Launch Speech on The Results of the National Research Survey "Is Australian management creative and innovative?"

Here is the full text of the speech I gave at the Annual General Meeting of the Australian Services Rountable in Sydney on November 5 launching the Creative Leadership Forum National Research Report "Is Australian management creative and innovative?"

To-day the word innovation appears almost daily in the media. There are 360 million references to innovation on Google and on the Google Daily RSS feed I receive notice of new books and articles released daily globally on the topic. Every expert offers a different solution! Every job advertisement talks about the applicant having the need to be creative and innovative. It appears this thing called innovation is a common everyday occurrence.

One might be able to talk about it as if it is. In practice, the reality is very different.

Innovation is an outcome - nothing more.

Creativity and invention with their fellow travellers risk, experimentation and the un-discussable “f” word “failure” are what makes innovation.These concepts are unpredictable, very elusive and differ from individual to individual, organisation to organisation in practice as much as humans differ themselves. Every example is different!

So the purpose of the Creative Leadership Forum research project “Is Australian management creative and innovative?” was to see if there were discernible patterns of practices, understandings, attitudes, perceptions and needs around creativity and its resultant innovation amongst Australian managers that could allow us to design and deliver meaningful and transformative peer to peer executive education and training programmes to enhance this practice so vital to the Australian economy.

The survey questions were deliberately designed to be generic, not to target industry or market segments, rather to reflect the existing opinions and practices surrounding creativity and innovation in the Australian work force as a whole.

The on-line survey was framed around three main areas of interest

• - Creative Leadership
• - Perceptions of creativity & innovation as practice
• Existing education and training programmes in creative leadership, creativity and innovation

I would like to thank at the outset The Australian Services Roundtable, the Australian Institute of Commercialisation, The Society for Knowledge Economics, The Australian Facilitators Network, ETN Communications through their magazine and on-line journal Fast Thinking, The Creative Skills Training Council, The Leadership Consortium, Innovation and Business Skills Australia (IBSA), Creativity Exchange Network and IXC Australia - all who facilitated links on their web sites and direct email newsletters to their membership databases. We estimate to have reached 30,000 in the Australian workforce at all levels and received in total 331 responses. I carried out an additional 25 in-depth interviews with 25 C plus executives against which I checked the findings of the on-line data.

I would also like to thank Dean Harris, Group Managing Director of Synnovate Australia whose advice was very helpful in the design of the survey.

Time will only permit me to paint an overall picture from the results to-night. A full report will be available off the Creative Leadership Forum web site within a fortnight for those interested.

As background to the project, I wanted to understand leadership and organisational trends in senior management globally to determine the perceived importance of creativity and innovation in their bigger picture. To this end, I completed a comparative study of global reports from 4 of the big consulting groups IBM/PWC, Boston Consulting, Accentures, McKinsey’s on CEO’s attitudes and concerns over the next five years.

The three main themes that emerged were

- CEO’s globally expressed concern that business model change was seen as vital to innovation (and boy, is that relevant more than ever right now);

- innovation was impeded by a lack of collaboration

and

- significantly, 2/3 of CEO’s have had little or no training in creative leadership, creativity or innovation and yet they see the development of these skills and capabilities as vital.

Was this reflected in the Australian market?

The answer is yes and this answer strongly informs my own opinions contained in this report.

The survey participants, made up of 42% upper level management 38% middle management, provided an insightful and at times sobering picture around some of the popular myths of creativity and innovation.

Only 5% of respondents used descriptors such as Creative, Innovation or Artistic Director or Manager in their titles. Only 12% described their roles as creating, innovating or driving change.

This I believe represents a significant challenge because if managers do not see creativity and innovation as a key aspect of their jobs they are highly unlikely to seek innovative solutions or to foster creativity and innovation with their teams.

My own experience and studies in North America and Australia is that those who have experienced creative leadership, creativity and innovation training are tentative at first in their application of their new thinking and tools and unless the environment in their organisation is supportive and empowering and thus conducive to its application - it is a case of use it or lose it!! The money and the effort lost!

Creative Leadership

So how do Australians perceive creative leadership?

