Creativity, mistakes and learning

I came across the TED talks on Youtube - films of stimulating talks/lectures/masterclasses by prominent people. I watched one by Sir Ken Robinson talking about education, intelligence and creativity - and how education squanders children's talent and creativity....

"companies stigmatise mistakes, we are frightened to make them - children are not frightened to be 'wrong'. If we are not prepared to be wrong, we won't come up with anything new or original". In my work supporting people's development in their professional and personal lives, this is central. There is a quote I've read that goes something like "we can't expect to get different results if we continue to do the same things".

Some of my best learning has come from my mistakes - recruiting the wrong person made me look at what assumptions I had made, and led me to change a recruitment process. Good managers cultivate an atmosphere where mistakes are valued (albeit within agreed levels of authority and responsibility which allow room for learning and development).

In the same lecture, Robinson quotes Picasso - "all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up".

Hand with flowers: Pablo Picasso

Goals and jigsaws

I use an exercise in my training courses to demonstrate aspects of learning. I invite participants to complete a small jigsaw (24 pieces) and use how they approached and completed the task to reflect on different ways we learn. This is then applied to thinking about how they might devise induction and training programmes for their staff.

I owe thanks to my friend Bill, who helped me to develop this exercise to a new level yesterday (we happened to be discussing the difficulty of understand tax matters for self employed people!). At the same time it also serves as an analogy for describing one of the ways that working with a coach / mentor / facilitator can help.

It involves trying to complete the jigsaw in reverse i.e. turn the pieces over so that you can't see any parts of the picture - only grey. This removes a lot of the clues we normally use to complete a jigsaw - limiting our information down to just 'shape'. The photo is the result of my attempt! By only having straight edges/corners as a guide, not only was I unable to get pieces in the right place, but it took me ages! Try it at home!

Developing and communicating a vision and engaging staff in the process and task is an essential part of leadership and management. It is also what we do as coaches/mentors and facilitators. Our aim is to work with others to help them to define and 'see' what the picture of their desired situation looks like (sometimes that is not even clear at the beginning), to compare this to what their current reality looks like, what they want it to be - and then how to make that happen through action. As a coach / facilitator, I assist clients to 'unlock' their thinking, help them to find the clues and answers that are inside themselves so that they turn their grey pieces into colour and bring their picture into reality.

Autumnal stages in life and work

I read a transcript today of an Inaugural Lecture (2008) at Henley School of Management by Prof Mike Pedler, an Action Learning facilitator and writer. In his lecture (All in a Knot of One Another's Labours - learning, self-determination and organising) he includes this extract from an article in The Guardian on 26.8.08 by the arts journalist Mark Lawson writing about writers' 'work' in later life:

"The conventional expectations of late work - the serenity of seniority, the perfection of philosophy - have been challenged by the literary critic Eric Said in his influential book 'On Late Style' (2002).

Said, a dedicated contrarian, argued that what made autumnal culture most interesting was not that the writer had come to some form of final understanding of their world and their work, but that they had failed to do so.

The career codas such as Beethoven's Grosse Fuge or Missa Solemnis - dark, dense, dragged out of deafness - were a statement, he argued, of 'intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction'."

These phrases (my italics) stood out for me. As the year moves to into autumn, there are people who have a sense of that difficulty - the transition from one season to another. Some move into it easily - with serenity - while others struggle with the 'dark'. On a bigger scale, how do we approach our work as we move into this later stage? What is the nature of our own 'career coda' (Italian term meaning'tail' - to describe a section at the end of a music composition to give a greater sense of finality). And going back to the topic of mergers or the close of a business, how many people move stubbornly, with difficulty with a relation to their work/organisation left unresolved. There is something romantic about the notion of 'serenity of seniority' which in these times may be out of reach.

Emergence

Samuel Johnson, the essayist, poet and lexicographer wrote the First Comprehensive English Dictionary (1755). Curious from hearing recent items on R4 referring to it, I took a look (the wonders of the Internet!). I looked to see what it said about the word 'emergent' which has come up in several ways in the last couple of days.

I came across the phrase "The Emergent Leaders Programme" yesterday while doing research on leadership development work in South Africa (for my application for a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship). This aims to support people to develop skills needed in moving into leadership roles.

At the end of the day I went to a fascinating talk by Nick Clements about his work with disaffected young males. Clements has written a book called "using The Ugly Duckling to find the missing link between boys and men". In it, he explains the archetypal themes in Hans Christian Andersen's autobiographical tale (a metaphor for a boy growing up without a father) and how this relates to Clements' own work in assisting teenagers through rites of passage into adulthood, to emerge knowing who they are without the need for their 'armoury'.

Then this morning I came from a meeting about a new programme which will include Action Learning to help bring social entrepreneur's ideas into fruition. The year-long programme will support them to develop what starts with a germ of an idea into a successful enterprise making a positive difference to their communities.

On the way back to the car I noticed spiky shells on the ground, burst open to reveal the beautiful red shiny new chestnuts that have been developing through the year inside the 'shells' - ripe and ready at the start of another stage of growth. Nature often provides us with these symbols.

So coming back to 'emergence' as described in Johnson's First Dictionary - to rise out of that which obscures or overwhelms it; rising into view. Three different groups of people - leaders, young people who struggle with what their circumstances have dealt them with, and entrepreneurs who have a desire to make a positive change - and different types of support but with the same purpose - to allow something from inside themselves to emerge into view, just as the chestnut out of its shell.

Photo: Laura Crichton

Transitions

I have just finished reading a Jungian perspective of the passage into midlife ("In Midlife" by Murray Stein). It describes the psychological journey of this particular type of transition as falling into three phases: separation, liminality, and re-integration.

The term 'liminality' comes from the Latin limen, meaning 'threshold' or 'doorway' and in psychologial theory refers to a state where identity is hung in suspension.

At the same time, I happened to be discussing organisations involved in mergers - a specific type of change and development in an organisation. I was struck by the resonances of the description of this process - not just what is happening externally (the organisational change, a merger) but also in the internal individual process of people in those organisations during a period of transition.

Mergers have a reasonably defined life cycle - from initial explorations (perhaps taking place 'off stage' in early days) to the coming into being of the new entity, formalised in legal terms with new systems and structures in place.

The whole process is a period of upheaval. Exisiting structures and boundaries will be taken down, formed/built into new 'shapes' (teams and departments) and a new identity established. It can involve great anxiety for staff caught up in the process (for most staff, the change is not within their control), letting go of what is known, uncertain about what is ahead, and not yet having a secure attachment and relationship to the new. A merger also involves a challenge to maintain 'business', bringing staff, customers and the public through this process of dismembering and construction.

At the same time, there is a life cycle of the personal processes involved - these depend on what role a person plays in the organisation - whether they are an instigator of the idea and involved in the early discussions, or whether they are further down in the hierarchical structure and enter the process at a later stage. For an individual, the organisation they know is now changing around them, bringing anxiety with an unknown future and identity.

Leaders and managers have a key role in guiding and supporting staff in the process (having a specific role/task to manage others through the change can mean their individual process through the change may move much quicker). They guide and support their staff in letting go of the old identity, structures, roles, relationships, and systems and moving to new ones (reintegration). Mergers can be seen as a reflection of (and containing elements of) the liminality that Stein describes in this particular life stage.