6. You Look Like the Creative Type: Da Vinci versus the Hackathon

After building expertise in an established field, the next step in personal and corporate development is creating new expertise in an undiscovered field: creativity. Creativity is the engine of the world economy. Every company is trying to come up with the next big thing, and the next big thing often doesn’t look at all like the current big thing.

Take the fast-changing world of mobile apps. In the span of a few years, it went from having a few proprietary apps on feature phones put there by a wireless carrier to ecosystems with millions of apps developed by companies ranging from large multinational game developers to teenagers coding in their spare time. The top-selling app this week will not be the top-selling app in a month. It’s hard to imagine that same kind of rapid innovation in slower moving sectors such as car manufacturing or even computer hardware, but this constant need for the next big thing is spreading across these industrial boundaries.

Different types of creativity exist, not necessarily in terms of artistic creativity versus engineering creativity, but along the lines of how disruptive, or revolutionary, the creation is. This axis goes from incremental improvements, such as a bigger screen on a smartphone, to major innovations, such as the invention of the airplane.

One might be tempted to say that disruptive innovation is better and more important than smaller improvements, but that’s not always the case. When a company is trying to move into a new area or break out of an unprofitable business model, the key to doing it is disruptive innovation. Plugging along with a broken model leads to being left behind by rivals. This was clearly the case with Nokia, which continued to churn out feature phones with uninspired designs long after the iPhone had disrupted the market.

Companies such as Amazon are fantastic at reaping the benefits of radical innovation. Releasing the Kindle, for example, represented a sea change in Amazon’s strategy. No longer content to only sell content online, Amazon took the big leap and created their own eBook reader with a seamless online storefront that made purchasing incredibly fast and simple. Today, Amazon effectively owns this market, worth billions of dollars.

The first Kindle, however, wasn’t that great to use. Buttons were in odd places, the screen took a long time to refresh, and the device itself was quite awkward and bulky. As soon as Amazon released the Kindle, competitors such as Barnes and Noble were fresh on their heels making similar devices. They even improved on some of the Kindle’s mistakes. Amazon had to continue innovating, but not in the same way. They had to constantly improve the Kindle to make using it a better experience. This is where continuous improvement and incremental creativity come into play. This type of innovation is responsible for the long-term success of a company or product, but requires a completely different mindset.

For disruptive innovation to happen, breaking out of one’s normal social circle and removing common assumptions are crucial. Incremental innovation, however, requires tight connections across a team that is working together to solve a problem. To be successful, organizations have to figure out how to effectively mix the two.

This mix strongly depends on what industry a company is in. In industries with longer release cycles, incremental improvement is paramount. Take the aircraft industry. Releasing a new airplane model represents the culmination of tens of billions of dollars of investment. Boeing’s latest plane, the Dreamliner, cost a staggering $32 billion to develop. Each plane they sell costs on the order of $200 million, meaning Boeing will have to deliver more than 150 planes to break even in terms of raw revenue, not factoring into account opportunity cost or what their actual profit margin is on each plane. As of mid-2012 they have built a total of 18 planes. If Boeing were simply to switch gears and develop another new plane, they would very quickly be out of business. Instead they need to work on improving the Dreamliner, implementing small changes to make it more attractive to customers.

The pharmaceutical industry is at the other end of the spectrum. Incremental innovation can help create drugs that are combinations of previously released drugs, but these typically have low profit potential and don’t fundamentally alter the market. Instead, drug makers are looking for that next home run, that next drug that meets a huge requirement in the marketplace and is radically different from anything else out there.

This task is hard to accomplish. Even the best pharmaceutical researchers only come out with a new drug once every 10 years. The rest of the time the compounds they work on never see the light of day, either because these compounds don’t have the expected effects or those effects don’t hold up under clinical trials. This makes gauging performance difficult and promoting effective development practice even more difficult. However, after a drug is released, the company’s work is essentially done. It has to manage production and distribution, but it can’t make any improvements to the drug.

In most organizations, ensuring a balance between these different types of creativity is important. Organizations that can get this balance right are destined to succeed in the long term. Interestingly, one of the best examples of this comes from the world of entertainment.

The show is the brainchild of friends Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They made the original inspiration for the show, The Spirit of Christmas, out of construction paper and placed each individual frame by hand. Today their team of 70 uses off-the-shelf computers and digital editing tools to make South Park come to life—but Matt and Trey have retained their close engagement with the actual production of the show.

Production of an episode of South Park is unlike anything else in animated entertainment. An entire show is conceived, written, animated, recorded, and delivered to the broadcaster in six days. By comparison, an episode of The Simpsons is produced over the course of six months.

