The crisis demands for more creativity …

Looking at the problems of today it becomes obvious that more of the same seems not to be the right cure. For The Times They Are A-Changin’, as Bob Dylan nicely put it, a fresh new approach towards business but also economic and societal problems is more important than ever.

But to date, the term ‘creativity’ in business has mostly been applied to the use of creativity techniques. While such techniques can be helpful to open managers up to new ideas, and while personal stories of artists can have an inspirational impact, both approaches are limited in their ability to help us appreciate peoples’ inherent creative potential.  If creativity is to add value to an organization, managers first have to understand its principles and develop the mindset, attitude and knowledge of where, when and how creativity emerges.

A look at the artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) might help us to grasp some of the underlying principles of creativity and how to make good use of it. Key to his approach are three core concepts for the path to creativity:

  • The active form of thinking (personal creativity);
  • The sculptural theory (process creativity); and
  • The social sculpture (collective creativity).

1. Personal creativity

Most of the thinking we do every day, according to Beuys, is routine: we repeat patterns and come up with the same solutions. But what if we want to generate new ideas in order to invent processes and products? To accomplish this, we must let go of well-known patterns of thinking and old solutions, and enter into what Beuys described as “the active form of thinking.”

Beuys defined three levels of active thinking: inspiration, intuition and imagination.

Inspiration is the moment that we spot something new or get the first spark of an idea. Sometimes people speak about the refreshing sensation of a ‘click’ when a moment like this happens. The idea is not yet clear, but one starts to sense what it could become. Most people experience intuition in the process of creativity. They sense and feel the quality of the upcoming idea, and trust their gut feeling. If we ask highly successful people the secret of their success, they often say that they sensed more than they thought about the topic. Intuition is the emotional side of the personal creativity process. Imagination is the final step in active thinking. What came to us as a spark and became more real by sensing is now generating an image. In the process of creativity, we start to let the image grow and make it as concrete and powerful as possible in order to communicate the idea. Imagination is the ability to think about the end result and make it visible.

2. Process creativity

In his sculptural theory, Beuys stated that every material that we use to produce a work of art ranges between two poles: structure and movement. Movement is related to activity, warmth, energy and intuitive thinking, but also to disorder and chaos; while structure is related to form, coldness, organization, rational thinking and structure. Beuys used this concept systematically in his own artwork: if he believed that more warmth was needed for a particular situation, he would choose the appropriate material. He claimed that this principle was not only relevant to artistic production, but has validity for all processes, including processes of communication. That is, ‘material’ can also be thought of as what people say or contribute to a process.

Process creativity involves the active shaping of a situation (by adding either more structure or chaos), instead of controlling it. In this sense, the process itself becomes creative. To manage process creativity, you have to closely observe the situation and judge its tendency towards structure or chaos.

3. Collective creativity

When Beuys was asked to name the most important piece of artwork that he ever produced, he always answered that it was the concept of the ‘social sculpture’ – a concept through which he brought together two disparate elements: social behaviour and the principles of building a sculpture. The heart of the concept is what he called ‘sculptural thinking’. Beuys saw the interaction of humans, in and of itself, as a sculptural space that could be shaped, on a metaphorical level, in the same way as a real sculpture.

While we can observe an entire painting at once, the perception of a sculpture is quite different. Obviously, we are not able to see the entire sculpture from a single vantage point. We observe it by moving around the object, beginning with one particular view and eventually coming back to the starting point, where we again see the same thing as when we started, but not the other side. However, we now have a memory of what we saw on the other side, and based on the memories of different perspectives and information, we ‘construct’ the image and form an opinion about the observed object. Beuys calls this process of assembling the different perspectives ‘sculptural thinking’.

In closing

We all have to acknowledge that — despite the emergence of analytical, metrics-driven approaches to problem solving — imagination, inspiration and intuition still have an integral role to play in modern business and society. Rather than being constrained by the boundaries of established management culture and legacy organizational practices, managers need to recognize the potential to sculpt their organization’s innovation practices and social interactions, just as Beuys created new forms of artwork through his understanding of the creative process. Perhaps the term ‘sculptural thinking’ should become a core part of the management lexicon for the 21st century.

Note: This comment was written by Martin Kupp, alumnus of the World Business Dialogue organizing team and draws on a recent article in Business Strategy Review by Jörg Reckhenrich, Jamie Anderson and Martin Kupp called “Understanding creativity: The manager as artist”.