‘Evolutionary-Teal’ companies are one step ahead in terms of leadership and chances to innovate as they are even more open and transparent.

As you may have understood up to this point, the leadership of the companies has become more and more lax and the structures more and more de-structured, less hierarchical and more ‘to the people and for the people’. The ‘green’ leader seeks and offers inner peace within the business environment (harmony within the group) and promotes consensus in decision-making and an ‘all must collaborate’ approach.

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‘Evolutionary-Teal’ companies are one step ahead in terms of leadership and chances to innovate as they are even more open and transparent. These companies embrace the following characteristics in pursuit of the company’s purpose: There are self-organising teams; coaches are consistently present; there is no formal managerial authority; there are no executive team meetings, and meetings are held only when needed; project management is simplified; self-projects are supported; there are no plans or a budget; prioritisation is organic; recruiting is done by future co-workers; there are no job titles and roles are fluid; individual calling aligned to the organisational purpose; there is extreme flexibility of time allocation between work and life issues; the focus is on team (instead of individual) performance; there are peer-based appraisals of performance; salaries are self-set; there is equal profit sharing; there are no promotions but rather a fluid rearrangement of roles; complete freedom exists for employees to speak up about others’ issues in the company; working spaces are self-decorated and warm; there are holacratic decision-making mechanisms; all the information about the company, including detailed financial data, is completely transparent; outsiders are welcome to make suggestions about anything; there are reflective spaces; the organisation is seen as a living evolutionary being with its own life; the irrelevant concept of competition (‘competitors’) is embraced to pursue the company’s purpose; strategy organically emerges from the collective intelligence; innovation is defined by purpose; there are no sales targets and no budgetary targets; spending is based on peer advice; there is distributed initiative; ‘change’ is no longer relevant as these organisations are fully ad hoc, adaptable, and so forth. These companies are also sometimes called ‘holacracies’, a word describing their natural search for wholeness. Remember what I said about creativity as being natural, fractalic, unpredictable and coming from the wholeness of being? These companies respond to the same principle of ‘both-and’ (instead of ‘either-or’ of the ‘red’ or ‘green’ companies) as is found in jazz improvisation or child’s play. The egos (company brand or employee status symbols) of these organisations are educated and brought very close to the self, as the purpose and only the purpose (an evolutionary and all-encompassing one) dictates the practices, norms, structures and flows in the company. 73

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‘What you do not want to do is govern your organisation based on human “ego” needs, but rather based on what is needed for the purpose, and likewise, you do not want organisations to end up dominating the people, creating drones. Instead, you want people to be free, to be themselves’ (Robertson, personal interview with the author). Thus, there is no longer a negative polarity among employees but a positive one. There is no longer a negative polarity among departments like sales versus credit, accounting versus commercial, headquarters versus branches, and there is no longer a negative polarity but a positive one within each employee, between what one wants to do and what one needs to do. Holacracy equals koinonia.

“A holacracy is a very formal system, just not a very conventional system. Holacracy provides a very disciplined way of structuring an organisation but also lets people make changes that otherwise they couldn’t make.” —Brian J. Robertson, personal interview with the author

Leadership of these companies is both yin and yang, masculine and feminine, rational and emotional, and left brain and right brain, and the leadership is distributed all around the company, to each of the employees. Thus, there is a proper balance of ‘will’ and ‘responsibility’ extending from the top (what ‘top’?) to the bottom (what ‘bottom’?) of the company. This happens each time the usual ‘competitive’ leadership is disseminated among people (responsibility) as people are much aware (feminine) of what’s best for the company and themselves. Employees’ engagement is extremely high within these companies as every lever of self-motivation is automatically activated. Innovation is sprinkled all around due to the convergence of each and every condition we have mentioned previously in this book. ‘We encourage innovation because it gives you the possibility to make an impact. Thus, you create a change in the society, contributing to a better world. And this belief is to be found in each of our 800 employees’ (Bogdan Padiu, Teamnet).

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As employees are aware and responsible for each part of their own job, innovation arises and flows when needed in the most natural way. The more you move from the ‘red’ to the ‘teal’ on this ‘spiral’ (Don Beck), the more the male aspect of business dissipates and makes way for the feminine, integrative, collaborative side to kick in. Stability loses more strength and terrain, while freedom of thought, imagination and action rise up. The more competitiveness is dissipated within the company, the greater the need for a more collaborative, overarching and stimulating vision from the leadership side. How can a company which resembles more the ‘red’ or ‘green’ organisations access the immense resources of creativity of the ‘teal’ organisations? Maybe just by mimicking the structure, processes and most everything else of the latter. But what is the essential aspect which must be copied? The answer is: The existence of an all-encompassing purpose, of a vision, for the business. And this is mainly an attribute of the leaders of that company, the CEO, the shareholders.

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What can always be seen when great and disruptive innovation is spurred, whether it’s social, political, economic, cultural, artistic, is that there was a ‘meaning of life’ (or a persistent search for it) which is explicit and profound, vibrating in the air, a purpose higher than the mere purpose of the average person. What a leader has to do in this respect, anywhere in the world, in any ‘colour of company’, is listen to his company’s evolutionary purpose and real pulse, and declare it, embrace it, live with it, be scorched by it and make it his coat and flag. This will attract a number of people, while others will leave. The remaining ones will start the innovation revolution in this company, as a consequence of their being lifted up by a higher purpose. When motivated by a life or death choice, people become either disruptive forces or adapters, but for sure when motivated by low stakes, they will converge around a low innovative apprehension. People as a species are divided between their innate ‘alone’ (yang, male) nature and their ‘together’ one (female, yin). A vision gives them the comfort of being ‘together’ (Wilson, 2013). If you’ve seen the film The Experiment or have read about the Stanford experiment or the Milgram experiments back in the ’60s, you understand very well the consequences of a lack of ‘feminine’ touch in sociological experiments. ‘Think of the effect holacracy has on the human psyche. When somebody feels like “I don’t have to fight to get my change in”, it feels easy to make a change’ (Robertson, personal interview). In my coaching practice I have the chance to work with different ‘colours’ of executives, managers and regular employees. It is an extraordinary chance to see how a ‘conformist-amber’ executive, when faced with some of my ‘pluralistic-green’ perspectives, does not ‘buy’ them, and this happens each time a person’s level of understanding and way of relating to the world is confronted by a level which is too high (two levels above). As a result, I have to go back, go lower and provoke him with an ‘achievement-orange’ proposal of an action or question.

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What an executive leader has to do to move his/her company into the ocean of infinite creativity and innovation is to just embrace both of his/her parts, masculine and feminine, and declare a reign of both a ‘vision’ and a ‘humane approach to business’, of both ‘stability’ and freedom’, to attain a higher understanding of the complexity of life and to instil the koinonia spirit in the company. And this may start by the leader virtually visiting the Consciousness Quotient Institute. ‘Our people want to do something meaningful and something always interesting; they refuse boring stuff. And we guarantee them this experience’ (Bogdan Padiu, Teamnet). Embracing Creativity And Innovation At An Organisational Level

When you look at the creativity in the LR Quadrant, it is a matter of form embracing a content, a pure need. In a ‘teal’ organisation, the content gives birth to the proper shape, as a seed gives shape to the plant, but in a ‘red’ or ‘green’ enterprise, the CEO is the main figure responsible for ensuring that creativity still has the freedom to be sparked. It has to do with a grand vision and also with some procedures defining the space of innovation. ‘A holacratic type of organisation brings into a company a percentage of clear, precise and structured communication (especially in the governance meeting process); therefore, it allows anyone to be as “artistic” as they want to be for the rest of the time. The discipline of holacracy resides in following these few rules. Holacracy frees employees’ time so that they are not worried about questions like “What is our focus?”, or “What do we want in this company?”’ (Robertson, personal interview with author). Interestingly, coming from practice, not theory, the holacratic system evolved toward a purely AQAL understanding. You may see this in the following figure, which is similar, if not identical, to the AQAL quadrants. ‘These very different spheres of human experience often get blurred because they all coexist within any organisation. The personal and tribe spaces are where all the wonderful richness of being human comes into play. The former is about you and your values, passions, talents, ambitions and identity [UL quadrant], while the latter is about how we interact and our shared values, culture, meaning making and language [LL quadrant].

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The role space, in contrast, is where we take action in role, as the role’s steward, in order to express its purpose and enact its accountabilities [UR quadrant]. Finally, the organisational space is the result of working together, role to role, and governing those roles for the sake of the organisation’s purpose’ (Robertson, 2015, p.200). The figure Brian Robertson explains in such profound terms in his book shows, in fact, exactly like the integral theory and practice within this book, a discipline between ‘soul’ (feminine) and ‘role’ (masculine) so that they are not collapsing on one another but rather doing the opposite, enabling one another, creating polarities.

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This is clear proof of a complete match between integral innovation and self-management systems, which holacratic systems are. A holacratic environment is one which provides an underlying and upgraded platform for integral innovation. Study cases like the one related to the implementation of holacracy in the Office of the Chief Information Officer in Washington State (United States) is proof that the system works well in governmental environments also. Employees of this office report that: ‘We are having project success because of holacracy. There is now a system for addressing systemic issues’, or ‘Holacracy has ruined me. I no longer want to work in an organisation that practices hierarchy’. The Office evaluated some metrics related to the velocity and happiness of the teams involved in the five-month pilot phase. Results show that there was a ‘steady increase in our assessment of holacracy’s ability to resolve impediments to getting the work done. Employees’ confidence that they were able to resolve impediments to getting their job done rose from 60% prior to holacracy to 80% confident by the end of five months. That equates to more than a 30% increase in employee empowerment’ (www.ocio.wa.gov/news/what-weve-learned-our-holacracy-experience-so-far). The Office of the Chief Information Officer has also seen a net increase in employees’ satisfaction and happiness with the job, but also ‘they couldn’t measure the delta in the “governance” change because they couldn’t do it at all before the holacracy implementation. Most people, when they wanted to change the authority structure or the core processes of the company, simply couldn’t. Now they can’, says Brian Robertson (personal interview with the author). As organisations have become more and more open to the environment surrounding them, we have understood that they are more and more in contact with nature. In nature, creativity is sparked naturally when an organism is faced with new environments, threats and food, and then a new organ or an evolution of organs occurs. For example, a ‘teal’ organising system is in itself an evolution of the business, to adapt to the new challenges on the market. I have already shown how any kind of human endeavour is closer to its environment nowadays.

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The Unending Definition Of Creativity

Innovation happens at the margins of an organism. In ‘teal’ organisations, the margins of the living organism are the margins of the sphere of influence of each employee, as they run and represent the business, each of them as holons (independent and autonomous units) of that business, just as a piece of a mirror has the entire attributes of the whole mirror. However, in a ‘red’ or ‘green’ organisation, which is more centralised and formal, innovation happens at the margins of the departments and representatives closest to the environment: Sales, purchasing, marketing, clients’ voice units and so on. But, if properly arranged, it also happens at the margins of the ‘internal clients’. Thus, the more autonomy and freedom of decision and execution you give to a department, the more it will find innovative solutions when faced with an equally independent internal client or supplier. It is as if you see a tree growing, and each branch has the independence to grow anywhere, but it finds the best direction so as not to cover the other branches and to benefit as much as possible from the sun’s rays. This is called fractalic evolution, and nature is fractalic. It resembles an improvisation show where each of the actors’ sentences is like a branch leading to any number of possible continuations. It is like child’s play, where anything might happen after the child enjoys a toy for a while. Our world is a complex one, not a complicated one. You may plan a response to a complicated problem, but it is impossible to do so for a complex one. So, forget about making five-year plans, but perhaps instead just look into the next 20 years of the future and plan your next day. Nature evolves through small continuous adaptations each day. The Lower-Right Definition Of Creativity

If setting up and contributing to an innovative organisational culture is the feminine side of the innovation leadership framework, then setting up the margins and behaviours of this culture is the masculine side. From this perspective, business creativity and innovation is a set of procedures helping innovation spark within your company. It is the overarching vision accompanying it, and pulling and pushing the creativity in and out of employees’ minds and hearts. 80

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The whole evolution of this species of ours is a process of creativity: Small adaptations to the environment and then disruptive sparks of collective movements to higher planes of consciousness triggered by the ‘Who Am I?’ focus-question. Lower-Right Sparks In Business

The rule here is to spread autonomy below your level in the hierarchy. Coaching your subordinates yourself can prove to be one such direct solution as it generates more autonomy, self-awareness and responsibility in each of person. Empower your subordinates to define strategies and take the corresponding decisions. Let them organise themselves into natural tribes, task forces and project teams as they need to. You will find other practical solutions in Chapter 9, which is dedicated to creative solutions to sparking business creativity and in the books of Gary Hammel, Steven Johnson, Frederic Laloux, or by studying companies like FAVI, AES, Morning Star, SEMCO, Buurtzorg and so on. ‘At the Zappos “All Hands” meeting, Tony Hsieh said that at most companies, “There’s the org chart on paper, and then the one that is exactly how the company operates for real, and then there’s the organisation chart that it would like to have in order to operate more efficiently”’ (Groth). The task of future leaders is to align and superimpose these three maps and to find the real territory behind them.

The Unending Definition Of Creativity Upper-Left Quadrant Definition

Business creativity and innovation are sparked if employees believe they are creative, curious and playful in finding solutions to an ardent problem which they consider is theirs. Polarity is present here when ‘what is’ is not ‘what might be’ in one’s life. As a leader, you have to get people to trust their natural creativity.

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Upper-Right Quadrant Definition

Business creativity and innovation are sparked when new neuronal connections are sparked, that is, when your body shifts the way it receives information through the senses. As a leader, you have to increase polarity by offering employees radically novel circumstances and experiences. Lower-Left Quadrant Definition

Business creativity and innovation are sparked when different people socialise and share their insights in a free manner. Employees, clients, suppliers, shareholders and stakeholders, different roles, different ages, sexes, religions, lifestyles, colours, mindsets – all make up people. When gathered, they produce a ‘social pollination’ of ideas, and from this ‘collaborative emergence’ new ideas are born. Polarity exists among all of them. As a leader, you have to let people mingle in any combination.

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Lower-Right Quadrant Definition

Business creativity and innovation are sparked when there is a business framework defined by a strong overarching vision of a problem/ focus-question which employees are interested in solving. The polarity here is between the pitiful reality and the higher realm that might be reached. A leader has to transform himself and embrace his polar nature, masculine and feminine, and create a compelling humanistic vision for the people he leads.

A business is innovative if it shows a dedication to a higher life purpose, rather than a simple one, triggering each of its stakeholders to believe they are creative and to outwardly manifest and share their different maps of life.

The Integral Definition Of Creativity And Innovation In Life

I am creative if I believe it is so, if I have a higher vision than myself for my life, if I get to experience novel things and meet people different from me. The Integral Definition Of Creativity And Innovation In Business

A business is innovative if it shows a dedication to a higher life purpose, rather than a simple one, triggering each of its stakeholders to believe they are creative and to outwardly manifest and share their different maps of life. Warning

Creativity is an integral complex system, namely an integral collection of four complex subsystems, interacting with and polarising each other, exchanging matter, energy and information: The four AQAL Quadrants. As this system contains non-linear processes and is open-ended in its results and inputs, you cannot predict its outcomes. Those who might want to

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assure you that creativity is a simple mechanical process are completely wrong. You can only play with creativity and, in time, some parts of it may reveal certain patterns such as any complex system has. This book is aimed at proposing an integral understanding of creativity and an integral way of honing it in the business environment.

