Creative Populist

Jugaad is a term for the innovation principles and practices emerging in India that are just beginning to be embraced in the USA.  Jugaad innovation starts with the assumption that resources are scarce, that we need to do more with less, and that alone helps us understand why we all need to develop an appreciation for this innovation model.  Jugaad emphasizes flexibility, agility, and is very much a Bottoms Up energy.  In contrast to the typical American corporate model of R&D where a select team of folks acquire large budgets and negotiate extended development cycles to try to accomplish transformative changes, Jugaad is populist, driven by constant small tests and trials, and is deeply anchored in the population it hopes to serve.

Jugaad is one more way to talk about the sort of Bottoms Up creative principles that Creative Populism embraces.  There are now a great number of case studies of poor villagers in India–uneducated and without investment capital–who set out to solve a local problem for themselves and their neighbors who are now selling there product solutions throughout the country.  That’s further proof of the inherent creatively entrepreneurial qualities of the human condition, and it makes a case for how important it is for business leaders to invite everyone in their organizations to take on the challenge of continuously innovating in the work they perform.   If you are interested in unlocking that creatively entrepreneurial energy in your organization, I would love to help.

A focus of my thinking the past couple of months has been why and how the most productive creatively entrepreneurial forces within an organization are so often driven by some sort of Bottoms-Up Self-Organization, BUSO.

I benefited from these generative forces with two companies over a ten year period.  Each of these companies had a small number of basic rules that guided behavior among employees–employees applied these rules to self-0rganize, to guide how they worked together and how they made their decisions–and the same rules guided behavior and relationships between the company and the markets.

‘Actively search for opportunities to over-invest in customer delight’ was one rule in a cellular service company.  ‘Maintain lots of quick experiments around new opportunities’ was one in the marketing services agency/new biz incubator.  Each company had maybe three or four such rules of strategic significance.

Each company was filled with employees who, guided by these rules, confidently applied their creatively entrepreneurial talents to delivering added value to the market while they continually self-organized; which is to say, they led their own reorganizations of how they would work together as new challenges and demands emerged.

In two rapidly changing marketplaces, it always seemed each company was ready to be what it needed to be in order to do what it next needed to do.

I’m excited to find how core elements of the Creative Populist content serve my understanding of how this happens, and that a simple and perhaps even graceful implementation strategy has come together to share these ideas with others.  I wrote about it in my book, and will write about it here, and am eager to talk to folks who would like me to help them use these ideas build more creatively entrepreneurial capacity in their organizations.

When I’m speaking to a room full of interested people we’ll talk about how our Intentional choice of Language can, in the immediate term, serve our creatively entrepreneurial work on a particular project while, in the long term, it develops our creatively entrepreneurial capacity.  I introduce this discussion by asking the folks gathered to “Raise your hand if you like being taken advantage of.”

Thousands have been asked that question, no hand’s been raised, and I wait for a an extra second to allow folks to think about how absurd that question is: Of course no one likes being taken advantage of.  That’s one of life’s least pleasant events, to be taken advantage of.  It’s insulting and embarrassing.  It’s worse than losing.

“Then why,” I ask after the pause, “when we see a fresh new opportunity, alive with possibility, why do we say we are going to take advantage of it?”  And then I start talking fast so I can keep up with them as their thoughts are racing ahead to answer that question.

“Of course when you say you are going to take advantage of an opportunity, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to take the best for yourself and leave the rest for us but if that’s what you did, we’d call that behavior taking advantage of the situation.  Nor does it necessarily mean you are going to withhold information and manipulate the authority you control because you can and because you’ll benefit, but we would call that taking advantage as well.

“What if instead we said we’re going to create advantage from an opportunity?

“Again, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to cultivate it and nurture it and care for it and recruit other talented folks to help, but using that language points you in that direction, in a generative direction, and it wins for you the next increment in wherever you are going with this opportunity.”

Here’s a good way to consider the impact of choosing Language with Intent.  Imagine the next time you sit at the table with a couple of others to kick off a creatively entrepreneurial project of some sort, to build a new marketing strategy around a shift in the industry, or to launch a new business with a couple of partners.

If you discussed at the start how this opportunity appears when you act to Take Advantage of it and how it appears when you act to Create Advantage from it, I’m betting the team’s subsequent efforts will be well served.