Creating an animated TV show is a complex process. In general, first someone must come up with a storyline and write a script. That script is then taken off to the storyboard department, which mocks up scenes with quick drawings. Working closely with the director, storyboard rapidly iterates on new scene conceptions to ensure that the visual presentation matches with the overall vision. Voicing work typically occurs simultaneously, which feeds into the animation process. After storyboards are complete, animators can work on drawing the different scenes that make up the show, but they need the audio track from the voice actors so that they can draw the characters’ mouths appropriately. Although production staff members try to keep scripts and scenes relatively constant after the script has been finalized and storyboards are approved, last-minute changes invariably happen. Scripts and scene edits can change in the last few weeks before production whether from a demand from a censor or simply a change of heart from the director. These changes mean that the staff often won’t see an episode until the final cut is ready to be sent to the broadcaster to air. In South Park Studios this entire process is turned on its head.

At SPS, as with all television shows, everything starts with writing. This part of the process relies heavily on disruptive thinking. Each episode has to be original. The more novel it is, the more it breaks away from other shows out there and touches a cultural nerve, the more likely it is to succeed.

The SPS writing staff of seven sits together in a meeting room on Thursday morning, trying to get the seed of an idea for next week’s show. The first part of the discussion starts out with people just throwing out ideas they think are interesting even if they wouldn’t be relevant to the show. In these discussions there aren’t stupid or bad ideas, just unfunny ones. If an idea makes everyone laugh, then the team will keep pushing on that idea. By gauging the reaction of the team, they’re able to figure out whether this idea is disruptive enough to be worth pursuing. The team comes to this decision mostly by paying attention to verbal and visual cues, not direct content. When the room gets energetic, that’s when they know they have something.

Even though they have this egalitarian writing process, this team sometimes gets stuck. After creating hundreds of shows with very different storylines, coming up with wildly new ideas becomes increasingly difficult. That’s when some of the writers will get up and start pacing around, trying to shake out of the funk through physical movement.

After the show concept is set, incremental creativity kicks in. There’s not really any room for radically changing the direction of the episode, but there are slight refinements, both in terms of the dialogue in individual scenes to the look of the characters, that need to be iterated to create a polished final product.

At this point, script writing can start. While the writers are at work, however, the rest of the studio is also gearing up. Because episodes have to get completed in six days, there isn’t time to separate the different aspects of production. Writing, animation, and voicing all have to be done as quickly as possible to make the Wednesday afternoon deadline, and that means constant overlap. To deal with that overlap, animators at SPS do everything.

Normally in animated shows, there are separate departments for storyboard, character design, and movie animation. Not so at SPS. Every animator has to be able to do all of these jobs and do them quickly. As the director of animation Jack Shih says: “If it takes you four days to get something done, you can’t really contribute.” Animators are brought in soon after the scriptwriting starts. After a rough story idea is fleshed out, animators have to go to work on storyboards. These storyboards are fed back to the writers, who use them to go over the story and make any changes they feel are necessary. At the same time, animators are already working on creating new characters for the show and drawing up the different scenes. Of course, animators rarely work with pen and paper anymore, and animators at SPS are no exception. By relying on computer models, animators are able to rapidly make changes to different scenes without having to repeat work. The art director works with the individual animators to iterate on fine points of scene composition, after which the finished scene is assembled into the overall episode video track. This demonstrates incredible incremental creativity, as the animation team works within its constraints to continuously refine their deliverables.

During this time, the cast of South Park is busy recording dialogue. Interestingly, in this case the cast and the writers are one and the same, with Matt and Trey providing the majority of the voices. Because they’ve been working together for more than 16 years, they’re able to quickly communicate minute changes in the voice acting to make the dialogue more convincing. While they’re writing, they can also immediately pitch dialogue and act it out, testing to see whether it comes out funny. Again, this is a powerful example of making extremely creative incremental changes.

Trey Parker is the captain of this ship. If he doesn’t like something, it gets reworked by the whole team. Leads from the different departments sit together on a couch watching early cuts and quickly make determinations about what changes need to be made. This leads to a time crunch in the last few days of episode production. People often spend 24 hours a day eating, sleeping, and working at their desk. Although this schedule creates an extremely stressful environment for the 14 weeks a year the show is in production, it also creates a strong sense of camaraderie.

It also makes both disruptive and incremental innovation that much easier. People have the comfort level with their coworkers that they’re not worried about throwing around “stupid” ideas, but they’re also able to get on the same page when they need to execute.

The results of this process speak for themselves—a show that’s still fresh after 16 years on the air, four Emmys, and a workforce that’s incredibly engaged.