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Teamnet: powering innovation for the evolution of society Innovation is in our DNA. We believe that technology underpins the evolution of society and this is why we have built our business philosophy around technology beyond limits, creating a true hub for innovation within Teamnet. Today, we are a leading regional system integrator, delivering cutting edge technological innovation throughout Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa.

How we do it? Innovation is truly achieved when bright minds, creative ideas and, most importantly, a wide array of competencies combine. At Teamnet, we have gathered experts from the most various industries, such as informatics, mathematics, aeronautics, engineering, robotics or geospatial analysis. Our team brings together the best experts in the field, working together to create innovative technologies and to develop magnitude projects in important areas where they make a real difference, like emergency situations, border surveillance, industrial manufacturing, transportation or agriculture.

Why we do it? The answer is simple: to transform society through technology, so we can make people’slives easier and safer. Research and development is, therefore, a key element of our innovation strategy, and a strong driver for innovation in Teamnet. Along with renowned partners, we have created the prototype of the first revolutionary industrial manufacturing robot Megarob, also, we are part of NEXES – Next Generation Emergency System aimed to create a truly universal emergency situations management system and we currently work on a new UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) system with Airbus. Furthermore, we are building the first robotics R&D center in the region, which reunites a cross-knowledge team specialized in engineering, unmanned aerial vehicles and geographic information systems, in our pursuit to revolutionize the field of robotics, one of our main competences alongside Cloud, Emergency and SCADA. This way, we are contributing to the sustainable long-term evolution of society in the region.

Moving forward... Our objectives for the years to come are to continue developing innovative technologies that significantly improve our lives and to expand the innovation footprint both in local and regional markets. With Romanian intelligence and various key competencies that we constantly invest in, we plan to accelerate the development of groundbreaking technologies and to bring them to the present.

www.teamnet.ro

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The Soil And Seeds Of Creativity And Innovation Ancient Farming Rules

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atch a seed grow. The seed dies and a new small sprout rises above the soil. There is a polarity here: Death and life. Man’s life is the same. Birth and death. Rises and falls. Black nights of the soul and transcendence, illumination. Setting aside ego and ‘absolute’ views on life, letting them die and rising to a new absolute light. Many times a life. When you die, you leave this planet and rise to the realm of… I do not know what this realm is, but I feel it is there. Here is also a polarity: What I believe it is and what I feel it is. When what I believe meets what I feel – there creativity is sparked. When a seed dies and gives birth to a sprout, creation begins. Watch nature. It passes through the same polarity cycles. And thus, it blooms. Watch species mating. The polarity between them gives birth to offspring. Business creativity and innovation are the same. It is the seeding of some seeds into certain soils to generate the polarity of creation.

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My 95-year-old grandfather taught me some rules of farming: Rule #1: Throw many types of seeds; some of them may be dry (no sap inside). Rule #2: Throw the seeds onto many types of soils; some of the soils may not be so fertile (no sap). Rule #3: Provide the conditions for the seeds to grow; they need the soil to be humid and warm, full of nutrients. A lack of suitable conditions means no sap. Water the seeds constantly and provide warmth and sun. Plow, weed and fertilise if necessary. If one of the three types of sap does not exist, life is not sparked. Practically speaking, for creativity to be sparked within a business environment, a leader has to follow these rules: Rule #1: Arrange for as many ‘seeds of creativity’ as possible to exist in a place. Rule #2: Prepare all the ‘soils of creativity’; visit them regularly. Rule #3: Believe that everyone is creative (including oneself) and trigger the same belief in each employee. The entire history of the world shows us that creativity is sparked when information circulates freely among people – 5,000 years ago when first cities formed, or during the Renaissance, or nowadays. This rule applies also in terms of developed/underdeveloped countries. Or developed companies/underdeveloped companies. An act of creation is basically a new idea, a new thought. This means that some one million neurons spark together as they did not do so before. But they are sparked because the brain receives new inputs from the outside, through the five senses, and the inputs are processed in a new way, leading to a new idea. Thus, it is essential to have larger networks of people, different ones mixing together because in this way, their minds have greater possibilities for new thoughts as they see new faces, new behaviours and

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new environments, hear new ways of talking and new words, feel new emotions, taste new tastes and smell new odours. Farming is the same: You mix many types of seeds, tossing many from each type onto several different soils, and condition them. In this way, you have a better chance for something to grow than just throwing one seed into a pot in the same place by the window. Many times, leaders are exactly like this: Strong plants (masculine) living in the same corner (quadrant) of a building. They fail to provide sufficient conditions as they inhabit a corner by themselves in the ethereal strata of the executive level where feedback is not permitted, not encouraged and not asked for. Sometimes, they use GMO seeds and forget to water them. As they barricade themselves in, they have no provocative contact with other people, with other soils, and therefore they ‘die’ in their own mindset. Creativity is not a mechanism. It is not an artificial process, but the nourishing of the natural habits in people. It is a fractalic natural process, a living organism. Plants have different ways of evolving. The seeds of some of them are carried by the wind (dandelions), while the seeds of others just float on the water and germinate at new sites. Other plants ‘shoot’ their seeds out of their pods, and the seeds can travel quite a few feet from the plant.

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Sometimes, farming leads to adaptive-evolutionary creative solutions (continuous innovation) and sometimes to radical-revolutionary solutions (disruptive innovation). It really depends on the mix of the three farming rules: Types of soils, types of seeds, their number, the watering system.

The Seeds Of Creativity As we have discussed previously, there are certain key aspects related to creativity and business innovation. Let’s call them ‘the seeds of creativity and innovation’. SEED #1: Focus-question, the business problem to be solved – There is no creativity outside a focus, a problem to be solved. Outside focus, there is imagination (i.e., creativity with no subject). When problems are solved and the focus dissolved, the solutions are called innovations. The greater the focus-question, the greater the polarity between real life and what might be. And also, here lies the polarity between focus and wandering: Creativity is sparked when long hours of focus and concentration are followed by relaxation. SEED #2: Interest – Creativity has to do with passion and interest in solving the problem. The greater the passion, the greater the creativity and the novelty of solutions. The greater the problem, the greater the interest. The greater the interest, the greater the polarity between what exists and the potential. You cannot be creative if you do not care about the problem laid on the work bench. Also, the polarity here arises from the difference between those most interested in a subject and those not interested, that is, between being fully associated with a problem and then completely dissociated. SEED #3: Waste of ideas – In searching for creative and fresh solutions, creativity needs many iterations, small adaptations, failures, trials. A farmer always knows that he has to throw many seeds onto the soil as only a few of them will transform into plants. The rest will be eaten by birds, part of them will stay dry, and part of them will be carried away by the wind to others’ soils (competition?). It is the same with creativity and business innovation: Throw out many ideas, let them flow freely, water them constantly and wait. A few of them will generate extraordinary innovations, part of them minor

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adaptations and many of them, nothing. The polarity here comes from the difference in volume between a single focus-question and many possible solutions. One ovule and many spermatozoon. SEED #4: Many different (opposite) perspectives – Creativity lies in the mating, lovemaking and pollination of opposite perspectives concerning the same issue. The more opposite they are, the greater the chance for baby ideas to be born. Perspectives are, in fact, different mind maps (memes, ‘colours’) covering the same territory. No map is absolute. All perspectives are relative, but their mixing will certainly create a new useful perspective. Opposite or different perspectives come from different people. Polarity here exists among all these different perspectives. Sometimes, rarely, you may find different perspectives within the same individual, which is why individual creativity has so many scientifically researched links to mental disorders. The greater the difference in perspectives, the greater the chances for innovation in your business. SEED #5: Instruments – Creativity has to do with certain measurable special ways of thinking and behaving. Instruments are thinking styles of the most creative people on the planet. They are linked to a certain absence of absolute mindsets and great flexibility in patterns of thought. Instruments are to be used to solve problems creatively. By using them constantly, they will change your map of life and educate you towards genuine creativity. I give you 10 such instruments. Polarity here is between your daily style of thinking and the lateral or divergent style of thinking, between your usual left-brain (or right brain, rarely) calculations and the intuition in the right brain. SEED #6: Constraint/organisation/freedom – Creativity is the polarity between a limit and infinite possibility. You see the potential when there is a limitation to it. In the business environment, certain constraints accompanied by the freedom of responsibility will trigger creative ideas. We draw lines, illusory lines, but nature does not. To play with constraints is to employ creative thinking. A light constraint upon employees might be, for example, asking for their creative ideas. If accompanied by freedom of action, this might boost many times their engagement in innovating. Another such pairing of polarities might be: Procedures of creative decision-making versus the liberty to dismiss them. If stability and constraints are too tight 91

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Too much freedom and creativity goes back to only imagination; people do not get caught by any focusquestion and nothing is really solved.

(feminine aspect), freedom suffers. If there is too much freedom, imagination loses focus and does not transform itself into creativity, but rather just mind wandering. After all, everything has to be a ‘trial and error’ experiment. Just by purposefully exercising different levels of control and freedom, you will gain the knowledge of the necessary threshold.

The delicate constraint/freedom equilibrium may also be seen as a seed of balance between relaxation and focus. Individuals considered to be creative are alternatively and equally relaxed and concentrated, focused. It is what gives one the feeling of being ‘in the zone’, or ‘in flow’. Too much freedom and creativity goes back to only imagination; people do not get caught by any focus-question and nothing is really solved. Too much stability and there is no creativity, no innovation. As you’ve seen in Chapter 2, there are organisations of different types. The ‘red’ and ‘achievement-orange’ ones keep the barriers high in front of people’s imagination and creativity while striving to keep these elements out, but the fact is that these organisations are so keen on controlling each employee’s moves, thoughts, behaviours and mindsets that it will always be a struggle for them to get their employees to really care about finding new, original solutions. The ‘pluralistic-green’ and ‘evolutionary-teal’ organisations seem nowadays to be the perfect environments in which the balance is effectively maintained.

The 4 Fertile Lots Of Creativity – The Integral Quadrants We have four fertile lots of creativity which constitute the ‘soil’. We have also ‘seeds’ and a ‘conditioning system’ (water, heat and so on). The first lot is the inner self (UL Quadrant of Wilber’s AQAL system). The soil here is full of ‘me’: What I think, I believe, I feel, I sense, I want. It is similar to a rich, moist soil, full of ferment and good stuff, well-watered, 92

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well-ventilated, well-composted. ‘What I Experience’ is the view from here. People centred here are full of themselves, rich in their own thoughts, feelings, perceptions. From this soil, creativity is viewed as one’s inner creativity starting from pure imagination and dedicated to improving dreams, thoughtful plans and artistic views. The UL Quadrant creativity is usually seen as an act of (creative) genius, of native and innate talent, of special DNA and divine origin. The second lot (UR Quadrant) is the one showing my deeds, results, facts, acts, physical belongings. The norm here is ‘What I Do’. The UR ‘soil’ may be seen more as a garden full of various variants of the same plant. The soil is somehow covered by all these plants, which seem very similar as they originate from the same place. In quantitative theories on creativity, UR creativity is usually viewed as acts of ‘creativity’. The creativity which academics and theorists have rooted here is dedicated to explaining creativity through its individual creations (artistic, technical, etc.). They state that creativity is the act of doing something new, inventing a new product, materialising the imagination. Also in this quadrant, we place all the biological and neurological explanations about creativity (how the creative brain functions) and all the DNA scientific explanations of creativity (though we do not have too much knowledge of that right now). The third lot (LL Quadrant) is the ‘collectivity’ quadrant, the space of ‘my’ relations (family, circles of friends, buddies, nations, humanity as a larger community). It looks like a territory larger than the self (‘me’), a complicated and interconnected geography of various soils ready to be seeded, like a collection of plains, hills and meadows, all caught in a subtle exchange of minerals through the subterranean deep waters. Creativity from this quadrant is seen as an emergence of collective imagination, of a collective movement towards new ideas full of potential. Theorists of creativity from this area say ‘let ideas have sex’ in the sense that creativity emerges from collective expressed views, divergent, convergent, opposite or similar. The fourth lot (LR Quadrant) is the lot of many plants in many gardens. It is the lot of gardening, of a system of growing plants and trees, of gardening tools and operations, of the administration of a greenhouse. This quadrant is marked by the ‘What WE Do?’ mantra, and the creativity here is seen 93

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as a process and a system of aligning inventions and innovations, small or big, into a larger than ‘me’ view. From here, creativity is complicated and complex, and supposedly a hard-to-manage endeavour which tries to apply the tools of creativity to certain resources to obtain certain measurable innovative outcomes. Integral Creativity is what you notice growing and what you obtain when you throw seeds onto each of the four types of soils. What emerges is a collection of fruits which come from inside any individual, multiplied by the collective divergence of opinions in the form of structures and systems promoting the best innovations. To increase the chances for an authentic, powerful, long-lasting creative culture in your company or for your business, you have to plant seeds on all four plots of land. You have to increase the chances and arrange the environment for personal creativity and collective creativity by throwing in a higher than ‘me’ and ‘us’ drive. You have to supply tools and instruments for both individual and collective creative expression, and you have to mix people in creative and productive collectives. And, above all, you have to water the seeds (i.e. make everyone believe), watering especially the belief that everyone is creative. William Lee ‘Bill’ Gore (Gore-Tex) says, ‘We can’t run the business. We learned over 25 years ago to let the business run itself. Commitment, not authority, promotes results’. This is like saying, ‘Let nature follow its flow’ (Shetty, Y.K. and Buehler, V.M., 1991, p. 74).

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The Watering System In the middle of this greenhouse system lies the watering system, which, in essence, is the shared belief that ‘I am creative’. Each of the soils receives the water in different forms: ‘I am creative’ (UL); ‘I can use some stuff to get creative and to express my creativity’ (UR); ‘We are creative’ (LL); ‘We can produce creative outcomes and innovations’ (LR).

Upper-Right SOIL (UR)

Upper-Left SOIL (UL)

‘It’ (The Exterior of the Individual) / Behavioural

‘I’ (The Interior of the Individual) / Intentional

Creative Behaviours and Innovations

Creative Thinking and Feeling SEEDS: ‘INTEREST’

THE WATERING SYSTEM ‘I Am Creative’

SEEDS: ‘INSTRUMENTS’

Lower-Right SOIL (LR)

Lower-Left SOIL (LL)

‘Its’ (The Exterior of the Collective) / Social

‘We’ (The Interior of the Collective) / Cultural

Systemic Creativity, Processes

Shared Creativity, Creative Culture

SEEDS: ‘FOCUS-QUESTION TO BE SOLVED’, ‘CONTRAINTS AND FREEDOM ENVIRONMENT’

SEEDS: ‘WASTE OF IDEAS’, ‘MANY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES’

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PART THREE

PRACTICE AND APPLICATION

C hapter 5

Applications Of Integral Innovation (Ants’ Eusociality And Improvisational Theatre)

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ere are some ‘applications’ (natural ones) of the integral theory of creativity and innovation: Ants’ life and improvisational theatre. Both are also examples of complex systems in the sense of the theory of complexity, characterised by simple components (agents) and non-linear interactions among them (the whole is more than the addition of the agents), no central control and emergent behaviours (especially evolution and learning). Creativity is such a similar process. We just have to understand it in this way and then we will be able to harness it.

