Who Killed Creativity? How Can We Get Creativity Back?

Andrew Grant Harvard Business Review (HBR)


Harvard Business Review (HBR) TV interview with Andrew Grant – author of “Who Killed Creativity? and how can we get it back”.6 Key questions HBR put to Andrew Grant…

1. What inspired you to write this book?

2. Who /what is the greatest creativity killer?

3. What advice could you offer us to avoid falling in the complacency or pessimism traps, like Nokia and Kodak did?

4. If it’s a process, can we make one person responsible for creativity in a business organization?

5. When we realize that our organization is not creative, how can we reverse this process? Where do we start?

6. Could you share with us a few most important suggestions for business leaders?

(Interviewer Paula Waskowska Co- Chairperson Innovation Committe AmCham (Poland) http://www.hbrp )

 

Partial Transcript

1. What inspired you to write this book?

For many years, we’ve been designing & running creative thinking session, designing thinking session, helping companies solve critical problems or difficult problems, and we just kept coming up against its barrier. These participants would come to our workshop  sessions and we’ll be all excited to teach them something creative (but this is not artistic ability), it’s about, solving a real issue. But often they’d  be pushed by their boss to come, and the first thing that they say is “it’s not my responsibility to be creative, why I am here? That it’s innovation’s department or that’s someone else.”  And here we are trying to get them to think  creatively and trying to feel creative and yet they often came with excuses.

So we starting collecting these excuses from individuals, and it’s become really interesting gathering a data. We gathered this anecdotally from around 15 thousand people we’ve worked, in over 40 different cultures, in the last 15 years, we starting gathering. This was a gap, that was not addressed by the company. There are hundreds of books out there on creative thinking, everyone’s offering sessions, but no one was saying, “hey before we get into creative thinking, let’s deal with the issue that individuals & teams were struggling with”. Also individuals would come to our sessions and say, “I want to be creative,  but now my team was not creative, or teams would come and say “my team’s creative, but my company doesn’t support me, or my company’s culture doesn’t support this” .

It was important for us that  before we gave participants seven’s steps to being creative, we needed to look at the seven things that might block the process. And we want to be creative in doing this, let’s make it fun, let’s make it interesting, let’s make it memorable. And that’s how we came up with the crime scene investigation.

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