Australians say the main attributes of a Creative Leader are Empowerment (73.3%), Enlightenment (70.7%), Enjoyment (66.9%) and Risk (62.4%). When asked to add an attribute of their choice, courage was most frequent word added.

Thus we can draw of profile of a creative leader as a team player, visionary, someone who enjoys work and is a risk-seeker.

So name someone in public life who leads creatively?

Sir Richard Branson topped the poll with 22%. Other admired creative leaders, of which over half were business leaders included Rupert Murdoch, Dick Smith, Mohammed Yunus and the late Anita Roderick and if you applied the main attributes you could say each one has been

- enlightened enough to create a new idea

- courageous enough to implement it

- personable enough to lead the innovation

- empowering enough to make it last.

Likewise all these entities have spoken in either biographies or interviews at length about their risk taking and seeking and their experiences of failure – attributes not easily spoken about by Australian managers tasked with leading innovation.

Yet failure and the discussion and criticism of it are vital components of creativity.

We asked Australian managers to define creative leadership?

The following is a selection of the responses..

...leads people to confidently innovate while managing change...

...harnesses the strengths of individuals in a team to better work for the team as a whole...

...helps people see issues, problems and processes creatively...

...leads themself and others through problem to solution in a useful and novel way...

...provides and contributes to an environment that allows people to try ideas...

...seeks out insights to inspire others...

....leads others into a new innovative and unknown future...

When asked are you a creative leader? 81% of Australians said YES

So if you are a creative leader (as the majority of Australian managers say they are) what does a creative leader do?

97.08% say a creative leader is one who leads people and processes creatively

45.9% say a creative leader is one who creates

Now there is a very important distinction here in that Australian managers say a creative leader is NOT ie ONE WHO CREATES rather az creative is one who leads people and processes creatively.

When asked to add their own description of what a creative leader does over half the responses fell under the empowering attribute with responses such as...create an environment that encourages creativity...build opening and trusting relationships..

Very revealing is that managers do NOT see creative leadership in the basics of business - revenue generation (50.8%), cost reduction (25%) or the development of new products (61%).

The main theme to emerge from this topic is that whilst Australians say they are creative leaders they foster creativity through empowerment rather than actually practice or apply it and because of the disconnect between the role of a creative leader and the role of a business leader, the workforce is conflicted on how to apply creativity to produce innovation at work.

These responses suggest to me the urgent need for leadership training focused on building a better work environment that ties functional creative skills training to the practice of creativity in everyday management.

Perceptions of Creativity and Innovation In Practice

Hands up those who are artists, writers, performers, musicians, sculptures or painters?? Hands up those who think they are creative?

When we asked managers where they perceived creativity came from?

91% disagreed creativity is mainly practised by artists

72% disagreed creativity came from artists

If creativity is not necessarily artistic, then what is it?

46% say it is mainly problem solving

44% say it is NOT problem solving but can’t say what it is

So there is substantial confusion and a lack of understanding by Australian managers about the use of the word “creativity” and what it means in reality.

Who do Australians think is highly creative (as opposed to leads creatively)?

This question surfaced a far wider and eclectic response than the previous question asking participants to name those who lead creatively.

Again Richard Branson topped the bill (6%) against the next closest who was Paul Keating (3%). Bill Gates received a mention but this time there were many more entertainers and artists Cate Blanchett, Pablo Picasso, Geoffrey Rush, Paul Kelly Edward De Bono as you might expect.

The diversity in response though reflects the diversity of creativity itself.

We asked Australian managers how they perceived themselves creatively.

70% agree People say I am creative

88% agree I am creative (And only 1% disagreed)

79% agree I recognise when I am being creative.

Is there a difference between personal creativity and work creativity?

62. % No - 48. % Yes.

2/3 of those who believe creativity is mainly problem solving believe there is no difference between work and personal creativity.

So how do Australian managers approach creativity?

We asked managers to list three attributes they perceived as their main creative attributes in order of importance.

- 56 % responded with attributes that could be called a functional, objective rational or problem solving view of creativity

- using terms such as lateral thinking, synthesis, thinking logically and clearly about shaping possibilities; clearly identifying the overall objective

- 20% responded with attributes that could be defined as an aesthetic or a softer view of creativity using such terms as passionate, intuitive, imaginative; as having a sense of humour; getting into the flow; using my inner child..