Ants’ Eusocial (Holacratic) Life And Evolution Ants are invertebrates that can carry four times their weight and have six legs consisting of three segments, and most species of ants can walk on vertical surfaces or ‘upside-down’. A colony consists of a variable number between 100 and several millions of ants. A ‘house‘ of a colony can be as

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small as a walnut or as large as a mound 50 square meters wide and 15 meters deep in the ground. Ants have existed on Earth without interruption for a few million years (as well as bees, wasps and termites, which are some of the only species of creatures that hold this record). In this time, over 10,000 subspecies of ants were inventoried. Each ant colony has a distinct odour (pheromone) so that ants from other colonies (incoming intruders) can be detected instantly. The life of an ant is several tens of days (45 to 60). The queen lives up to five years and in this time can lay several thousand eggs every day. Each colony has a single queen whose only job is to lay eggs. The queen lays eggs that are taken care of by ‘ant caretakers’ until they pass the stage of larva, pupa and adult. Ants in the early stages are kept separate from each other. All ants in a colony are female and sterile. Male ants have only the role of fertilising the queen and later, they die. The functions they perform are related to foraging, defending against other intruders, defending the colony queen and making the colony clean (all debris – including dead ants – is stored in special places). Ants do not possess any kind of hierarchy. Their functions (roles) are defined at birth (by their genetics and epigenetics) and are followed with an iron discipline.

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If a man could run at the speed with which an ant runs in its world, he would run with the speed of a racehorse. An ant has a brain composed of 250,000 nerve cells, and the combined brains of a colony of 40,000 ants equates to a human brain (100 billion neurons). The two antennae of an ant are utilised to touch and smell. In addition, it has two eyes, which are, in turn, composed of several tiny eyes. Ants have a pair of pliers to cut the solid food that they cannot swallow. This kind of food is then deposited in one of the colony’s ‘kitchens’. Decomposed food is then swallowed. The stomach has two rooms: An ant’s individual stomach (as in humans) – the egotistic, ‘masculine’ side of eating, and the ‘social stomach’ (in which food is stored for ‘donation’ to other ants) – the caring, ‘feminine’ side of eating. Ants in a colony move to a new location when there is no longer enough food in the current location. It is estimated that there are about a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) ants worldwide. The biggest ant colony was identified on the Ishikari Coast, in Hokkaido, Japan, where there were 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 square kilometres. Some ants form ‘supercolonies’, that is, massive communities of ants spread over thousands of kilometres. Ants use a sophisticated communication system to coordinate their specialised tasks. A key form of communication among ants is a chemical signal called a pheromone (chemtrails). The roles of pheromones can be various: To alert neighbours of danger and to attract them to the place in question, to guide their peers for food and new places to nest, to mark their territory. Ants arranged in long rows follow these signals. In species that feed in groups, an ant which finds food is then followed by other ants which follow its chemtrail. When the food is gone, no traces are left by the returning ants, and the smell disappears with time. Pheromones are also used as chemical signals applied to the body of larva to identify and nurture specialised young ants from the nest. The ‘workers’ are cared for differently from the ‘soldiers’ based on these marks. Also, ants rely on these odours to know whether a member of the colony died. When a dead ant is discovered, it is ‘buried’ away from the others.

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The queen emits a large number of pheromones that serve various purposes in the colony. Some of queen’s pheromones attract ‘worker ants’ to care for and nurture the queen. Other pheromones released by the queen affect the ‘psychology’ and then the behaviour of ants. For example, certain pheromones are emitted by the queen to prevent ovarian maturation, and other ‘nursing’ ants can cause the larval development of castes. When a dominant queen ceases to produce pheromones, ants start to breed new ‘larva queens’. Some ant species use sound to communicate. Some ants produce sounds by stridulation, using their segments and mandibles. Carpenter ants bang their heads rhythmically on the floors of the room, and leaf cutter ants emit sharp sounds if their nest collapses. These sounds will trigger the nest partners to find and save the ants caught in the trap. Also, ants use touch, in particular their antennas, to communicate. Ants which have discovered a large quantity of food can attract attention by hitting the other ants with their antennae, legs or heads. Some primitive ants engage in duels involving hitting each other with their antennas. These duels determine which ‘nursing ant’ is dominant and remains with the offspring. But much of the work in an ant colony is done without direct communication. Ants are guided directly to the task itself. For example, the collapse of a route corridor will cause the ants to repair it without waiting for any instructions. An ability to respond directly to a task avoids attracting a large number of working ants for a task that takes only a few to accomplish.

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When looking for a new house, ants apply a set of extraordinarily effective rules. First, ‘researcher ants’ (few in number) begin to look for a new habitable space. Each unit is tested and ‘measured’ several times to check whether it will be large enough to accommodate the entire colony. If the space passes this first test, the ants return to the colony on a ‘mission of persuasion’: They communicate and sometimes forcefully oblige other ants to follow them to the new place. After this ‘conviction campaign’ reaches a critical number of ants, the rest of the colony at that point is simply driven to the new home forcibly. Throughout this adventure to find a new location, ants communicate with each other constantly, and their ‘responsibility’ is that they do not deviate from the mission of finding a new home until it is completed. They continually share their ‘assumptions’ and invite other ants to provide feedback. In the case of a colony of ants, their colony’s final ‘aim’ is related to its survival and perpetuation. A colony never crumbles from within. The only reason why a colony might disappear is to be conquered by another colony, but in this case, conquered ants are often embedded in the new colony. Ants’ organisation is based on total cooperation (feminine aspect of nature), the coexistence of several adult generations together in a colony, a clear division of ‘work’ (masculine aspect of organisation) and a lack of hierarchy, exchanged with eusociality.

The evolutionary history of this species is similar to that of man – a continuous series of creative adaptations to the environment.

Eusociality (their way of organisation) has led this insect species to endure for more than 100 million years on Earth without discontinuities and despite changing climate conditions. The evolutionary history of this species is similar to that of man – a continuous series of creative adaptations to the environment, spread across a huge length of time (from the point of view of human life) but on a tiny cosmic scale. Ants are the top species in the order of invertebrates, just as men are to vertebrates because

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one of the main laws of nature’s organisation on Earth is that the most complex species (eusocial ones) are the ones that dominate the planet by their number. All the rules of integral creativity are at play here: Individual autonomy (UL, UR), collective working (LL), a clear understanding (by genetics) of the overarching ‘why do we live on Earth?’ (LR), everything ‘watered’ by the simple unconscious genetically set roles ants receive at birth. This no-consciousness species has prospered through permanent adaptations (creativity) for more than 100 million years, uninterruptedly, completely integrated with this planet’s life. During the last years, we, the conscious human species, have adapted some of our processes and been inspired by ants, in aeronautics, transportation, the launching of satellites and so on.

‘Yes, And…’ (Or How A Simple Speaking Trick Can Boost Creativity)

“There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain. There are far more ‘No’ sayers around than ‘Yes’ sayers, but you can train one type to behave like the other.” —Keith Johnstone, Impro. Improvisation and the Theatre, 1981, p.92 Playing on stage as a theatrical improviser, I got a first-hand experience of what integral creativity might look like. Back then, I used to get stuck sometimes in fear, in egotistic assumptions or in not listening enough to what the other actors were playing and saying. It is the same sometimes with corporates dealing with innovation.

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There are several rules at work when improvising. The key rule is maybe to say ‘yes’ to everything, not blocking out any of the other actors’ intentions, moves, lines. When you attain this ability, the performance reaches new heights of excellence as each step is directed towards exploration and opens up new possibilities. By saying ‘yes’, you co-create a space of common acting, leave space for everyone to contribute equally and wait for inspiration to emerge collectively from the group of actors. ‘The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.93). The actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural. And an important change of mindset is involved here. When an actor (someone) concentrates on making the thing he gives interesting, each actor seems in competition, while when actors concentrate on making the gift they receive interesting, then they generate warmth between them.

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The second real challenge is to really listen, not just hear, but listen. We do not really exert our full capacity in listening or seeing, or tasting or feeling or smelling the world as a territory but through our filters and maps. Listening at this level presupposes that you employ your senses at the ‘raw’ level and force the inner voice in your mind to be quiet and silent. Listening at this level takes you back and forth from your shoes and into the other person’s shoes, and pushes you to act as if you are one with the other person. This is ‘collaborative emergence’ (not ‘competitive emergence’). ‘When you listen, you become a hallway – a passive, receptive uterus. You become feminine’ (Osho, 1999, p.75). Hence the yin/yang explanations of creativity. Improvisational theatre functions on the basis of ‘complex theory’ or ‘fractal evolution’. Emergentists argue that there are several natural laws working within the body of any natural system. One is unpredictability. You may see this in an ant’s life and also in improv. No single ant, no single actor may know the next ‘move’ or the final outcome of a group action. And still, there is always an outcome, better than any individually foreseen outcome, and one that fulfils everyone. Another law is that the production of an ‘emergent’ work is not reducible to any of its components or actors. You cannot decipher the real initiator of the outcome nor can you deduce from the outcome anything about the players. Another law is that the framework establishes itself from the collective work. Ants and improv actors set up the main ‘physics’ of the space they themselves have co-created. In a sense, this is what holacratic evolutionary companies experience: The whole working space and rules are settled on by permanent co-creation. Thus, each and every single actor is an ‘associate’ of the play or work he contributed to; hence, they have self-awareness and own full responsibility. This law is usually called ‘inter-subjectivity’: It is like defining a marriage as ‘me, you and our relationship’ not just ‘me’ and ‘you’. ‘Our relationship’ becomes a character in itself. Overlapping subjective understanding in a common work or play generates common beneficial results.

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John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians in history, who made great contributions in all the related fields (quantum physics, genetics, topology, informatics, etc.), was the first to suggest that for complex systems (such as jazz or theatre improvisation, or creativity or life itself), the simplest description might be its simulation. This means that you cannot describe and predict creativity or the innovation outcome of a group of people by describing its components but only by letting them act. A simple case of an improvisation game would be the following: Four actors stand in a row in front of an audience. They receive from the audience the ‘title of an as yet unwritten story’ that they have to tell. A fifth actor will direct the performance by indicating from time to time which actor has to be the storyteller. Each time the storyteller changes, he has to take over the story from the place at which where the previous actor was telling it and also take into consideration and reincorporate everything which was being said before by the other actors. What emerges from this is always creative, hilarious or dramatic memorable stories, as each actor has his own personality but is also trained to listen deeply and say ‘yes’, and not block any crazy idea before it is expressed. Here is an example of such a story: Actor 1: ‘A bear chases Dan through the forest. He escapes the bear by rowing across to an island’. Actor 2: ‘Inside a hut on the island is a beautiful girl bathing in a wooden tub’. Actor 3: ‘Dan is making passionate love to her when he happens to glance through the window. The bear is rowing across in a second boat’. Actor 4: ‘The girl sees the bear too and she screams “My Lover!”’ Actor 1: ‘She hides Dan under the bed. The bear enters the hut, unzips his skin and emerges as a grey old man who makes love to the girl’.

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Actor 3: ‘Dan creeps out of the hut, taking the skin with him so that the old man can’t change back into a bear’. Actor 2: ‘Dan runs down to the shore and rows back to the mainland…’ Actor 4: ‘… towing the second boat behind him. Then he sees the old man…’ Actor 1: ‘… paddling after him in the tub’. Actor 2: ‘The old man seems incredibly strong, and Dan feels there is no escape from the guy’. Actor 4: ‘Dan pulls the bearskin around himself and waits for the old man among the trees’. Actor 3: ‘Dan becomes a bear and tears the old man to pieces. He then rows back to the island and finds…’ Actor 1: ‘... the girl has vanished. The hut has become very old and the roof is sagging in, and trees that were young saplings…’ Actor 2: ‘… are now very tall.’ Actor 4: ‘Then Dan tries to remove the bearskin and finds…’ Actor 3: ‘… it is sealed up around him’. (Adaptation of a story mentioned by Keith Johnstone – Johnstone, 1981, p.112)

Improv checks in all the four corners of the AQAL integral creativity framework: Own imagination and beliefs (UL) of each player; few rules as instruments of creativity (UR) – listening, do not block, keep your status or character; collective emergence (LL); and a clear framework of a game setting (LR) – the rules of each game itself. Everything is nurtured by the watering belief that ‘I and we together may create something novel’. And this kind of performance is never-ending, just the same as creativity.

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The interest for the audience lies in their admiration for the way the actors work with each other. ‘We so seldom see people working together with such joy and precision’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.96). It is the same for holacratically organised companies. You can imagine now how Zappos employees felt when they first faced these challenging new mindsets, after a holacratic system (or a variant of it) got implemented at the company – to be able not only to express your ego and also to keep it in check, to affirm your identity and also to embrace another’s is the ultimate expression of embracing your whole self, both feminine and masculine, of letting yourself be guided by a new understanding of life – a more peaceful and fruitful one.

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Giving Birth To A Creative Business Decision – The 6 Stages

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urposeful imagination, that is, creativity, has to do with several stages or steps as I have empirically detected by studying improvisation, the life of ants, human evolution, how nature works and how the greatest creative minds work. The six stages below are all essential to creativity and mimic nature’s way of sparking creativity (life). They should be applied to solve business problems, in small groups or large populations of employees, in multiple sessions. You may want to look over the tips and practices detailed in Chapter 9 and 10 in order to have successful sessions – the hints related to the composition of teams when performing the sessions below are especially important. STAGE 1: Preparation STAGE 2: Focus-question STAGE 3: Burst Idea Generation Session (BIGS) STAGE 4: Employees’ Ideas Pool Poll and Clients’ and Competitors’ Pool Poll STAGE 5: Theta Idea Exploration Session (TIES) STAGE 6: ‘People Decide Session’ and Implementation

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From a farming point of view, these stages are similar to the ones for growing plants: The soil is prepared (and the watering system), the seeds are sown (focus-question), spring comes and many saplings bloom (stage three), the farmer reduces the density for the healthy growth of plants (stage four), there is some plowing, weeding and fertilising (stage five) and then finally harvesting. It is easy to notice that the stages follow a rather rhombic shape: Opening, development, closing, with the development phase a lot larger than the other two. This is also the way nature operates: Birth – growth – death or wholeness (or nothingness) – fractal multiplicity – nothingness (or wholeness). And also, one may go back and forth from one stage to another after the beginning and before the end. Nature also does the same. A plant tests the surroundings with its leaves and retracts if there is not enough light or warmth, and tests the soil with its roots and retracts and avoids the infertile soil. A bird flies round and round until it catches a useful stream of air and so on. And we humans do the same in our lives by rethinking the same problems, letting our mind go back and forth from memories to present deeds to wishful thinking. We have bad days and good days. We discover ourselves at different ages and sometimes break through consciousness levels. Ants had steps backward in their evolution, and humans did too.