Compare South Park to a show like The Simpsons, which has been running for an incredible 23 years. The Simpsons, produced by Gracie Films, is a traditionally structured animated show with separate departments for the different art functions. After an initial story brainstorming session, each episode is assigned to an individual writer. In 1990 when the show was just starting up, there was still a core creative team that was able to span the gap between different departments.

Today, it’s a different story. After a storyboard is completed and approved by directors, it is transferred to a Korean animation studio that does the actual animation that appears on your television. Although the level of involvement by the directors and animators at Gracie is unclear, they’re certainly not under the same roof, as they are in SPS, and executing rapid, incremental innovation would be difficult if not impossible.

These process differences have a clear impact on the success of these shows. When comparing the Nielsen ratings of The Simpsons and South Park,² one must take a couple of things into account:

• Although the number of viewers watching The Simpsons has declined almost every year since its debut in 1989, this isn’t just due to show quality. In 1989, the penetration rate of cable was very low, so grabbing a larger share of the market was much easier. That competition has increased over time.

• Before 2001, Nielsen-released ratings were based on the number of households that watched a show. Today, Nielsen releases the more accurate number of how many people actually watched.

To make these numbers roughly comparable, I multiplied the number of households by two to get a decent idea of how many people were watching The Simpsons (see Figure 6.1). This makes ratings from The Simpsons and South Park directly comparable.

Figure 6.1. Simpsons Did It?

What’s fascinating when looking at these numbers is how consistent South Park has been relative to The Simpsons. South Park has managed to retain viewers over the course of its 16-year run with little change in its ratings over the past 10 years. The Simpsons, on the other hand, exhibits a fairly consistent downward trend in its ratings, with an audience in 2011 (season 23) that is only a quarter of what it was when the show premiered in 1989. Considering that the viewing population grew by about 26% during this same period of time, this represents an even more precipitous drop.

All of this is to say that when it comes to creativity, South Park wins the cartoon wars.

This bias against creativity instruction bleeds over into the way organizations think about training. Training sessions are much more about specific facts or systems that employees need to know, not how to think. Although organizations know that creativity is important, they just don’t have a solid model of what creativity actually looks like. Without that model, creating sustainable improvements in creativity is extremely difficult for organizations.

That’s not to say that companies can’t take lessons from SPS. Their model of rapid incremental innovation, breaking down organizational silos for disruptive show ideas, and close connections between coworkers sets it apart from other shows. This certainly seems like the secret sauce that makes the studio so successful.

As already mentioned, however, different organizations need different types of innovation, different types of creativity. Although inferring general rules from these examples is possible, getting into the data to see what is really making everything tick is necessary.

To tackle this problem, my collaborators at Arizona State (ASU) used the badges to look at researchers in different research and development (R&D) labs across the U.S.³ Their question, similar to the one posed in this chapter, was around what behaviors were actually driving creativity. After the relevant behaviors are known, they can be incorporated into training, management policies, and even the educational system.

Measuring return on investment for R&D is difficult, mostly because an investment made today might not pay off until 10 years from now, whereas other efforts can show up in a product in 6 months. So, sales numbers don’t really give a company much to evaluate. Even if they did, in the 10 years a company spends working to make an innovation become reality, it can’t use data from that project to improve the creativity of the workforce.

This problem is magnified at the individual level. When an individual researcher comes up with a new invention, it often has to be used in tandem with other technologies to be useful. How do you determine how big of a contribution that invention was?

As you can imagine, with such a big gap between measurement and reality, researchers have developed a number of tools to gauge creativity. Essentially these tools are all subjective, but by using a number of tools to triangulate measurements and testing across a variety of contexts, one can feel more confident in the results. Specifically, researchers use self-reports on creativity and have experts code daily logs of activity to assess how creative someone was on a given day. Survey questions essentially take the form of “How creative were you today?” Activity logs, on the other hand, ask employees to write details about what they did during the day. These methods are really only applicable for research projects because these surveys and activity logs take a substantial amount of time to fill out.

Using the Sociometric Badges and the aforementioned evaluation tools, ASU researchers Win Burleson and Pia Tripathi studied three R&D teams in different technology organizations. The goal was to understand creativity in general and see whether the data collected with the badges could actually predict this nebulous concept.

The teams they studied had between five and seven members and were broadly focused on technology R&D. One team worked on software creation, while the two other teams were concerned with thinking up new systems that included both hardware and software. The workplaces for these teams were similar as well. Each team member had his or her own cubicle facing a wall, with the cubicles surrounding a central collaboration space. The idea behind this setup was to create an environment that facilitates close collaboration but also provides for individual space to focus on different work efforts.