The fact is, you and your friends don’t play enough.  If you are the exception you’re lucky.  All the research concludes that Millennials as children spend dramatically fewer hours in Open-ended Play than previous generations have.

What is Open-ended Play (O-eP)?   It’s the fully committed investment of your body and your mind.  You are physically active, your senses are engaged and your mind is wide awake, both consciously analyzing and calculating and subconsciously associating and relating.

O-eP is the imaginative collaboration of you and a friend or three or six or ten kids declaring a new world into existence as you take turns defining it and shaping it as you run around and through it.

Not long ago a great span of childhood years were spent architecting and narrating and acting and prototyping and continuously improving these creative worlds.

This dramatic reduction of O-eP in Millennial children’s’ lives to a great extent is the unintended consequence of your parents tremendous love for their children.

Your parents were more eager to be parents than any before, so much so that they added large new responsibilities, even duties, to the parent’s role.   Most notably they have become your talent manager, watching carefully for every indication of any special inclination on your part, and they are quick to invest in the lessons or classes or teams where you can develop that skill or interest.

So you are regularly attending practices, or taking lessons, or signing up for extra classes because there is that second interest of yours, with its own schedule.

And quite often a third.

And of course there is school, and homework.

And more homework.

And you need to spend some time with friends, and on Facebook.

And a bunch of you have jobs.

So very few of you have any meaningful time to be bored enough to entertain yourself with old school O-eP.

So what?

Any one of your extracurricular activities is important in helping you develop your talents and abilities, creatively entrepreneurial or otherwise, no doubt.

But if you are doing so many that your life feels like you are trying to stuff 50 pounds into a 40 pound sack then let me share another picture of O-eP and ask yourself where in your life you are cultivating, nurturing, developing the creatively entrepreneurial instincts and feelings expressed in…

…Once upon a time you picked up the stick and it felt just right in your hand, and your action and your thought are in the same moment as you slash the sky with the stick that has become a sword so that means the cloth on the chair is now your cape and you drape it over your shoulder and arm and take the next step forward into a world you narrate through this character’s eyes, negotiating the imaginative realities of others on the playground, recruiting them at times, diverging when necessary, discarding what isn’t needed and adding features when they suit the emerging story.

And when it’s time you know it’s time for the sword to become an eye glass and you put it to that use to scout ahead for the next narrative hook.

All as you run for your life, then wait for your turn, then balance on one foot, then hop on the other, then agree to be the one who dies next time, and then break the stick in half to refresh the game.

Being well practiced and graceful at such play is suggestive of what?  Strategic nimbleness?  An appetite for tactical Continuous Improvement?  Adaptive Leadership through narrative development?

I’m not sure how you teach that.  I know how you learn it.

By playing at it.

I try to talk my Duke students out of getting an MBA.  There’s nothing new to my concerns about MBA programs, they have been expressed by others before me–they are way too focused on the quantitative side of business, a focus that has led to a range of problems, most notably a sense that if it can’t be measured, it is of less importance.

After two events last week at Hult University I now have an MBA program I am eager to promote.  Hult has five campuses–I visited San Fran, there’s one in Boston, London, Singapore, and Dubai–and students accepted at one can rotate term by term from one to the other.  And 85% of the students are from overseas.  They stress collaboration, there is a wonderful creative energy, the students were both focused and dynamic, and the faculty and administrators I met were deeply committed to their students.   It’s a one year program, very hands on in its approach.  It needs to be much better known.

I had the privilege to be a part of Wake Forest University’s TEDx on Saturday.  There were great speakers, from Dr. Atala sharing his work in organ regeneration, to Mary Martin Niepold sharing her work supporting the growing number of grandmothers in small Tanzanian villages who raise their grandchildren because parents die from AIDS, to Dr. Laurienti surveying the powers of the new science of Complexity.

One of the comments that resonated the most with me was that we don’t absorb knowledge, we actively construct it for ourselves.

I was amazed by the turnout the Wake Forest students who ran this event were able to attract to it.  Last spring we had a TEDx at Duke where we didn’t quite fill a 300 person theater.  At its peak the audience on Saturday was right around 1,500 folks.

On Friday before the event I was on the TEDx site and saw how many TEDx’s were taking place, so I counted them.  From that Friday til the end of this month, six days, there were 176 TEDx’s scheduled around the globe.  I consider this a great testament to the bottoms up self organizing energy that I call Creative Populism.