Stage 1: Preparation (Alpha Brain State, Relaxed Mind And Body) A plant’s seed contains everything it needs to germinate and grow; it is similar to our ‘preparation’ stage. It is the stage of wholeness and yin/yang union. Thus, for humans it is essential to exit the normal beta state of the brain, get relaxed and suspend the ego, while enjoying the unknown of what will be. This is the ‘polarity’ (spark generation): The difference between the current mental and emotional state and the ‘creative’ one (which we sometimes call ‘inspiration’). It is easy to see that the first stage is not necessary for small kids when they play. They need no preparation to enter the state of creativity as their brains are already in a relaxed (alpha) and creative (theta) state. 112

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In improvisational theatre also, the ‘preparation’ stage is done for months on end before any show is staged and it basically means practicing the same games but without audience. In the case of Adobe’s ‘Red Kickbox’ initiative, this phase is done through the optional two-day workshop where people learn the principles of the initiative, how to use the box and how to get A leader has to instil creative and ‘inspired’. The Kickbox a koinonia spirit in is, in fact, a very good approximation the company/session, of the AQAL framework applied in an environment of creativity as I explained before: You tolerance, a lack of give individuals back the power of presuppositions, their imagination (UL), give them a and equality among tool (UR), place them in contact with the members. others (LL) and provide a framework (the six steps, the whole process – LR). In a business environment aiming at continuous creativity and possibly disruptive innovation, this phase should be continuous as well. ‘At Teamnet, we walked on the innovation path not because it was easy, but because we wanted it badly. The challenge isn’t within the group; we see limitations only outside’ (Bogdan Padiu, Teamnet). Employees, or at least a certain part of them, have to always be ‘prepared’ and ready to generate novel ideas. In holacratic business environments, people are prepared due to the way they work and relate to each other. Ants function like this in the case of feeding: One meets another and the latter is starving and far away from the nest, so the first will feed the latter from its ‘social stomach’. This is what the human race does when facing a grand natural disaster. Otherwise, a leader has to instil a koinonia spirit in the company/session, an environment of tolerance, a lack of presuppositions, and equality among the members. You will find lots of tips and ideas ready to be implemented in your company in Chapter 9. What you have to do as a leader at this stage is to be assured that the soil is ready (fertile, well watered, in the sun) and that it will maintain this condition into the future, and that there are mechanisms in place in your company which will cherish innovation and creativity forever. 113

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Also, in Chapter 8, you will find out an integral proposal for an innovation-generation business framework where there are listed several actions to be done in this stage. In fact, you are sowing many seeds at this stage: You create the necessary balance between constraints and freedom. You stimulate people’s creativity and prepare them to accept different opinions and for the feeling of wasting many ideas. Why? To be ready to live the extraordinary realisation of your and others’ innate creativity. Why not? Otherwise, you will generate boring ideas, which already exist or are obsolete, lower the morale in the company and have mercenaries instead of fanatic followers. How? Patience and dedication, believing everyone is creative and showing this at every occasion. What? You will obtain a state of focused relaxation and employees’ mindset flexibility, which are necessary for creative thinking.

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Stage 2: Focus-Question (Alpha Brain State, Focused Mind) This is sometimes called the ‘inception’ stage, in which one has to concentrate and focus his mind on one thing only: The problem to be solved. In Adobe’s ‘Red Kickbox’, this phase is called ‘inception’ and this is when you nail down your motivation behind the idea and the idea itself. In improvisational theatre, this is the moment when the actors receive the needed input from the audience (a title for a scene or a story, words to improvise with and so on). The more challenging the focus-question, the better. The greater the interest, the better. The higher the motivation, the better. It will gather the participants’ entire energy into a single spot, and their minds will receive a great boost to work on a problem which really means a great deal to them. In the most natural and instinctual way, kids do not play games they do not like; rather, they prefer to stay on the side or play something else. As a corporate leader using this process to generate creative and innovative solutions to business issues, you should gather around the focus-question only the employees who are really engaged and interested in solving it, as if you were choosing the most potent seeds. And bear in mind that you need to propose focus-questions of interest to as many of your subordinates, employees or teammates as possible. If this step weren’t so important, we wouldn’t have iPhones, the theory of relativity, CERN or space exploration today. If survival wasn’t a big deal for the human race and for the reign of ants, they would not be the two main species dominant on this planet today. Even if a focus-question is a seed mainly for the LR plot of soil, it has to be also well sowed onto the other soils; has to be of interest for each of the employees involved (UL); has to be well defined, specific and clearly formulated as a behaviour of a product to be observed/obtained (UR Quadrant); and also has to interest the whole team in an emergent way, as if solving it will lift the employees’ collectivity onto a higher level of consciousness (LL). Why? To have a focus point without which what you intend is just pure imagination.

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Why not? To avoid dreaming and wasting money and planetary resources instead of creating welfare for people. How? By finding the sweet spot of the intersection of a company’s interest, your interest, employees’ shared interest, clients’ desires and an overarching meaning of life. What? A phrase precisely describing what everybody would want and be happy about.

Stage 3: Burst Idea Generation Session (BIGS) (Alpha And Theta Brain States, Focused Mind) In the case of a classical improvisation theatre game, this stage is represented by the first one to three minutes when actors throw lots of new ideas into the play. At this stage, they do not tend to incorporate all the elements (as in the future stages) but to raise the stakes by coming up with different ‘proposals’. In the case of Adobe’s Kickbox, this is the stage called ‘ideate’ where you are supposed to use notebooks (‘good ideas’ and ‘bad ideas’ notebooks). This is basically the most important part of the whole process of generating innovative ideas and of implementing such a culture in your company. If conditions from stages one and two are well settled, stage three might be a continuous process. Meetings might be BIGS, corporate sales conventions, board meetings and so on. This stage consists of dedicated sessions of ‘brainstorming’ novel ideas related to the defined focus-question. Now it’s the time for the farmer in you to bring the spring rain and sun over the soil and the seeds. Have you ever seen someone having a relaxed concentration? It is sometimes called the ‘flow state’ (Csikszentmihalyi), a mind-body-spirit state where perception of time is completely changed as you are immersed in doing something with pleasure and learning from it (Gallwey). This state is the desired one for this stage of the innovation process. How can you get it out of your employees? By patiently performing the right actions in previous stages for some time. The flow state is associated with dedication to your

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‘element’ (Robinson), which means the focus-question has to be of great interest for each of your employees and for them collectively, and it has to be close to their area of expertise. Essential in this step is the attitude and spirit of koinonia, that is, suspending judgment, suspending one’s own agenda and listening to others in discovering the real territory out there, like a small child does when playing. A child does not possess a strong ego and personality yet, and therefore is not reluctant to accept other children’s proposals. The next chapter has a large view onto this stage especially. The many instruments offered there are meant to cover all the seeds for each of the four quadrants and to create as many polarities as possible in order to generate the sparking of ideas. Why? To create an emergent web of new ideas, to engage employees, to move ahead, to change life in a significant way. Why not? Without this step you will not innovate but instead maintain the status quo in a world full of possibilities of well-being and significant contribution. How? Creative techniques to stimulate any kind of useful polarity and spark. What? Hundreds of ideas.

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Stage 4: Employees’ Ideas Pool Poll And Clients’ And Competitors’ Pool Poll (Beta Brain States) This stage is as essential for the process of innovation as were the many trials and errors for Thomas Alva Edison when he invented the light bulb. It is a sort of ‘constraints and freedom’ seed in the sense that it filters what has been generated until now and creates a free space for future exploration of what remains. It functions also as a left-brain check from the public. It is similar to the audience clapping their hands and expressing their enjoyment for theatrical improvisers or not. It is also caught in the Adobe Kickbox’s procedure (partially in each of the ‘improve’, ‘iterate’ and ‘investigate’ phases). It is what will guide, stop or boost you forward as you will either gather avid followers or you will face the naysayers. A farmer has to reduce density to achieve the healthy growth of plants. This is what is at the core of Kickstarter and Indiegogo: Are they going to pledge for my idea? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes, no. In the case of ants and humans as species, this stage has functioned continuously during the millions or hundreds of thousands of years leading up to today, forcing a continuous adaptation through trial and error. As I said in previous chapters, new ideas (adaptive and revolutionary) appear when the present ‘state of affairs’ cannot be dealt with anymore; new ideas appear at the circumference of the comfort zone, when meeting new conditions, new people, new experiences, when there is a polarity between what is and what might be. Nature has been giving feedback to ants and humans throughout earth’s history. Exposing newly generated ideas to any stakeholder is, in fact mimicking, nature’s way of creation. Nature is giving us enough signals nowadays, but our stubbornness may lead to the disappearance of Homo sapiens – or not, if you start listening. ‘There is a framework for innovating within Teamnet and sometimes it is given through our participation into certain international collaborations. Also, the structure of the company and our cultures inspire the employees that “we are proactive towards innovation”’ (Bogdan Padiu, Teamnet).

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The more transparently you execute this step, the more likely you will be to receive the most accurate feedback for existing ideas. And still, there is the risk of clients not understanding your product or the future services you plan to invent. What do you do? Why? To test your ideas and find the best and greatest ones, the ones which ‘will do’. Why not? To avoid wasting money on crazy ideas or being lost under a burden of possibilities. How? Online and offline questionnaires, meetings, focus groups or through the implementation of an ‘idea exchange’ platform where each stakeholder may buy and sell shares of ideas. What? You will end up with a bunch of several good and novel ideas.

Stage 5: Theta Idea Exploration Session (TIES) (Alpha And Theta Brain States, Focused Mind) The stage of ‘plowing, weeding and fertilising’, of improving, iterating and investigating (Adobe Red Kickbox) is the stage of going more deeply into the soil to test the viability of the few ideas left standing after the previous step. In a way, you are seeding some more seeds of the #4, #5 and #6 types, but mostly, you are applying Rule #3 of farming (watering and conditioning the existing plants). This is what is called ‘reincorporation’ in theatrical improv: Actors start to combine the existing ideas and come up with novel continuations. If an ant finds a possible new home for the colony, it will explore the new territory and start to include other ants to explore some more. The new ants will involve other ants in their turn and so on, until the whole colony is moved to the new location. The same is true in finding new sources of food or facing an enemy. The key here is playfulness. The more the participants set aside their egos, beliefs, own maps credo and, most especially, their ‘adult view of the world’, the more they will find the real essence (Michalko) behind the ideas

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explored. When one discovers the real essence of things, one becomes exuberant about the (new) reality as one finds connections one has not thought of before, and ideas take the shape of possible innovations. What’s behind a drill? A hole. What’s behind a window? Protection. What’s behind lending money? Consumption. What’s behind a condom? Lust and love. When someone starts to combine essences instead of forms (meaning instead of representation), he will come up with novel ideas once more, while deepening the possibilities and perspectives on the existing ideas. The attitude here is that of children playing, making free associations with what they have at hand and exploring a game until they are fed up and exhausted. The whole existence of humanity is, in fact, based on this stage as most inventions are combinations of existing ones. Once, we only had wood at hand, then stones, bones, iron and so on. Going deep and wide (lateral) is what the mind has to do. In the case of holacratic businesses, this happens during the regular informal meetings where ideas are discussed and explored (versus the normal corporation where ideas are presented and dismissed). Adobe Red Kickbox uses $1,000 of free money at the disposal of each employee to explore his own idea. Adobe calculated that giving away several hundreds of thousands of dollars in this way is a form of incentive – project money and investment in employees’ autonomy at least. At the end of the pipeline, a multimillion-dollar idea might emerge among the others and cover the expenditures of the whole program. Why? To get a full perspective of ‘what might be’ and ‘what it will be like’. Why not? Without this step, you will be lost among the details of implementation and not know what the implications are. How? Several creative instruments to involve participants in a balanced exploration state, playful and still conscious. What? The result will be a better understanding of the reality of implementing the few ideas selected, a greater awareness (Whitmore).

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Stage 6: ‘People Decide Session’ And Implementation (Beta Brain States, Focused Mind) This is what ‘infiltrate’ means in the case of Adobe’s Red Kickbox, namely to decide, pitch and implement. Each ant decides on his or her own and implements directly, without the need of a supervisor to check the action. In holacratic corporations, the same thing occurs. In theatrical improvisation, each actor is his or her own master and directs the whole action as his intuition and preparation dictates. In normal cases of innovation programs, ideas previously explored are passed through various decisional filters: Committees, experts, panels, SWOT analysis, and economic and financial aspects are evaluated until they are implemented. Good… if they are implemented. Not good… if the whole process of ideation is disregarded and considered useless. It is best if you let people decide, that is the ones who will be affected by the new changes which are implied. It is the best of the best if you also ask and test the ‘final consumers’. In my view, to implement freely the ideas you came up with is the greatest form of freedom (seed #6) you may give an employee.

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I believe that creative instruments may be applied here. Several feasibility tests will do as long as employees certainly try to avoid crazy ideas during the other stages. In doing so, you can preserve the ‘celebration’ aspect of the whole process and let them be the ‘authors’ of the ideas. Most of them, though, in the normal circumstances of innovation programs may feel frustrated and lied to, as if their ideas are being stolen as they are transformed and mutilated until the initial intention is no longer no recognisable. Together with the outcomes of the exploration stage, the same people will be able to decide which ideas are the best, knowing the whole implications of each idea and having the responsibility (Whitmore) for the ideas. Why? Preserve motivation of participants and morale of the whole company. Why not? Totally destroys engagement. How? Give the power to the ones who have the problem and the solutions. What? Have an implementation pilot run by the initiators of the ideas and then disseminate and scale the outcomes.

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Giving Birth To A Creative Business Decision – The 10 Possible Techniques Stage 1: Preparation Choose The Participants

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group of 6 to 12 participants will do. When choosing them, think of their attitude, motivation, mindset, lifestyle, and mix them together so that they will form a team of creative people. Look over Chapter 2 where I describe creative mindsets and behaviours. Mix the participants so that they cover any possible criteria of mixing (gender, religion, age, expertise, etc.). The facilitator should be able to face any opinion from any of the participants, especially from those with formal hierarchical roles in the company. He should especially keep the egos of these participants under control.

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Choose The Environment

The intention towards ‘sparking’ a decisional process is to bring all the participants into a state of creative flow (Csikszentmihalyi) which will help in solving the focus-question.

The setting of the creative session has to be a comfortable one, an unusual one, one which transmits an urgency to solve the focus-question. These three conditions are essential. Otherwise, the setting should have no contact with the usual office setting of the employees. Have a trained facilitator. He should be energetic, open-minded, organised, have a ‘coaching mindset’ and know everything about the process and innovation theories. It is even better to have two facilitators. The second one might be the ‘minute’s taker’ of the session.

Prepare The Participants

The intention towards ‘sparking’ a decisional process is to bring all the participants into a state of creative flow (Csikszentmihalyi) which will help in solving the focus-question. In such a state, in which all the inner parts of you are gathered into a ‘being’ state full of meaning for goals which overcome you, the creative ideas naturally appear the same. The cognitive processes are becoming more natural. The ‘flow’ state is defined as the physical, emotional and mental way of being in which the meaning of what you do is clear for you, you get live feedback, there is a balance between the provocation and your resources, you have the highest control over your actions and you fully understand their roles (you have perspective), your mind is focused on the present and completely absorbed by the activity, your ego is silent and dormant, there is no worry or fear of failure, your self-consciousness disappears and you are feeling as if you are part of a bigger whole. Your sense of time is no more and the activity becomes ‘autotelic’, meaning it is an end in itself.

