1eighty

Having known of CreativeMornings for quite some time, I finally made the decision to attend one of their talks and managed to snag a ticket to July’s lecture with John Maeda (assisted by Becky Bermont). If you’re not familiar with CreativeMornings, they’re an organization that hosts free breakfast lectures on a range of creative topics in four different locations around the world. Really good stuff.

John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), as well as an artist, designer, computer scientist and author. He gave a short talk on creative leadership, inspired by the work that he did with Bermont in preparation for their book on leadership; together they printed and analyzed Maeda’s tweets to see what insights these digital short-form messages held about him as a leader. Maeda and Bermont distilled their findings into six principles for creative leaders. By coining these principles, they hope to raise awareness of the value of artistic thinking in a leadership context.

Without further ado, I give you John Maeda’s principles for creative leadership:

1. Build From Foundations
Sketching, drawing and the study of raw data are excellent starting point to any creative process. “Artists have to get their hands dirty, starting with core foundations and basic principles.”

2. Craft The Team
Don’t be a lone wolf creative person. Work with your team. Make sure to craft your team wisely; to do great work, you need great material.

3. Sense Actively
Our world is changing rapidly. The structures of our organizations have grown more complex as we’ve gone from organizational trees with clear hierarchies and communication paths to complex and intertwined organizational networks. These organizational changes are felt everywhere and as a leader, it’s in your interest to quickly sense them and try to understand them.

Artists sense their surroundings and communicate their impressions through their art. Maeda likens them to kitemakers who sense the wind and with their kites help others to see it. Leaders should take inspiration from this and try to reflect the winds that they are sensing in their work.

4. Take Leaps
Artists are risk takers. They ask questions (“Why is it this way? Why is it not?”) and take leaps based on the answers they find. Leaders are understandably not as eager to do this but in an increasingly complex world, leaders benefit from looking to how artists approach the process of finding good ideas.

Maeda describes a pyramid of skills that facilitate idea generation (Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination). Click for full version.

The top half is the most strategic span for leaders today. People generally get stuck in the bottom half because they’re afraid of taking risks (Becky chimed in to say that this is especially true for women who often set out to find the right solution in projects). Leaders should welcome more freedom in their process and not strive to be perfect; just jump in, get your hands dirty and try out different things.

5. Fail Productively
Artists fail often, but they recover quickly; they fail productively. They connect and reuse old failures and in doing so they create new things. A CEO can facilitate productive failure by connecting people and ideas. As a leader, which two people can you connect to spark a new idea or to provide a solution to someone’s problem?

6. Grow From Critique
Artists are hungry for critique because they are eager to change and grow into their fullest potential. Anyone in a leadership position is going to be exposed to critique. So how does one grow from this critique without losing oneself? The answer, according to Maeda, is to have confidence and to use the 6 principles.

If you’d like to read more:
John Maeda’s Creative Leadership blog http://creativeleadership.com/
Patti Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination: http://creativeleadership.com/brennans-hierarchy-of-imagination