Alf Rehn (Finland) is an internationally recognized business thinker and has taught at universities all over the globe. He has been called an “enfant terrible of organization studies,” while The Times named him a “star of the future.”
I know that Alf Rehn doesn’t like being referred to as a Finnish superstar of the future, but I use these words anyway because I was very inspired by our conversation around creativity, innovation, and what Rehn calls “the land of lost ambition.” I hope you find it inspiring too.
I know that you don’t like the idea of the “singular genius.” Could you please tell me more about why? And if creativity doesn’t come from the individual, where does it come from?
I talk about creative cultures, and I do so as a way to get away from the cult of the individual in the thinking around creativity.
We’re far too focused on the notion of the singular genius coming up with a singular idea, when the real issue of creativity—particularly in organizations—is how we can create a fertile environment for ideas, one where they are engaged with, nurtured, and cared for. This also means that creative cultures are attentive to ideas from all their members, not just the few who’ve been designated as the “creative ones.”
What sets these kinds of cultures apart from the not-so-creative cultures?
They are more creative, more innovative, and more adept at managing change. Whereas a lot of the discussion about creativity in an organization still focuses on individuals and their ideas, I’ve tried to show that even a hypercreative individual will flounder in an organization that lacks care and nurturing when it comes to ideas, and that cultures tend to be far better at killing ideas than they are at taking care of them.
So, you could say that the notion of creative cultures refers to what happens after ideation, when an idea meets the cold, hard glare of reality. Will the culture scoff, laugh, or yawn at it? Will the culture engage or tell the progenitor of the idea why it won’t work? Will the culture nurture new ideas like you’d nurture a child—one not yet mature but with tremendous potential?
For me, this is what sets some cultures apart. Not that they talk the talk about creativity. Not that they’re great at brainstorming. Rather, that they are good at things like care and nurturing, support and succor. The weird thing is, if you’re good at such soft things, the world will reward you with cold, hard cash.
I like the idea that being good at soft things rewards you with harder things. But why do some companies tend to destroy their own creativity?
By and large, companies are good at seeing the value of their history and terrible at seeing the potential value in the people. Companies tend to be very locked in to the things that made them great, and without knowing it, very wedded to the notion that their future should look very much like their past. This means that when they start exploring new opportunities, they unconsciously limit their creative space.
So, a company can have a tremendous amount of creative potential but limit itself by only allowing ideas and experiments that stick closely to what has historically worked for it. Further, a company might pay lip service to innovation, while at the same time only looking at familiar opportunities. Simply put, it isn’t enough for a company just to “get creative,” it also needs to be able to critically review what kind of creativity and what kind of innovation it has tended to allow.
So creativity doesn’t come naturally to us. What can we do about it as individuals, as leaders, and as organizations?
Simply put, our brain is lazy and so are we. It is always easier to go with what one already knows, using well-honed routines and acquired experience. Creativity requires extra energy, and true creativity may even require that we unlearn some things and learn completely new ones. All of this comes at a cost, which is why we often subconsciously turn away from creative thoughts—particularly very creative ones. The funny/scary thing is that our brain can actually trick us into believing that we’re being creative when we’re actually just using old knowledge and known processes.
To work around this, I often suggest people start exploring their own discomfort. Look at the ideas you ignore or say no to and ask yourself why you ignored them. Sometimes it might simply be because the ideas weren’t very good, but often it can be about how new ideas seem to require too much work from us. Understanding this, our occasional discomfort with novelty, can then be harnessed to learn new forms of ideation.
Speaking of new forms of ideation, you have the concept of a dangerous idea. What is that?
Oscar Wilde might have said it best: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” I sort of riff on that, and in my book Dangerous Ideas, I argued that too much of what is presented as “creativity” are in fact quite safe and tepid ideas. Instead, I said, we should look for ideas that make people angry, disgusted, creeped out. Ideas that make people laugh at us, spit in our faces, threaten legal action. If everyone likes your idea, it can’t be very good; you’ve not challenged anyone. If your idea makes people furious, you’re on to something.
You’re writing a book called Saving Innovation, and at the same time you claim that having more innovation books isn’t necessarily better. You’ll have to explain that to me!
Hey, I wrote a creativity book about why there are too many creativity books! This just follows suit… Heh! No, it’s a good question. What I’ve tried to argue is that a great deal of the innovation literature is rather uninnovative. Most innovation books look just like all the others, using the same examples and prescribing the same solutions. They also tend to be very bad at looking more critically at innovation, and instead merely present the same shiny, happy stories as everyone else.
What I wanted to write about was how innovation can be lost and squandered, and about how the innovation industry—all us gurus, consultants, and writers—are part of the problem. I’m arguing that innovation has been turned into a bullshit buzzword, and that people who write books about it need to take a long, hard look at themselves and ask whether we’re really supporting innovation as a meaningful driver of human advancement or just a fancy word we use to enrich ourselves.
When you write about innovation, you also write about “the land of lost ambition.” What is that?
Once upon a time, innovation stood for “What miracles can we achieve?!” Today, many companies see it as just something to churn out. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real innovation or if it creates significant, valuable change. It only matters that you have something, anything, that can be referred to as an innovation in the PR material. So yes, I believe that many companies lack ambition in their innovation endeavors. As long as it is new, and as long as you can refer to it as an innovation, managers are happy.
But this has a dark side. Innovation is still the single best chance we have to create things to solve the many wicked problems of our planet. While companies should be thinking about things like the water crisis, global warming, social inequality, and the cataclysmic shifts of demography, many are still far too caught up in questions like “Should we create an app?” and “Can we put more smart sensors into our socks/shovels/shawarma?” Innovation should be ambitious. These days, however, only a small fraction of what is called “innovation” actually is.
TO THE PERSON WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHERE HE WANTS TO GO THERE IS NO FAVORABLE WIND.
Seneca