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It is extremely important for the participants to keep this during all the six next stages of finding solutions to a focus-question. Therefore, you should not have a period longer than, say, four hours to do everything listed below. For the preparation stage, you may use any of the games or practices listed below: •

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

‘Mumble’ – give two teams of participants short instructions on some roles to play, a short script or a title, and let the teams express the script by mumbling or using their bodies (not saying a word). ‘Gibberish’ – the same exercise but using a language the participants do not speak but pretend to be able to speak. ‘Yes, and…’ – an exercise in which all the participants sit in a circle, and you start with a neutral sentence (for example ‘I am here’) and then pass it on to the next person in the circle, having him say ‘Yes, and…’ and continuing it. ‘Draw with both hands’ – an exercise which involves each participant to draw something collectively with both their hands (even while they are in the dark or blindfolded). ‘Associating images’ – one participant evokes one image, and the next participant spontaneously evokes an image he links to the first one, and so on. ‘Word at a time’ – one participant starts with a word, and each participant who follows adds a word to create a meaning with the words already given, until an entire story is made up. ‘Space creature’ – teams of participants create creatures from outer space in different space settings (structured creativity) and modify them until they really become unusual creatures. ‘Exchange of shoes’ – each of the participants places their own shoes on the table in the creativity room, notes the differences and then exchanges the shoes and ‘is for a while walking in the other person’s shoes’. ‘Impossible task’ – split the participants into two teams and give them something impossible to do so that they will learn that failure is part of the process.

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•

‘Senses provocation’ – immerse the participants into a sensory experience where they have to describe an unknown space by using only one of the five senses (the most unused ones – smelling, tasting), while the others are blocked.

Any warm-up improv exercise implying mind, body and spirit will do, or any kind of yoga and meditation will do. Exercises implying all senses, both yin and yang aspects, both right and left-brain hemispheres, solo and collective exercises will create a good alpha-theta state of mind.

Stage 2: Focus-Question At this stage, the facilitator suggests a focus-question, a problem to be resolved. The more ardent this problem, the more the participants will be engaged. Therefore it is essential that the facilitator and sponsors of such a program of creative decisions know what issue will be put on the table and who the participants will be so as to obtain maximum interest. The problem must be defined by taking into account the clear separation I have explained in the previous chapters concerning the ‘why?’, ‘how?’, and ‘what?’ Participants have to know whether this problem is rather related to an attitude that needs to be defined, a certain skill or behaviour, or a specific and clearly defined product or service.

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In formulating some focus-questions related to products/services/ results/information/knowledge/concepts (‘what?‘), the words usually used are knowledge, retaining, understanding, listing from memory, definition, description, identification, enumeration, naming, matching, labelling, remembrance, recognition, reproduction, argumentation, assertion, choice, explaining, predicting, exemplification, interpretation, transcription, translation, abridgment, calculation, prediction, discovery, correlation, solving, analysis, decomposition, comparison, differentiation, illustration, deduction, description, selecting, combining, compiling, creating, organising, planning, design, linking, review, writing, review, criticism, or discrimination, summarising, justification. Examples of such focus-questions: ‘To design a new product’, ‘to organise the chain of production’, ‘to choose the most cost-efficient service’, ‘to select the best seller’, ‘to better differentiate our products’. In formulating some focus-questions related to abilities/skills/ behaviours/processes (‘how?’), the words usually used are to get started, to choose, to detect, to identify, to isolate, to observe, to feel, to manifest, to explain, to move to, to proceed, to react, to look, to say, to offer, to make, to succeed, to draw, to come forth, to reproduce, to respond, to assemble, to calibrate, to build, to break, to engage, to fix, to heat, to manipulate, to measure, to repair, to mix, to organise, to sketch, to build, to gather, to shape, to adjust, to modify, to change, to rearrange, to reorganise, to revise, to vary, to arrange, to compose, to achieve, to design, to engage, to invent. Examples of such focus-questions: ‘How to isolate the competitors’, ‘how to better respond to clients’ requests’, ‘how to evaluate the effects of the stimulating measures on the personnel’, ‘how to reorganise the call centre’, ‘how to detect a decrease in employees’ engagement in a timely way’, ‘how to teach more quickly our clients to use the new product’, ‘how to better explain to the market our business model’, ‘how to detect competitors’ new innovations in due time’, ‘how to increase the interoperability grade among our departments’.

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In formulating some focus-questions related to attitudes/motivations, such words are used as to be more…, to ask…, to choose, to validate, to rely on, to use, to help, to respond, to conform, to discuss, to provide, to present, to report, to say, to have insight, to feel, to demonstrate, to form, to engage, to move to action, to join, to propose, to work, to join, to transform, to defend, to explain, to alter, to educate, to link, to influence, to act, to manifest the discernment, to serve, to settle, to check. Examples of such focus-questions: ‘Employees listen respectfully’, ‘employees actively participate in workshops’, ‘employees are more innovative’, ‘clients are curious about our brand’, ‘competitors are frightened by us’, ‘employees are proactive towards solving daily glitches’, ‘employees are more responsible’, ‘employees are sincere’, ‘employees are autonomous’. Each time you define a problem to be solved, make sure you touch all the ‘?s’ of that problem: The ‘why?’, the ‘how?’ and the ‘what?’, and also their counterparts (the ‘nots’, the ‘ifs’, etc.). You may also include aspects related to what is outside the three circles, namely the environment and the communication of the problem within this environment. Doing so, you ensure that apart from being a problem, this is a ‘focus-question’. Activity: Define the focus-question clearly for all those who will participate in solving it. Conditions: The focus-question should be at the centre of everything from now on. Be sure everybody has a copy of it at all times and has benefited from a clear description of the outcomes that are aimed for. AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seed #1 (focus-question) and #2 (interest). Sparks generated: From engagement towards a problem of interest, from the new environment and from the difference between relaxation in stage one and the focus and concentrated attention in this stage.

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Stage 3: Burst Idea Generation Session (BIGS)

Technique #1: ‘Brainstorming On The Anti-Focus-Question’ ‘The Anti-Focus-Question’ aims at completely changing the perspective on the main focus-question. It uses ‘lateral thinking’ (Edward De Bono) and proposes the definition of an ‘anti-focus-question’ (meaning the ‘opposite’ problem) for which solutions have to be found. By finding solutions for the anti-focus-question and exaggerating these solutions to Do you drive the maximum, the participants come yourself crazy with to understand which ones are the good a problem which solutions for the problem in question. inspires passion in In the brainstorming used to generate you? What if this solutions for the anti-focus-question, idea is negative (or there are no wrong ideas. What matters at least inside-out)? is a large volume of ideas, no matter how awkward they may seem. Do you drive yourself crazy with a problem which inspires passion in you? What if this idea is negative (or at least inside-out)? In nature, this ‘technique’ is called trial and error. Each plant or animal daily tests the environment and learns from it, and on a larger scale, each species adapts and selects the best genes to be transmitted over to the next generations this way. Antoni Gaudi solved the problem of the Sagrada Familia’s architecture by using chains and wires hanging upside-down. Activity: Step 1: The participants are invited to define the ‘anti-focus-question’. Step 2: Generate as many solutions to this anti-focus-question as you can, by using the classical brainstorming technique. Exaggerate these solutions. Step 3: In the end, look over the ‘negative solutions’ and turn them around, inside-out. You will find ideas for the initial focus-question. 131

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Conditions: Standing, parallel generation of solutions (several teams and everybody writes down ideas without discussing them), mixed teams, exchanging partners (participants are like visitors in a museum seeing pictures of collected ideas and coming up with retouches and new ideas). Bodystorming might be a good addition (participants use their bodies to simulate negative ideas instead of expressing them verbally). Same with drawstorming (participants draw their solutions). Also, you may use a variant of going to the extreme with the perspective on the anti-focus-question (participants would respond to a question like, ‘How could we solve this anti-focus-question if we had all the resources in the world?’ followed by a second question, ‘How could we solve it if we did not have any resources?’ and combining the answers). AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seed #1 and #6, LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #3 and #4. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), ‘me’ and ‘us’, the normal ‘cause-effect’ thinking process reverted to an ‘anti-cause–anti-effect’ process.

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Technique #2: ‘Free Associations’ With this method, the participants or the facilitator proposes a forced association between the defined focus-question and anything else. We humans understand the world by associations and analogies – a plane resembles a helicopter, a bicycle is similar to a car. ‘Free associations’ presuppose the breaking of these thinking patterns in a definitive way, proposing an analogy or association to generate ideas. This is the same way children’s minds work when they have not yet developed a complete map of meanings. They are still able to give names to objects in the way they see fit. Activity: Step 1: Participants generate a list with several stimulating words (‘stimuli’), randomly chosen, using, for example, a dictionary or any printed material, and note them. The words may define objects, qualities, states or anything else. Step 2: The objects or states or whatever the word describes is defined by its characteristics (adjectives, attributes about the shape, colour, nature, interior, etc.). Step 3: Then, the participants use gross brainstorming to find all the properties (‘derived characteristics’) of the focus-question by relating the properties of the objects (from the previous step) to the focus-question itself. Step 4: Look over the ‘derived characteristics’ of the focus-question and brainstorm solutions for it. Participants list all the ideas and solutions. Conditions: Standing while brainstorming is the most appropriate posture for generating more energy. AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seed #5, LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #3 and #4. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), ‘me’ and ‘us’, meaning versus real thing (map versus territory).

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Technique #3: ‘Combinations’ This activity is based on combinations between the focus-question and different things, ideas and so on. Children do not care about combining toys, things or other resources in order to play. But adults remain stuck in their map of meanings and each object has a clear definition and utilisation. This technique breaks down these barriers. Activity: Step 1: Make a two-column worksheet filled with participants’ proposals of different combinations. You may iterate this technique several times, including all the possible variants below: •

•

•

• •

A combination of two domains (stimuli words from domains different from the focus-question domain; one great idea would be to choose domains linked to nature). A combination of connected domains (if you need solutions to a marketing focus-question, choose two successful ad campaigns, or PR campaigns or political campaigns). A combination and crossing of two ‘stimulus’ objects (combine objects, animals, plants, substances, shapes with one another and creatively describe these new non-existent products). Choose classical pairs of objects (nail–hammer, moon–sun, Facebook–LinkedIn, tree–wind, etc.). Combine two senses out of the five (seeing–hearing, smelling–touching, etc.).

Step 2: Look over the combinations and derive characteristics of the focus-question starting from attributes of the combinations above. Step 3: Brainstorm solutions to your focus-question starting from the derived characteristics. Conditions: The crazier the associations and combinations, the more outstanding will be the ideas and solutions. Therefore, choose the craziest proposals for combinations. Mix the participants in crazy combinations also.

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AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seed #5, LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #3 and #4. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), ‘me’ versus ‘us’, map versus territory thinking process.

Technique #4: ‘Analogy’ As long as they do not have a complete map of the world, children may create interesting analogies. This exercise forces a person to come up with novel solutions and ideas starting from analogies of the focus-question with different other things. Activity: Have the focus-question well written and somewhere in sight. Step 1: Invite each participant to write down on a piece of paper a word describing an object or product of nature. Step 2: Circulate the pieces of paper from left to right and ask each participant to answer the first question: ‘How can this object… solve our focus-question?’ Write down the answers on a sheet of paper. Step 3: Pass around the pieces of paper again from left to right and ask each participant to write down on the new piece of paper in front of him as many analogies between the focus-question and the object as he can come up with. Step 4: Pass around the pieces of paper again and this time ask each participant to write down any idea or solution for the focus-question he comes up with when reading the analogies on the sheet of paper. Step 5: Create a little exposition of all the writings and invite participants to look over the pieces of paper they have not yet seen and come up with additional solutions. Step 6: Read out loud the solutions and invite participants to contribute and share their thoughts. Other possible solutions might come up. 135

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Conditions: Pass around the pieces of paper quickly. AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seed #4, LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #6. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), ‘me’ versus ‘you’, map versus territory thinking process.

Technique #5: ‘The Why? – How? – What? Atomisation’ With this activity, you will learn to ‘dissect’ an idea/solution/focus-question into all its parts, down to the most essential ones. Following such an activity, a previously defined focus-question will be seen from new perspectives by ‘splitting the hair into 14’ or by the focus-question’s ‘atomisation’ (splitting it into the constituent atoms so that you will understand which are the smallest and most essential inner parts necessary for implementing it). Usually the smallest units (atoms) take the form of behaviours, attitudes and artefacts (notions, objects, material stuff) necessary to the employees. Starting from this point, a superior consciousness of the necessary resources will emerge. This process is somewhat similar to Tony Buzzan’s mind-mapping method (or Ishikawa’s). You are creating polarity nodes of intersection for the motivations/attitudes, abilities/behaviours and artefacts/instruments/results. Activity: Step 1: Place the focus-question in the centre of a large piece of paper. Take care of what is a good definition of this problem/ focus-question. Step 2: Start by drawing ‘rivers’ flowing towards the ‘lake of the focus-question’. Each river will have its affluent and so on. Each of these will be either a ‘why?’ a ‘why not?’, a ‘how?’, a ‘how not?’, a ‘what?’ or a ‘what if?’ of the focus-question. Split each ‘river’ into six and answer them and so on until you are blocked. You may start with the actual words in the defining sentence of the focus-question.

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Step 3: Now look at the whole image you have created. The branched focus-question already suggests possible solutions. Start by writing them on a separate page. You may also consider several other questions: • • •

How might this ‘river’ be a solution of implementation? What do I need and what is the implementation process? Which ‘rivers’, combined, may lead to new solutions?

Conditions: You may use this method in parallel for several teams focused on the same problem or split an initial team into two or more which follow ‘nodes’ and ‘threads’ along the atomisation process. AQAL soil plots and seeds: LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #3, #4 and #5. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), thinking of opposing alternatives, going deep and remaining at the surface.

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Stage 4: Employees’ Ideas Pool Poll And Clients’ And Competitors’ Pool Poll

Technique #6: ‘All-Versus-All’ How do you select and prioritise all the solutions which may appear to be right for your focus-question? You use an invincible instrument and scale it up to large numbers of participants. Our brain is not capable of accomplishing complete comparisons among many alternatives. But when you train it to think differently and compare all the variants based on certain clear criteria, the result will be a long-term valid choice. You are the only one to decide which scale you apply to this instrument – few participants, all the employees, clients, competitors and so on. The more you enlarge your circle of stakeholders of your focus-question, the more the results will be relevant to many more of the participants. Let’s say that there are 12 participants and that they generated around 100 possible solutions to your focus-question. The first step would be for the 12 participants to choose several of these, in order to explore them. This might be done through a direct, silent and secret vote by allocating some ‘points’ for the 12 participants to rank ideas or by some other way. It is essential that the same solutions pool is filtered by other employees, potential clients of the company or other stakeholders. This process is similar to the process of trial and error that an animal or vegetal species uses to adapt to the environment, through the repeated filtering of adaptive solutions. The environment (in our case, clients and collaborators) offers constant feedback, and the named species constantly tries new variables and variants until the environment ‘accepts’ part of them. Scalability is important in this process, and also the filtering criteria with which you operate. As for the criteria, you may have ‘novelty’, ‘impossibility’, ‘beauty’ or ‘scarcity’ of the generated ideas. In our case, we will choose two relevant criteria as examples: The solution’s ‘craziness’ and its ‘adherence’ (how much support it will receive from the actors interested in its implementation).