- 21% responded with attributes that could be loosely categorised as synthesis of both such as courage, empowerment, enjoyment

In summary, we can say the majority of Australian managers hold a broad definition of creativity and in the main feel they are creative and believe that creativity can be used by anyone anywhere. They are accepting that creativity has many manifestations and uses.

How do Australian Managers perceive creativity and its application in an organisational context.

55% believe their organisation is creative and a slightly larger number 64% say their organisation is innovative.

Importantly, the overall perception of individual creativity and innovation in the workplace is positive. 80% believe they are innovative and are able to apply creative thinking at work.

It appears Australian managers have a more positive view of their ability to innovate themselves than their organisation's ability to apply their creativity.

There were industry sector variances as one would expect. The Creative Industries had the most positive view of their organisation as was the consulting and professional services; the public sector participants in particular held a negative view of their organisations with only 22% saying their organisations were creative.

A very interesting statistics emerged saying 82% could not describe the difference between the terms creativity and innovation in the workplace - again, highlighting the confusion around definition, practice and meaning in these conpets.

Yet they seemed to be able to do so intuitively when asked to describe their experiences of creativity and innovation organisationally.

When describing experiences of creativity, managers described what they did. They used words such as "Designed, created, wrote, performed". Examples were “created a nation wide add campaign” - “designed a Christmas party theme”

When describing experiences of innovation, managers described what they achieved. "Reduced costs, enhanced quality, created value, streamlined process". Examples were “saved $55million in recurrent expenditure” “developed a new more efficient filing system”.

"Turning ideas into implementation” was how one respondent described organisational creativity.

From this we can see that Australian managers regard creativity in a very narrow view mainly as idea generation and innovation as implementation

Existing education and training programmes in creative leadership, creativity and innovation

Only 18% of organisations surveyed have a creative leadership programme. 95% of those programmes are CE0 driven. Training occurs across all strata of the organisation and sample topics included perception, thinking and judgment ; diversity as an asset; collaboration and emergence in groups; kinaesthetic and stress management

Creativity and innovation skills development programmes revealed what I thought was high. 49% of organisations have offered or experienced some form of creativity and innovation training - mainly in Senior to Middle Management. A very telling statistic was that less than a quarter of the respondents felt their organisations creativity and innovation skills programmes were successful and just over 50% were unsure whether they were successful or not.

The Summary

Is Australian management creative and innovative?

Yes, definitely. However they are being constrained by leaders who are restricted in their own experiences and understanding of the topic.

My personal view is that Australian managers are forced to view creativity and innovation from an operational, functional and process outcome driven perspective rather than from the perspective of a creative process and because of this it is impossible to tell if a manager who identifies him or herself as creative is able to manifest that creativity in the workplace.

Managers are required to work logically, rationally and linearily towards organisational outcomes because they have been planned and mandated in the first place. This is not how the world, real or on-line operates.

Innovation, as a reflection on the real world, is a series of continual actions of creation driven by experimentation, prototyping, failure and risk and unless a manager can feel safe and comfortable in that context, it will be very difficult for us to develop creative leaders capable of leading us into a truly innovative economy.

My research points to an absolute paucity of executive education and training in this area globally within business schools. I am currently involved with a small group of academics from Harvard, Oxford, MacGill and Texas Tech Universities and a senior partner from the US Boston Consulting Group who are exchanging information on developing curriculum around the art of management – a euphemism for creative leadership.

The Creative Leadership Forum will be delivering its first executive education programme in creative leadership in collaboration with the AGSM Executive Education programme in May 2009.

However, my view is that the next generation of managers and leaders regardless of formal education will be highly creative and innovative.

Web 2.0 and the digital world have forced their hands and these functions are driving business model innovation and re-writing business models on a daily basis. The next generation of managers will be multi-media savvy; able to create at the drop of a hat; prototype at no cost; think visually, write aesthetically, conceptualise and implement searching for a stream of commercial gold for all their stakeholders. The line between private and public in younger managers is already starting to blur.

As a result the very nature of organisations will alter.

They will become constantly changing creative learning communities who will be continually creative or die!!

To read a copy of the full report of "Is Australian management creative and innovative?"