I’m convinced it is so because of my experience in the workplace and the classroom–time and again I have seen folks who proclaim they aren’t creatively entrepreneurial soon making important creative contributions.  But I appreciate many want more quantitative evidence and I have been relying on the research that demonstrated 98% of 5 year old kids score at the creative genius level on a Divergent Discovery assessment tool developed by NASA.   Now comes a new piece of data.  According to Robert Neuwirths’ new book ‘Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy’ 50% of all the jobs in the world are self-generated, where someone has seen a problem in their neighborhood or village or town as an opportunity to offer a solution and make money doing it.  And they accomplish this with little or no formal training, and little or no capital.  They accomplish it by being creatively entrepreneurial.

I have been invited to speak about Creative Populism and Being Creatively Entrepreneurial at McKinney on Thursday.  And when you check out their website–www.McKinney.com–you’ll understand my reference; the folks at McKinney exhibit a mastery over the creative process that is inspiring.

But then I considered my experience working in creative industries–I’ve been in advertising and publishing–and realized that while athletes understand the vital importance of practicing to improve their skills and performance, and so do musicians, most creatively entrepreneurial professionals don’t.  They get to work, and of course their skills improve in the application of them at work, but few of us practice them.  Sure, we read books from Daniel Pink and Seth Godin and others, and that has true value, but how many of us have a regular discipline of action or behavior designed to cultivate our creative capacities and develop our entrepreneurial instincts?

I enjoyed speaking about creative entrepreneurship twice in the past two weeks with employees at SAS.   Most of you know this company, founded in 1976 by a group out of North Carolina State; many consider SAS to be the largest privately-held software firm in the world.  Year after year they rank at the top of ‘Best Places to Work’ and awhile back I had the great fortune of meeting Page Cvelich, a consultant in SAS’s Work/Life Programs.  Thanks Page, for arranging for these talks.

The first was designed to help employees cultivate their creatively entrepreneurial qualities.  For the second I spoke to them as parents who appreciate the importance of developing those qualities in their children.

We focused on open-ended play, and its vital role in the cultivation of a child’s creatively entrepreneurial abilities.  Research doesn’t surprise us when it demonstrates this generation plays less than the previous generations.  Most reasons are obvious–schools being taken over by a culture of tests and more tests tops the list, but parents who care so much that they over-book their kids’ schedules with too many extracurricular activities so kids don’t have time to exercise their imaginations with their own open-ended play is way up there, and parental concern for kids safety means we don’t provide the space either–children don’t ‘wonder as they wander out under the sky’.

Why is open-ended play so important?  It not only provides opportunity for them to exercise their imaginations as they design new worlds that they populate with their characters and their narratives…

It not only invites the creation of prototypes, as they quickly cobble together props and sets and then continually improve them when the narrative calls for it…

It not only requires creative collaboration–think about these open-ended imaginative games as early experiences with open source software, where kids are adding their improvements to the whole of it…

Open-ended play also develops ‘executive control’ as children learn patience playing games, and and voluntarily manage their behavior as they wait for the next turn.  Does it surprise you that research will often find more patience on the playground than in the classroom?

The day after my second talk I was delighted to be copied on an email between SAS employees about their interest in forming a parent support group to help introduce more open-ended play into their children’s day.   Excuse me if I smile about this victory for the Creative Populist Revolution.  And allow me to invite you to find a way to bring more open-ended play into your life, and the life of your children.

That my first job in high school was as a fishing guide at Ball Lake Lodge, a fly-in fishing lodge in Ontario, had a profound impact on my development as a creatively entrepreneurial person.   At the age of 16 it was my job to make sure that the two successful businessmen who had spent lots and lots of money to fly into this wilderness camp and would spend three or four days fishing out of my boat would be delighted with their trip.

I quickly learned that I had two relationships with these men.  I was most certainly their servant–I met them at their cabins in the morning with a pot of coffee, loaded their gear in my boat, baited their hooks, netted their fish, cleaned their fish, and fixed their shore lunch.

And I was also their leader, for they needed me to plan the day, to take them to the best spots, and show them how to fish a particular cove or reef or bit of current.

It was my job to lead them by caring for them, to care for them by leading them.

Is there a better leadership style to take on when managing a team of creatively entrepreneurial employees than promising you will care for their needs as you show them the best places to exercise their talents?