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Activity: Step 1: Use the pool of solutions that have been found. Step 2: For a preliminary filtering, let the participants choose five to seven solutions from the ones found; these are the ones that they love the most. Step 3: In small teams, compare them twice, all-versus-all, based on the two mentioned criteria, and aggregate the results: 1 versus 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, and then 2 versus 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 and so on until the last one is 6 versus 7. Mark each choice. Step 4: Aggregate and count the choices from all the participants and list the solutions. Conditions: You may use this ‘all-versus-all’ instrument to decide anything (solutions, ideas and so forth). AQAL soil plots and seeds: LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #3, #4, #5 and #6. Sparks generated from: Different (sometimes opposing ideas), thinking of different alternatives with own (subjective) criteria versus imposed (objective) criteria, many versus few (freedom vs. constraints).

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Stage 5: Theta Idea Exploration Session (TIES)

Technique #7: ‘The Yin-Yang Bodystorm Exploration’ This is an activity presupposing a bodily analysis of the focus-question, from the dual (yin/yang) perspective of it. Activity: Step 1: Draw a simple line dividing a surface for work (sheet of paper). Name the right side ‘the yin aspect’ and the left side ‘the yang aspect’. Then split the participants into two main groups based on their preference for one nature of being or another. Step 2: Bodystorm in parallel for yin for ideas and correspondingly for yang for ideas for several minutes. Bodystorming presupposes that you role-play the ‘execution’ of the idea, whatever that means. Bodystorming will give you powerful insights regarding the effective implementation of any solution. Step 3: Then switch the sides and let the new team bodystorm some more. Then gather everyone and have them combine their yin and yang exploration aspects from the two sides in a whole bodystorming characterisation. You will understand better how yin and how yang are involved in one idea’s potential. Search for the most yin-yang ideas and leave aside the unbalanced ones. The more balanced an idea is from this point of view, the more followers it will have. Conditions: This is like letting girls mingle and play with boys. You know that at a certain age, children start to see themselves as boys versus girls. Until this age, they play together and their games are complete and nice. Then the boys become oriented towards more competitive and aggressive games, while girls prefer more collaborative and caring games. What you do with this activity, then, is mingle again the adults (participants) in an exploration, inwards and outwards of ideas, with the intention of finding the ‘whole’ ones. 140

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AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL Quadrant seeded with seeds #2 and #4, LL Quadrant seeded with seeds #4 and #6. Sparks generated from: Different perspectives (yin and yang) on different solutions.

Technique #8: ‘The AQAL Exploration’ This is an activity that puts you in the UL position (‘I’), LL (‘WE’), my acts (UR) and our acts (LR). Each participant plays each of the four roles. This change of perspective will allow you to explore the ideas and solutions previously generated from all the main business points of view. You will thereby gain important additional information about the found solution or idea, how useful it is, how economically viable, how easy to implement. Activity: Step 1: Choose one of the previously found solutions. Step 2: Have participants enter an ‘I’ room, where they also have to step into the ‘role’ of a regular employee of the company. Film everything. Let them have their insights on the solution from this perspective and let them note all of their insights somewhere visible. Possible questions to ask are the following: •

•

•

‘What will you believe and what will you feel/sense with your five senses when you know for the first time that this solution will be implemented in your company?’ ‘Which will be your personal experience during the implementation of this solution? What will you believe and sense?’ ‘After this idea is implemented, what will you think and sense about it?’

Step 3: Invite the participants to come into another room, ‘My Deeds Room’, where they will see the film which was made in the first room. Ask them to note their answers to the following questions:

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•

• •

‘How will you behave differently in the future when you know for the first time that this solution will be implemented in your company?’ ‘What will be your behaviour during the implementation of this solution?’ ‘After this idea is implemented, what will you do differently?’

Step 4: Invite the participants to come into another room, ‘Our Culture’, where they will have a discussion about the following topics, while they are filmed: •

• •

‘How will the culture of this company be changed at the moment it is announced that this solution will be implemented?’ ‘How will the culture of this company be affected during the implementation of this idea?’ ‘What will the culture be like after this idea is implemented?’

Step 5: Invite the participants to come into another room, ‘Our Deeds’, where they will see the film which was made in the ‘Culture’ room. Ask them to note their answers to the following questions: • • •

‘What will be the different results of this company when the implementation of this idea is announced?’ ‘What will be the results during the implementation?’ ‘What will be the results after the implementation?’

Conditions: Do the same role-play, taking turns for each of the previously generated and selected ideas. Then, compare all the results. You may have all the participants play the whole process or different (four) teams play the four ‘quadrants’ and give feedback to one another. AQAL soil plots and seeds: UL, LL and LR Quadrants seeded with seeds #4 and #5. Sparks generated from: Different perspectives (‘me’ versus ‘us’, ‘inside/subjective’ vs. ‘outside/objective’) on different solutions.

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Technique #9: ‘The Box’ ‘Create the box’ is an extraordinarily productive and funny activity. The solutions found and explored previously are now considered as ‘products on a shelf’ (boxes in a supermarket). You will now explore the persuasive power of solutions. Participants will get a truly physical sense of the solutions already found. This analogy will oblige the participants to understand the proper way in which the idea may be promoted and ‘sold’ within the company, to the other employees and ‘sponsors’ of implementation. Basically, they will see a box in the middle of the room and they will know that that box is their idea in a physical form. Activity: Step 1: ‘FILLING THE BOX’ Participants have to answer these questions themselves and act upon their answers by materialising the content of the box. The questions which will help them are the following: • • • •

•

What is the name of this box? What’s inside of it? What is it good for? Is it new? If this were the day when this box was invented (so that it was brand new), what would it contain so that would be a bestseller? What else would this box contain/be like in order to represent each of you?

Step 2: ‘MARKETING THE BOX’ This step is meant to give them the tools to market the box. The questions which will help them are the following: • • •

What emotions, sensations, feelings do you want any possible buyer to have when seeing it? What thoughts do you want the possible buyer to have? What actions do you want the buyers to take when they see your box?

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• •

What are the coolest aspects of the box? What design would make it memorable and desirable?

Step 3: ‘SELLING THE BOX’ Answer the following questions: • •

What would the buyers of this box want to hear in a radio/ TV commercial which would make them want it instantly? What would you like a satisfied buyer to tell another potential buyer?

Step 4: The participants do the sell/pitch in front of everybody. Conditions: Do the same play, in parallel, for all the previously filtered solutions, each of them for a team. You may film each team pitching the solution and then play the clips within the company, having all the employees vote for the most interesting and documented one. AQAL soil plots and seeds: LL and LR Quadrants seeded with seeds #4, #5 and #6. Sparks generated from: Different perspectives (‘me’ vs. ‘us’, ‘inside/ subjective’ vs. ‘outside/objective’) on the same solution, thinking versus doing, non-material versus material.

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Stage 6: ‘People Decide Session’ And Implementation

Technique #10: ‘The $100 F.U.N. Test’ F.U.N. means ‘FEASIBLE + USEFUL + NEW’. Usually, we find similar solutions for different problems. The ‘F.U.N.’ test creates a realistic filter of the previously generated and explored ideas. Additionally, we’ll measure these three features through another filter, the $100 test. We will pretend we have $100 available to buy the proposed solutions, as if they were products on a shelf (see the previous exercise) and we will also pretend we have obtained $100 from selling these ‘products’. Solutions versus 100$

Costs

Benefits

Cost/Benefit Gain

SOLUTION 1 Total, out of which:

70

65

-5

Feasibility

30

60

+30

Usefulness

20

2

-18

Novelty

20

3

-17

SOLUTION 2 Total, out of which:

30

35

+5

Feasibility

15

15

0

Usefulness

10 5

15 5

+5 0

Novelty

Activity: Step 1: Arrange all the solutions in a column. Step 2: Take each solution and split a total expenditure of $100 among your solutions, as if you were going to buy them. Do the same as if you had made $100 as a profit from selling them.

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Step 3: Divide each expenditure and profit into more components (‘costs’): Feasibility, novelty, usefulness, answering these questions: • •

‘How much of the total costs of this solution should be allocated for its feasibility, novelty and usefulness?’ ‘How much of the profits generated by this solution are coming from its feasibility, novelty and usefulness?’

Step 4: Calculate the ratios, gains and losses, and decide. But maybe you can somehow combine the feasibility of Solution 1 with the usefulness and novelty of Solution 2 in order to have a higher total gain. Conditions: At this point, each participant should fill in his own matrix for the F.U.N. $100 test. By aggregating the figures of each participant, you may find a democratic and engaging universal solution. AQAL soil plots and seeds: LL and LR Quadrants seeded with seeds #4, #5 and #6. Sparks generated from: Different perspectives (‘me’ vs. ‘us’, ‘inside/ subjective’ vs. ‘outside/objective’) on the same solution, left brain (calculus) versus right brain (subjective preference).

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C hapter 8

An Integral Stage Setting For An Innovation Generation Business Framework

F

rom an integral point of view, any business should be viewed as a mix of individuals (UL Quadrant), culture (LL Quadrant), individual deeds and results (UR Quadrant) and systems, procedures and rules (LR Quadrant).

Creativity and innovation (especially the disruptive type) is so scarce that it would be pitiful to waste any possibility for getting it. Scarcity refers to not really knowing how it works inside a human being and also to the scarcity of the ‘I am creative’ belief (the ‘watering belief’, as explained in Chapter 4). In this respect, the integral view ensures the largest possibility of having it.

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Creativity and innovation (especially the disruptive type) is so scarce that it would be pitiful to waste any possibility for getting it.

An Integral Stage Setting For An Innovation Generation Business Framework

Here you have a proposal for a business integral framework and for implementing it. The following is a proposal for a framework setup using the integral map. The framework is meant to generate creative and innovative ideas for a certain business problem based on the principles explained in this book (soils, seeds and irrigation system). It encompasses the ‘Burst Idea Generation Session’ format explained above. Each stage and each step of the following framework generates ‘creativity sparks’ through polarity, as explained below.

Stage 1: Preparation Of The CEO And Of The Business For Creativity And Innovation Integral Preparation Of The CEO For Creativity And Innovation

As the CEO or manager of a team in your company, you are on one level of consciousness or another (Red, Amber, Orange, Green, Teal, etc.). A proper ‘initiative for innovation’ starts with you rising up to at least the next higher level. Any focus-question may be instantly and more creatively solved from a level above its level of creation. So, this step would mean a mix of coaching, experiences, introspection and provocative reflection on your role in the company, your meaning of what you do (your ‘why’, as Simon Sinek would put it) and your dedication, passion and responsibility for the problem to be solved in the company or team you lead. This step is not mandatory in itself, but be aware that solutions found in business environments where this step was missed are less profound, innovative or creative than the ones which emerged from a higher consciousness level milieu. I would say that this is a crucial step. Depending on a leader’s (new) perspective on the focus-question and its possible solution, you may find the next steps obsolete, outdated or unnecessary, as a leader may transform every bit of them into a ‘teal’ approach where hierarchy becomes a holarchy and everything settles down into a new shape in several months. Innovation sparks these changes continuously. 150

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Question: Therefore, one question to ask yourself now would be, ‘Which type of a proposal for an innovation generation business framework is the one below? Is it an AMBER to ORANGE, an ORANGE to GREEN or a GREEN to TEAL solution?’ (The answer is at the end of this chapter.) Integral Preparation Of The Business For Creativity And Innovation

STEP 1: (LR Quadrant – planting SEED #1 and SEED #6) Let the CEO declare a future campaign to collect creative and innovative ideas from all the employees, based around a specific focus-question to be announced in one month. Let the CEO declare the following month as a Creativity Preparation Month (CPM). Employees will become informed about what creativity and innovation is and what it requires, and will get in shape for creative outputs. Here, the spark comes from involving everybody versus having some ‘special’ people deal with the creativity problem.

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STEP 2: (LR, LL Quadrants – planting SEED #4 and SEED #6) Gather several good LR and LL Quadrant people to form a ‘Facilitation Team’ (FT) for the development, setup and deployment of the CPM. Establish clear roles within the team: LR people to deal with the processes, LL people to deal with the communication. Here, the spark comes from the polarity between LR and LL Quadrants in the FT: On one side, people loving systems (civilisation), and on the other side, people loving culture, both working together. STEP 3: (LR, LL Quadrants – planting SEED #4 and SEED #6) Let the FT run the processes to set up tools, information, a company-wide internal publicity campaign for the CPM. Give each employee a copy of The Leadership Spark to learn about the creativity methodology the company is going to use. Use any of the ‘30 Tips For Increasing Your Business’ Creativity’ presented in Chapter 9. Here, the spark comes from the polarity in the tools used versus the usual business environment. STEP 4: (All quadrants – planting SEED #2 and watering) Let the FT involve any consultant (external or internal), information, notion or knowledge database to work on the current individual and collective mindsets regarding the creativity of each and every person in the company during the CPM. Have plays, arts, physical activities or psychological consultations. Invitees from any creative genre can give speeches, propose ‘warm-up’ games or put on improvisational theatre classes. Use any of the ‘20 Tips To Increase Your Personal Creativity’ presented in Chapter 10. Here, the spark comes from the polarity in the tools used versus the usual business environment.

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Stage 2: Setup Of A Corporate Focus-Question STEP 5: (LR Quadrant – planting all seeds and watering) Have a desired outcome which has been settled upon by the Board of Directors: A problem to be solved, a focus-question, a goal – the more specific, the better. The more ‘client-centred’, the better. Use any tools necessary to get employees’, clients’ and competitors’ input in deciding on the ‘focus-question’ to be solved. Let the CEO communicate the focus-question within the company and let him launch it as a focus for the next month as a ‘Creatively Solving the Focus-Question’ (CSD) campaign, let’s say. Let him announce the non-judgemental setup for bad or good ideas; all ideas should be listened to. Let him announce the setup for collecting ideas, for the processes involved, key facilitators and their roles. Let him announce that everybody in the company is welcome. Let him say, ‘One has a problem, one has the best solutions’ as a mantra and a guiding belief of the campaign. Here, the spark comes from the hierarchy versus the holarchy approach of solving the problem. 153

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STEP 6: (All quadrants – taking care of SEED #6 and SEED #5) Let the FT give feedback itself and receive feedback from all the employees regarding improving the way it functions. Reshape, restructure, reform a new FT and let it run the processes to set up tools, information and a company internal publicity campaign for the CSD. Here the spark comes from the polarity between the self-feedback and collective feedback of the internal clients.

Stage 3: Generation Of New, Creative And Innovative Ideas STEP 7: (All quadrants – planting more deeply SEED #2, SEED #3, SEED #4, SEED #5) Have as many as possible ‘Burst Idea Generation Sessions’ (BIGS) based on the format described in this book (Chapters 5 and 6). Collect and archive all the ideas and document them during the first two weeks of the CSD. Here, the spark comes from the BIGS format itself.