The ASU team had a couple of hypotheses going into this study:

• During highly creative days, team members would interact more closely with one another. That is, the average amount of time people spent speaking with their coworkers would increase.

• On these highly creative days, people would also be much more physically active.

These hypotheses intuitively make a lot of sense and match the observations from SPS. When people are having a creative day, they’re working very closely with colleagues and rapidly iterating on new ideas. The better the ideas, the more enthusiastic people become, which in real terms means speech and movement are much more energetic.

The ASU team set out to put some numbers behind these observations, finally injecting hard data into what has long been considered a “soft” metric.

This result is a major step forward because it means that your creativity can be measured just by looking at whom you talk to and how much you move around. While things besides creativity can obviously affect a person’s movement patterns, these results indicate that those other factors don’t have a consistent effect.

Some people don’t even realize that they’re being creative, as illustrated by the disparities between the expert and self-report data. This implies that behavioral data analysis may be a much more accurate and less time-intensive approach for measuring creativity.

This method would also be extremely helpful for understanding creative events. By automatically detecting when people are creative, companies could better study the conditions that gave rise to that creativity. On a large scale, with organizations composed of hundreds of thousands of people, this action could yield creative iteration on many different processes to help spur creativity across the company.

This data also provides some tools to help people figure out how to get out of a creative funk. For example, rather than trying to work through new ideas on your own, engaging other people in discussion is best. This could be as simple as going to a meeting room and working on a whiteboard. Even scheduled brainstorming sessions can help.

Longer term creative success also depends upon people in different groups interacting with each other. If you only interact with people in your social circle, you end up speaking to people who all have the same opinion. The lack of these interactions is precisely what causes companies such as Nokia to ignore a major disruptive force in their market. As discussed earlier, although Nokia had dominated the cell phone market for some time, the strength of its organizational silos meant that until recently their dominance wasn’t turned into a transformative opportunity to make smartphones central to the company’s strategy.

Serendipitous interactions are incredibly important for making random connections that pay off down the road. You could meet someone working in a completely different area and find out that you’re working on things that are actually quite related or could solve one another’s problems. Longer-term studies are needed to determine the impact on the company’s bottom line, but preliminary data shows that people who tend to have these random interactions perform better than people who don’t (see Chapter 4).

Although interaction patterns and physical movement were both predictive of creativity, they need to be addressed separately. It’s not surprising that you’re more creative when you’re more energetic and moving around. After all, when you’re lying around on a couch and not lifting a finger, you’re probably not being very productive or creative. An example of the importance of energy comes from the crucible of startup innovation, the hackathon. One of the hallmarks of creative software companies is the liberal use of caffeine-fueled 24-hour programming jams called hackathons. These events, at companies such as Facebook and Google, get a bunch of engineers together in a large room with plenty of computers, couches, pizza, and drinks, and encourage people to collaborate in small teams and build a working demo of the next big thing.

During a 24-hour period, programmers devise code and demonstrate a working application that builds on top of a company’s infrastructure. This Herculean undertaking yields important innovations—Facebook’s chat feature, for example—and at the same time builds social capital across the company. These are intense events, with people furiously coding to meet deadlines and quickly iterating on features to hack something workable and intuitive together. No wonder that the startup community has enthusiastically embraced hackathons as a major tool to promote innovation.

Hackathons are an example of the type of activity that is associated with higher energy levels and higher creativity. The results from the ASU study don’t say that people should spend the entire day running around the office. Instead they’re saying that rather than sitting still at your desk, you should try to walk around a bit more and get yourself amped up about the work you’re doing. These tasks can be challenging, but that’s another reason why events such as hackathons can be effective. They set a cultural expectation for high energy and high commitment, and this activity is infectious. When everyone around you is energetic, you similarly become more energetic.

In contrast to these findings, in many socities the lone genius is often seen as the ultimate model of creativity. Leonardo da Vinci, Edison, these are the giants of individual innovation. Forgotten is the fact that these people lived in an extremely vibrant and collaborative community. Da Vinci traveled around Italy during the heady days of the Renaissance, interacting and working with many of the brilliant luminaries of that time. Edison’s work developed during the boom times of the Industrial Revolution, and he similarly was heavily embedded in the scientific and industrial communities. Edison’s famous work on the light bulb was actually a practical improvement built on top of existing technology, not something that he invented from scratch.

As the data from the ASU study shows, innovation isn’t just about the individual. That’s not to say that individual people aren’t important. People actually have to work to be creative and make innovations a reality. At its core, creativity is about getting the right people energized to collaborate and make something great. The combination of different skills and the chaotic mixing of ideas is what generates innovations that change the world.