Stage 4: Feedback Of The Pool Of Ideas STEP 8: (All quadrants – planting deeper SEED #2 and SEED #6) Have the ‘Employees’ Ideas Pool Poll’ carried out on the generated ideas for the best employee engagement, as explained in Chapter 5. Let everybody vote for the most innovative, ‘out of the box’ idea, the most extraordinary, the most 10-steps-ahead idea or the most yin/yang idea. Have the ‘Clients and Competitors Pool Poll’ carried out on the generated ideas for the best clients’ engagement and competitors’ (dis-)engagement. Keep the first tier of these ideas for continuation (say three to five ideas) and archive the rest and the poll results for future possible utilisations, trials, tests. Here, the spark comes from targeting the high versus the usually low expectations, and from the polarity between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the company inputs. 154

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Stage 5: Exploration Of Selected Ideas STEP 9: (All quadrants – planting all seeds more deeply) Have as many iterations as possible of ‘Theta Idea Exploration Sessions’ (TIES) based on the format described in this book (Chapters 5 and 6), during the next two weeks of the CSD. Collect and archive all the outcomes, descriptions and feedback, and document each explored idea. Here, the spark comes from targeting the high versus the usually low expectations, from the polarity between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the company input and from the polarity between ‘beta’ and ‘theta’ thinking in defining the focus-question, generating and exploring possible ideas and deciding on solutions.

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Stage 6: Validation, Decision And Implementation The most critical aspect of business innovation is not having enough ideas. Most companies struggle with this very step of evaluating and implementing. Therefore, simplify it to the maximum. Just let the people evaluate by collectively using the two validation instruments described in Chapter 6 (the ‘F.U.N. Test’ and the ‘$100 Test’ – ‘People Decide Session’), and implement the validated idea. Take a risk and bet on their choice and self-evaluation rather than a corporate complicated system of filters, rules, committees and so on. STEP 10: (All quadrants – planting all seeds more deeply) This step has to be done in parallel and in conjunction with Step 9 above. At the end of each ‘Theta Idea Exploration Session’, have a ‘People Decide Session’ (as explained in Chapters 5 and 6) and save the outputs and decisions. Have a final round-up of all the outputs and decide in a pluralistic way on the first solution to be implemented. STEP 11: (All quadrants – planting all seeds more deeply) Implement the idea chosen. No comments, no fuss, no second thoughts. Innovation = Ideas x Execution. If after so many iterations and trials of people’s imagination you still have doubts, it probably means that you had the same doubts from the beginning. Answer to the question before: Yes, it is a solution well suited for a company aspiring to the green level. So, if your company is pretty much within the ‘achievement-orange’ or even the ‘pluralistic-green’ environment, it is a good possibility for implementing innovation within your organisation. If your corporation is mostly relying on the practices of a ‘conformist-amber’, it will be a tougher job to implement it and therefore ‘Stage 0’ becomes crucial.

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PART FOUR

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30 Tips For Increasing Your Business’ Creativity

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ere you will have many resources and ideas which will help your business have a culture that is well ‘watered’ with the ‘We are creative’ belief (LL Quadrant). Therefore, the implementation of these ideas will produce long-lasting results for your company’s benefit, in the form of a continuous stream of adaptive or disruptive innovative ideas which come from the employees. These 30+1 tips complement the 20 tips for personal creativity (next chapter) which work on a more individual level. All the practices and solutions for increasing the spirit of innovation listed below are clearly LR approaches. Apart from this, each of them aims at other certain quadrants of creativity, as noted. 1. Find the real value proposition of your company. Of course, you already have some ‘mission and vision’ or ‘values’ statements hanging on the walls. But what is the real thing you are offering to your employees and clients? Ask the 70% most disengaged employees in your company what they would say about this company and its products/services that would encourage them to become your most fervent advocates. Convert the existing 30% already engaged to the new vision and meaning, and make it the overarching reason everybody comes at the office. Convert the shareholders to the new true rationale for the company.

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The innovation revolution in your company starts with your consciousness transformation, as the CEO, to a higher purpose. There is no innovation, nor creativity, nor imagination where people do not believe they should be innovative, creative and imaginative. Only after you settle this should you start the following practices (LL). 2. Have a ‘meditation and yoga’ space for your employees. Zazen meditation, for example, is one way to clear and make the mind tranquil. OSHO Dynamic Meditation is another form of profound meditative practice to get rid of people’s egos. Yoga works also on providing balance at a more complete level, involving equilibrium of the senses, inner states (thoughts and emotions) and bodily movements (actions). Hire a zazen-certified practitioner and a yoga instructor and offer FREE sessions to anybody in your company at any hour. People sharing such a common space will, as a result, create and delve into a calmer culture that is ready to innovate (UL, UR). 3. Have a theatrical improvisation teacher employed in the company. His job would be to have daily eight-hour classes on theatrical improvisation with a series of employees. This works like magic as a team-building tool, a creativity-sparking tool, relaxation tool, a tool generating engagement in employees (UL, UR). 4. Buy a biofeedback/neurofeedback apparatus, install it in a room and have all employees use it daily. It will train their minds to self-generate alpha and possible theta states of relaxation and creativity (UR). 5. Play binaural sounds in elevators and ambient music in the offices. Binaural sounds are engineered to induce good creative states in the brain. Mixed with relaxing music, they make a perfect audio companion anywhere (UR). 6. Have a full-time psychotherapist at the company and ensure at least one session per month for each employee. Corporate stress is one of the biggest barriers to creativity (UL, UR).

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7. Build an ‘Artistic Creation Room’ at the Demolish all company, not a relaxation room but an the ‘aquariums’ ‘artistic creation’ room. Supply it with and ‘window canvases, pencils, brushes, oil paints, a DJ music creation studio, some pottery shops’ where the stuff, building blocks, animals to feed, managers reside plants for tending, bonsais needing to in your company. be cut, sand for arranging, a chorus conductor, instruments for playing music, tools for carving, for moulding, for taking photos, for 3D printing and so on. Get everybody involved in an artistic project, in teams, and have daily exhibitions (UR, UL). 8. Demolish all the ‘aquariums’ and ‘window shops’ where the managers reside in your company. Create a single large open space for everybody, including family members, clients and suppliers working remotely from your office. Throw away the desks and do not replace them, but create instead plots for gathering. Create unisex toilets. People will mingle and bump into each other. Promote a ‘clothes exchange day’ when people lend each other their clothes for one day, just to be in another’s shoes. Set aside all the old boundaries, self-imposed or imposed by old organisational habits (LL, UR). 9. Let your employees travel and work abroad. All of them. Encountering new cultures, places and people increases neural connections and the chances for increased creativity. Many businessmen have paid large amounts of money to set up company trips and holidays recently. Promote ‘travel incentives’ in the company and negotiate discounts with travel agencies and airlines for certain remote and ‘out of the box’ destinations. Organise remote working sessions of one month for teams, in strange places, totally different (polarised) cultures (East–West, North–South) (UR, UL). 10. Have teams for creative bursts made of people from outside the business. Or from completely different divisions, silos. A fresh view on old problems will spark fresh ideas from people not stuck in

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the trenches. If your domain is a ‘scientific’ one, spark the thinking of your people by inviting to your meetings, let’s say, people from the ‘artistic’ environment, and vice-versa (LL). 11. Reformulate focus-questions like ‘Why Not…?’, ‘How Else…?’ and ‘What If…?’ and lead meetings where everybody should concentrate on answers to these types of questions. Search for different ways of replacing the usual problem-solving process (LL). 12. Completely change your managerial system to an open one meant to inquire for people’s solutions. As a high-ranking manager in large corporations, I began as a directive type. Then I shifted towards a more collaborative style and ended up as a ‘one-minute manager’, as a manager-coach. I would never return to directive style. Ask any manager-coach about the power he has over his people. Ask any such manager about the power his reports have over their problems. Being a manager-coach is a generative solution to any corporate problem as it opens the virtuous circle of trial and error, learning, evolution, the exploitation of full potential. Each and every person has a soul, emotions, thinking ability, knowledge, desires, so use them fully. Avoid telling them what to do, how to do it and why they should do it. Look at any history of ‘innovative’ companies and you will find 100% examples of such managing systems: SEMCO, Morning Star, GoreTex, AES, FAVI, BSO/Origin, Patagonia, Sun Hydraulics and the like. Holacracy is a new ‘word’, a word describing the new emergent planetary level of consciousness rising in business and human civilisation lately, the ‘teal’ level (Ken Wilber, Frederic Laloux, Don Beck) (LL). 13. Transform discontent into an idea for progress. Use clients’, employees’, suppliers’ and collaborators’ discontent to find new ideas and solutions to address your business problems. And, of course, use your own discontent. Bring these up during each meeting of the unit you lead and decide upon them immediately. Completely transform the culture of your company into a ‘learning from discontent’ one; make it a priority of each meeting, working agenda, reunion or coffee chat (LL).

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14. Rotate and swap your employees and managers. Make a guiding policy out of changing the nature of each employee’s job, once in a while. The better the employees know all the entrails of the company, the more they will contribute to the development and the perfecting of the flows and procedures. From different angles, problems have different shades and may be solved with better and more up-to-date solutions (UL). 15. Invent a fluid workspace. Nothing in the workspace of employees may resemble the obsolete ‘office space’, ‘open space’ or ‘cubicle’. Regularly change the workspace so that each employee has the opportunity to position and move his office effects and sit or stand alongside other colleagues and access the same (production) space from different angles. Changing the perspective of the senses gets people out of the numbness they enter each time when, for years on end, they return to the same seat on the same floor, in front of the same computer, with the same colleagues around them (LL, UR).

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16. Organise the employees to work in cross-cultural teams. It is not really necessary for all the members of a team to know the same language. Common interests will be the link in helping them find a way of communicating which is sometimes non-verbal or para-verbal. Language unifies and standardises ideas, but the lack of it polarises toward new discoveries of new meanings. Common cultural norms introduce everyone into a state of numbness in their mindset. Cultural differences provide unimaginable opportunities for rewriting individual mindsets in ways which are more open, more transparent and in which people are more willing to collaborate, accept, tolerate and suspend judgments of value (LL, UR). 17. Give each employee the opportunity to bring in the cultural environments that he or she is part of, to be able to bring guests at his or her office. Let your employees bring to the workspace friends; family members; friends who are members of religious congregations, of support groups, of a choir or theatre group to which they belong; colleagues from the photography workshop they attend each Sunday. In this way, the corporate environment will be further polarised and this will lead to the emergence of new perspectives on everyday problems of the organisation from people who have no connection with it (UL). 18. Destroy the ‘physical silos’. Usually, each silo is located in a certain space, and all employees from a department are gathered together there. Let members of different departments sit together in a ‘fluid network environment’. If you want a beautiful structure for your company, organise the space as a beautiful garden, but the life of ideas will come out of that space. If you want the wilderness of creativity, mingle the department spaces, mingle their employees, let a salesperson sit next to a guy from IT or accounting, and let the janitor of your company sit next to the CEO. And do not keep this organisation for long but rather, change it once a month or just move every piece of information into virtual reality and the cloud, and then the piles of dossiers to be moved around by each employee will be no longer necessary, so that they may move around anywhere (LL).

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19. Have ‘no reason’ meetings, that is, meetings where anyone can argue, share, tell anything about his work, hobby, last book read, last movie watched, anything. Twenty minutes of such meetings per day will burn out the formality of ‘agenda meetings’ and will ignite the logs of creativity. Let the ideas flow one from the other in a chaotic burst, with no apparent logic or meaning or goal. Great ideas have long incubation periods. Be sure that your company’s (or team’s) environment is an incubator, not a coffin. And wait: Months, years, or decades. Do not try to control the birth of ideas. You are not God. What you can merely do is to cherish life (LL)! 20. Let employees’ ideas be certified by the power of the masses. Use crowdfunding. Indiegogo, Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding platform will tell you instantly whether one idea is worth developing or not, and how big an idea is. Be aware that, nowadays, great ideas do not need an organisation to emerge. Big companies develop in less than a year starting from a garage idea which is funded collectively (LL). 21. Directly use ‘crowd creativity’ or ‘open innovation’ platforms. There is no need, really, to generate innovation yourself; instead, outsource it entirely. Others have already organised themselves to support you. Do not change anything in your company. Just sign a contract with such a company and they will do all the work. But when they come up with their bunch of crowd-generated ideas, apply them instantly. Do not negotiate, do not question, do not judge (LL)! 22. Have a nursery, kindergarten and school within your premises for employees’ children. Let employees’ children play and learn among your company’s workers and managers. Mingle them with the old ones, the elder members of employees’ families. Transform your office building into a ‘school’, ‘asylum’ and ‘office’ space altogether (LL). 23. Have your Christmas party at a jazz club and make sure that everybody has the chance to mingle with the jazz players, play instruments and improvise (LL).

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24. Your company needs ‘positive’ emotions. Destroy stress-related factors: Overwork, tight deadlines, negative feedback and no feedback. Instead, create an environment where people may experience ‘serotonin’ and ‘dopamine’ emotions and eliminate the ‘cortisol’ ones. What about a spa and fitness office space? Why create a ‘boundary’ between free time and ‘office’ time? Why not exercise while having meetings? Why not have meetings around a Jacuzzi inside the office building? Why not have a ‘spinning’ sales meeting (LL)? 25. Have a ‘Yes, and...’ day in your company. Everybody should play along by not blocking anything that’s being said or shown. Each employee should be aware that he should start his dialogue by repeatedly saying ‘Yes, and…’ This improvisational exercise will help open up the souls, ideas and emotions. ‘Blocking is a form of aggression’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.94) (UL, LL). 26. Give each employee a paper notebook and invite them to come up with ideas for providing solutions to anything they may notice around them, in the workspace that needs to be fixed or solved. Weekly, ask them to exchange the notebooks among themselves, read the existing ideas and continue finding new ones. Do this for at least one month, then collect anything useful from the notebooks. What you do through this method is to increase the observation part of the mindset of each employee and also to increase the chances for coming up with new ideas by taking turns using the same notebooks (UL, UR). 27. Instil a culture of ‘the doodling whiteboard’ in your company: Have whiteboards placed on the walls in each meeting point in your company (smoking areas, toilets, drinking spots, etc.). Encourage employees to doodle their thoughts on these whiteboards and then create a ‘Book of Company Doodles’. Doodling is a way of releasing creativity from people. Doodles have meaning. Have meetings based on discussing the ‘Book of Company Doodles’ and on using them as input for creative processes. SEMCO uses a small booklet in the form of a compilation of cartoons called ‘The Survival Manual’, and this is the only form of

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procedure they have. MBWA, ‘Management by Wandering Around’, is also a form of doodling, or ‘management doodling’, in the sense that managers wander around and participate in doing various managerial tasks and so forth without really having a formal plan that has been set up (LL, UL).

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28. Have a recruitment corporate policy based on ‘inner nature’ (yin or yang), hobbies (showing the real preference for one type of activity or another), open-mindedness and encompassing an evaluation of the breadth of one’s mindset, rather than expertise and experience. Those who are ‘the right guy in the right job’ are more likely to be self-motivated and engaged than those who fit into a job based on their academic degrees, studies or prior work experience. You do not need people who will be engaged for, at most, one year or so by a new level of their wage, by a new position or by benefits; rather, you need people aligned with the core values and ‘essence’ of their job and their employer (LL). 29. Have a library in the company, at the geographical points where people meet. Place this space where everybody smokes, drinks water, eats or engages in whatever common habit they share. The closer to these places, the more useful will be such a library. And fill it with great books, not only the greatest business-related books (usually the ones written in a narrative manner) but also great literature, poetry and prose and drama. Business books are only mere expressions of great ideas Let the coming from great descriptions of shareholders life and of human relationships. Great and CEO of your poetry and prose will give the readers company be – your employees – more insights into coached by an what might be than highly specialised integral coach. business books (LL, UL). 30. Test yourself and your employees for the ‘consciousness quotient’. Find the site, read the literature, see how it works, fill in the questionnaire. Make the results transparent for everybody. Have ideas for raising the stakes for each of you to the next consciousness level (UR, UL, LL).

Bonus Tip: Let the shareholders and CEO of your company be coached by an integral coach (which I am and also of which there are several hundred in the world today). The innovation spark starts with a sparking CEO and shareholder who is able to think about management from a

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higher level of consciousness, the highest available. Only in this way can you transform your organisation into a TEAL one or even beyond. You are not going to see an ‘employees’ revolution’ anywhere as employees are preoccupied with their paycheque stability. Instead you will feel it and see it in the figures and reports which show your employees’ engagement abruptly decreasing (UL, UR).

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he tips below will help you get to your deeper sense of creativity, unleash it from within and use it for your benefit and that of others. They are meant to be practices, tasks to be done daily at least until they start to generate the right effects on your mindset, abilities and behaviour. Also, I grouped them depending on their main target ‘muscle’ to be trained: UL muscle, UR muscle, LL muscle, LR muscle or a combination. 1. Do the exercise of concentration of the senses. A few minutes each day, activate all your five senses and wake them up. In a quiet state (without doing anything, without talking to someone else), look around carefully and only list what you see in your mind without trying to remember; listen carefully to the noises and sounds near you and in the surrounding area; smell carefully; follow your body movements, tensed or relaxed spots of your body, breathing or pulse; closely notice your taste. Do all these things alternating attention to one or the other senses. With time, you will notice that the state you attain from this practice will occur more spontaneously Be a beggar and naturally during the day and will be for one day. prolonged. Finally you will fully wake up,

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and the maps and filters in your mind will blur. You’ll live more fully, more creatively, more attentively in the world around you, more in line and in tune with nature (UL, UR). 2. Be a beggar for one day. Dress yourself totally inappropriately and sit for several hours near a street corner, begging. Notice people from that point of view. Enter the shoes of the beggar, enter his mindset. This is harder at the beginning, but in the end, you will understand the spirit of this adventure. The more you release the memory and desire for your home comforts, the better you will comprehend the pure nature of life and of natural creativity. If you are really courageous, sell everything and leave the world. Planned vagabonding will help you restore your true self, beyond your whole ‘having’ and ‘doing’, which you feed and maintain each day. You will return full of the explorer’s energy and of the survivor’s creativity (UL, UR). 3. Have a ‘do nothing’ day. Renounce any activity. Just sleep in your hammock. Do nothing. Be alone and let your mind totally relax, get out of its beta state and enter the alpha state: ‘Like a hollow bamboo, rest in peace with your body’ (Tilopa) (UL). 4. Try doing free associations in writing. Set a time limit, say 20 minutes, and just write down everything in your head. Try to speed up during this time until you can write no more as your thoughts are more rapid than your hand. ‘Automatic writing is one way of getting people to understand that there is “something inside them besides themselves”’ (Johnstone, 1981, p.121). You will bypass the censorship of ego and of your current mindset and neuro pathways, and get access to a deeper you. Maybe the writing will tell nothing to anyone, but the process will train your mind to be spontaneous and creative (UL, UR). 5. Have a goal for yourself, one that is higher than your present self. Propose to yourself some impossible deed. Have a 1-year goal or a 10-year goal. Stick to it. Note it, wear it, declare it each day. Having a target will drive your imagination to a clear stream of creativity, will give it a meaning and destination. Do not expect to become creative if you

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do not want anything for yourself and others. Either way, if you succeed in accomplishing your goal or fail in doing it, you will learn a lot – what it is to be capable of something, what it is to embrace failure (both are good for creativity) (LR). 6. Experience new things each day. Drive on a different route towards your office. Eat something new. See unfamiliar movies. Read something unusual. Listen to strange radio stations. Make unconceivable body movements. Smell undesirable smells. Each day, experience something new. Meet people who are completely different from you (UR). 7. Reverse your corporal behaviours. Brush your teeth with the other hand, zip and unzip your clothes the opposite way, write with the other hand, backwards or from the bottom to the top of the page. Play tennis with the other hand. Wear your watch on the opposite wrist. Wear suits at home and casual clothes at work. Sit straight if you usually sit relaxed, laid back. Comb your hair in the opposite direction. Jog and run backwards for a mile. Try to walk with your eyes shut. Have a ‘left hand day’ if you are right-handed and vice-versa; during this day, use mostly the hand you do not usually use so much (UR, UL). 8. Do the opposite of what your mind tells you. For a week, silence the mind by arguing with it and doing things the ‘wrong’ way. Be rebellious in your deeds and surprise others with this new attitude. Tell them it is just a temporary experiment (UR). 9. Work near and mingle with people considered to be creative. Creativity is a viral mindset. Read a lot of biographies about creative people. Watch documentaries about them. Mimic their behaviour (LL). 10. Talk ‘gibberish’ (unintelligible or nonsensical talk or writing). Say this: ‘Maciungas mitoka, buciandrangu mbelte, tziuchen hein gih galandrumbos parashnaia totuj hey’. And continue, as you wish. Move your tongue in some unimaginable ways in your mouth,

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Try poetry. Poetry is a clear expression of creativity.

20 Tips For Increasing Your Personal Creativity

just mumble, shout or whisper. Invent a new language of just one speaker in the world. This will kill your ‘language makeup’, the meaning of words. Words are just learned expressions (maps) of a common territory (nature around us) (UL). 11. Try poetry. Poetry is a clear expression of creativity, from the very right brain – left brain point of view. Poetry is metaphor, and metaphors are what ‘corpus callosum’ does, linking left-brain activity (more rational, cause-effect) to the more intuitive (artistic expression, feeling) right-brain activity. Reading and, moreover, writing poetry, even if your ‘gremlin’ (ego or inner voice) tells you that you suck at poetry, teaches you to let go of only the argumentative view of life and become more keen to nature, to the five senses and to your feminine inner side. You will understand life from a higher angle. A fuller perspective will also evolve on daily prosaic tasks (UL). 12. ‘A journal is a coffer in which you keep your reflexive intelligence’ (Peter Abbs, poet). When you take notes on reality, you employ the ‘observation’ function of your brain, therefore triggering a more complete functioning. Many creative individuals keep journals of ideas. Thomas Edison had 3,400 copybooks of more than 200 pages each. He is considered one of the greatest inventors, with several hundreds of patents. Keep a personal notebook or journal (digital or analogue) and write down any idea or thought you find surprising or novel for yourself. Creativity relies on many ideas gathered and accumulated over time. From time to time, read the last pages. A brand-new breakthrough idea may rise from those written down. Keep a journal at all times and note any strange idea, keen observation of reality, observation and impression (UL, UR). 13. Try the ‘other three senses’ for one day. We are all slaves of hearing and seeing, but much less of the smelling, touching and tasting. For at least one day, concentrate on these three senses. They are sources of important information. Use them to decide, choose and evaluate the experiences of this day and put aside the seeing and hearing. You may have a full experience by blocking four senses and using only one in a certain known safe space (UL).

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14. Try improvisational theatre. Go see some gigs and take some classes. Improv will drastically increase your self-awareness, responsibility and listening skills. Empathy is included. Creativity emerges abruptly. You will become wittier, closer to others and full of energy. Your self-trust will be boosted (UR, UL). 15. Listen to engineered binaural sounds mixed with nature sounds. There are lots of FREE sets and playlists on the Internet, or you can buy some CDs or MP3s. Binaural sounds, the good ones, will give your brain a boost in the area of alpha and theta functioning. During the day, before going to sleep or at the brink of a regular day, over the long term, they will slowly and steadily balance you and offer you the perspective of a more serene and playful mood. Or you can at least start listening to classical music. Part of it really works in this respect and might also be pleasant to hear, not just useful for creativity (UR, UL).

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16. Read creativity books and solve your daily burdens and tasks, professional or personal by applying creative thinking techniques. In time, your mind will learn new pathways of solving, deciding, prioritising based on these techniques, which will glue themselves among your neurons. Watch the most creative ads of all times, as they are full of creative thinking. Study the history of creativity and the way nature works in documentaries. Study the science of complexity, fractals and artificial intelligence (UR). 17. Have days of just asking. To ask is to involve more neurons and neural connections than just to listen. Having answers is not creative. Losing yourself in the uncertainty of questions is creative. Ask others, ask yourself, question everything that day. Make the ‘?’ the symbol of the day and wear it everywhere. In time, you will become more reluctant to encounter brainwashing, the negative aspects of life and the subjective views of others, and be more relative (and thus, more objective) in your takings of life (UL). 18. Try painting; the inner child is still there. Scrawling and painting triggers right-hemisphere neurons to fire. Paint with your bare fingers; use your touching sense. Do it blindfolded and with both hands at the same time. One such experience is sometimes enough to teach you about your imaginative potential (UR, UL). 19. Walk in nature and study it. Lie down on a bed of autumn leaves and watch the insects, worms, vegetation, trees and grass, birds flying in the sky, clouds passing by. Pretend to be an insect, a tree, a bird and let your imagination grow and fly away (UL). 20. Network. Create social media accounts and start gathering friends. Subscribe to discussion forums on your subject and your hobbies. Call three friends or acquaintances a day. Go to parties and gatherings, conventions. Travel by train and bus and subway; they are better networking places than your own car. Talk to strangers in the elevator and on the street. Get closer to your family, friends and colleagues. Create interest-based groups on social media platforms and populate them with your reflections on the subject. Create a blog and a subscription list, and network regularly. Creativity and innovation is heavily linked to networking. The human species evolved due to this (LL). 178

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Selected Readings 1. Alef, Daniel. Jeff Bezos: Amazon and the EBook Revolution. Titans of Fortune Publishing, 2010. 2. Amabile, Teresa. Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity. Westview Press, 1997. 3. Arbinger Institute, Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010. 4. Assagioli, Roberto. Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings. The Synthesis Centre Inc., 2010 (a). 5. Assagioli, Roberto. The Act of Will. The Synthesis Centre Inc., 2010 (b). 6. Assagioli, Roberto. Transpersonal Development (Revised Edition). Smiling Wisdom, imprint of Inner Way Productions, 2008. 7. Bakke, Dennis. Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job. PVG, 2010. 8. Barrett, Richard. Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. 9. Beck, Don Edward. Spiral Dynamics. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 10.  Bejan, Adrian and Zane, Peter. Design in Nature. How Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology and Social Organization. Anchor Books, 2012. 11. Berns, Gregory. Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, Harvard Business Review Press. 2010. 12. Claxton, Guy and Lucas, Bill. Be Creative: Essential Steps to Revitalise Your Work and Life. BBC Active, 2004. 13. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Perennial, 2013.

181

Selected Readings

14. De Bono, Edward. Serious Creativity. Journal for Quality and Participation, September 1995. 15. De Bono, Edward. Lateral Thinking. Penguin UK, 2010. 16. De Bono, Edward. Six Thinking Hats. Back Bay Books, 1999. 17. Dispenza, Joe. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind. HCI, 2008. 18. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentyfirst Century. Picador, 2007. 19. Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be? Harper & Row Publishers, 1976. 20. Gallo, Carmine. The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success. McGraw-Hill Education, 2010. 21. Gallwey, Timothy. The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace (Reprint Edition). Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2001. 22. Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. (3rd Edition) Basic Books, 2011. 23. Gelb, Michael J. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day. Dell, 2000. 24. Godin, Seth. Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Portfolio, 2009. 25. Gompertz, Will. Think Like an Artist and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life. Penguin, 2015. 26. Gray, Dave. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. O’Reilly Media, 2010. 27. Groth, Aimee, Zappos is going holacratic: No job titles, no managers, no hierarchy. www.qz.com. 28. Hamel, Gary. The Future of Management. Harvard Business School Press, 2007. 182

George Bragadireanu

29. Hamel, Gary. What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation. JosseyBass, 2012. 30. Hawkins, David R. Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self: Contemplations from the Teachings of David R. Hawkins. Hay House, 2011. 31.  Hawkins, David R. Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment. Hay House, 2015. 32. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From. Riverhead Books, 2011. 33. Johnstone, Keith. Impro. Improvisation and the Theatre. Routledge, 1981. 34. Kaufman, James C. and Sternberg, Robert. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 35. Kirkpatrick, Doug. SMI interviews Chris Rufer, founder of Morning Star, on the power and potential of self-management, www.self-managementinstitute.org, 2010. 36.  Kirton, M. J. Adaption-Innovation: In the Context of Diversity and Change. Routledge, 2004. 37. Laloux, Frederic. Reinventing Organizations – A Guide To Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Nelson Parker, 2014. 38.  Levinson, Jay Conrad. Guerrilla Creativity: Make Your Message Irresistible with the Power of Memes. Mariner Books, 2001. 39.  Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2014. 40.  Libert, Barry and Spector, Jon. We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. FT Press, 2007. 41. Lipton, Bruce. Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here. Hay House India, 2011.

183

Selected Readings

42. Martin, Roger. The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking. Harvard Business Review Press, 2009. 43. Michalko, Michael. Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition). Ten Speed Press, 2006. 44. Noack, Karsten. Kreativitätstechniken. entwickeln und nutzen. Cornelsen, 2010.

Schöpferisches

Potenzial

45. Nussbaum, Bruce. Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire. HarperBusiness, 2013. 46. Osho. Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living). St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. 47. Padiu, Bogdan, CEO Teamnet (www.teamnet.ro/en) Personal Interview with author in December 2015. 48. Peters, Tom. The Circle of Innovation: You Can’t Shrink Your Way to Greatness. Vintage, 1999. 49.  Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New Mind. Riverhead Books, 2006. 50. Ramachander, S. Creativity @ Work (Response Books). Sage, 2006. 51. Robertson,   Brian J. Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. Henry Holt and Co, 2015. 52.  Robertson, Brian J. Personal interview with author in November 2015.   Alan and Schroeder, Dean. Ideas Are Free: How the Idea 53. Robinson, Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010. 54. Robinson, Ken. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. Penguin Books, 2009. 55. Sawyer, Keith. Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. Oxford University Press, 2006. 56. Sawyer, Keith. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Basic Books, 2007. 184

George Bragadireanu

57. Semler, Ricardo. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace. Warner Books, 1993. 58. Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday/Currency, 1990. 59. Shetty, Y. Krishna and Buehler, Vernon M., The Quest for Competitiveness: Lessons from America’s Productivity and Quality Leaders. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991. 60. Sinek, Simon. Start with Why. Portfolio, 2011. 61. Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theater. Northwestern University Press, 1999. 62. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor, 2005. 63.  Tapscot, Don and Williams, Anthony. Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio, 2006. 64. Thiebaut, Philippe. Gaudi: Builder of Visions. Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2002. 65. Whitmore, John. Coaching for Performance: GROWing Human Potential and Purpose: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership (4th Edition). Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2010. 66. Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Shambhala, 2001. 67. Wilber, Ken. No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth. Shambhala, 2001 (b). 68. Wilber, Ken. The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything. Shambhala, 2007. 69. Wilson, Edward. The Social Conquest of Earth. Liveright, 2013. 70. Zull, James. The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Stylus Publishing, 2002.

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