Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

Mark Twain famously described the proper proportions of a maxim: a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense. In a text-messaged and 140-character Twitterized world, brevity has enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Writer, and blogger, Seth Godin, has made a living by being both perceptive and brief.

A few months ago, I read the best-seller, "Not Quite What I Was Expecting: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure," by the editors of Smith Magazine. Legend has it that in the 1920's, Ernest Hemingwaybet colleagues that he could write a complete short story in just six words.

The result, "For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn," He reportedly called it his best work.

Here's a sampling:

Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends.

Danced in fields of infinite possibilities. (Deepak Chopra)

Nobody cared. Then they did. Why? (Chuck Klosterman)

Wasted time regretted, so life reinvented. (Vicky Oppus)

I use the 6-word technique in Innovation Workshops because it's a creative way to distill an idea to its essence. For example, Melville's Moby Dick: White whale. Missing Leg. Unknowable God.Twitter: What are you doing? 140 characters.

Can you sum up your business idea or company mission in 6 words? If you can't -- maybe there isn't a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense. Try it at your next meeting. Distill the next project to six words. Express the strategy in six words.

Creativity Central. Ideas. Innovation. All in one place.

http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/

The Window.

Think of it as a graphic that illustrates your ability to absorb and evaluate new information.  It is likely to be as mercurial and complicated as the Dow Jones Average.

I first noticed The Window when I gave a presentation on innovation a few years ago in to an academic committee.  50% of the group was engaged.  25% were neutral.  And 25% were seemingly disengaged.  Curiously, this may be a Newtonian-like constant recognized by teachers and presenters everywhere.

The presentation, no matter how provocative, simply wasn’t relevant to that 25% at that moment in time.   We’ve all been there.

Contrast this to the work I’ve done with Gerald Haman at the Thinkubator in Chicago.  The group was nearly 100% engaged.  The difference was 1) they invested money in the accelerated innovation workshop 2) they made a commitment to the process and 3) they were highly motivated and receptive to the information.

David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done (GTD) asks a critical question, “What do you have your attention on?”  You may be physically present in a meeting, but your head may be swimming with other commitments.

He writes in his new book Making It All Work. “Time is what creates the awareness of constraint, which then forces the real issue, which includes where and when you allocate your (mental) resources.”

So how do you engage when there’s a sense of urgency of other commitments – even if they do not rise to the level of truly urgent and important?

I think The Window is a creative solution.  It is a commitment to being actively present for at least 15 minutes.  It is what psychotherapists attempt do everyday.  When they mentally drift – it is often because the patient isn’t being emotionally authentic.  As one psychologist said to me, “not every moment is an epiphany.”

15 minutes is arbitrary but it seems to be a threshold of active engagement on subjects that aren’t immediately relevant.  The creative solution is to clear your mind of other commitments and to habitually open a window of receptivity.  Make that the overriding commitment.

Not every presentation is going to resonate.  Not every meeting is going to be engaging.  Not every interaction is going to be life-altering.  But if we open even the smallest of windows, the winds of receptivity may take us places we haven’t imagined before.

I wouldn’t call the book The Mathematics of Marriage a beach read.  In fact, it might be a stretch to call it a Harvard study group read.  You'll find such phrases like “null clines” and  “Lotka-Volterra Equations” strewn about its 403 pages. 

But thanks to a little literary alchemy by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book Blink, we get a crash course on why John Gottman and his colleagues are mixing the hard science of math and the psychological minefield of marriage.

Gottman brought more than 3,000 married couples to a lab near the University of Washington campus.  For nearly three decades, the couples have been videotaped and the results have been analyzed by something Gottman dubbed (SPAFF ) for specific affect.  It is a coding system with twenty separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation. 

Each emotion is given a number.  Disgust is a 1.  Stonewalling is a 13.  Whining is 11. What is remarkable is that if Gottman analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be married 15 years later.  And if he watches a couple for just 15 minutes, his success rate only drops to 90%.

90% accuracy in 15 minutes.  Amazing. Gladwell uses Gottman’s work as an example of “thin slicing” – the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Gottman can decipher a distinctive verbal code while observing a couple communicate. He focuses on what he calls the Four Horsemen, defensiveness,stonewalling, criticism and contempt.  And according to Gladwell, “there is one emotion he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes either partner or both partners showing contempt, he considers it single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.”

Ultimately, Gottman has discovered a ratio of positive and negative codes in a marital interaction and can mathematically predict the future of the relationship with an incredible degree of accuracy.

I use the term creativity because Gottman has gone beyond the seeming impossibility of studying the dynamic and changing relationships of couples but has taken the estimated divorce rates (50% +) and has revealed that traditional counseling success rates are not particularly high.  So, he has brought advanced math and the creativity of a variety  of controlled experiments to try to understand consistent patterns that emerge from conversations between couples.  That's creative use of both theory and applied science.

Which brings me to the world of work relationships. Could Gottman’s theories and techniques work in this environment?  Business success is generally predicated on the ratio of income to expenses.  But what about the balance sheet of human capital?  In the typical day, are employee interactions mostly positive or negative? 

All of Gottman’s coded categories from positive reinforcements to the Four Horsemen of contempt, criticism, stonewalling and defensiveness are equally applicable to the work environment. But while this may poison the atmosphere at work, there are some companies that appear to succeed in a dysfunctional atmosphere.

I know a particular company where the top management exhibits most of the four horsemen behaviors, yet ulcers aside, workers continue to stay and to do excellent work.

Can we get Gottman to turn his attention to the workplace?  What are your experiences?  I welcome comments from any perspective, even the four horsemen.

The last time I saw John Updike, he was seated at Charlie Rose’s massive round table; impeccably dressed in a tan suit, starched white shirt and a speckled salmon-colored tie. He was talking about his newest book, The Widows of Eastwick, and hinted that his next historical novel set in the 1st Century A.D. -- The Last Epistle --would be his last.

Updike died on January 27th from the ravages of lung cancer. Updike and Andrew Wyeth, my two most consistent muses, passed away 11 days apart and I am orphaned again.  There is something about the possibility of the next that has been a bond to my literary and artistic heroes.  I still tenaciously cling to the belief Mark Twain alive and well.

This past October, Updike talked with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times about the craft of is writing.  “I don’t think of myself as writing stylishly, I think of myself as trying to write with precision, what my mind’s eye conjures up.  So if out of this the sentences become shapely and vivid, that’s great, but I’m mostly concerned with trying to deliver to the reader, my images, and my sense of human behavior and landscape.”

In 1988, he echoed a similar thought with Terry Gross. “I find that the main charge, let’s call it, that I get out of writing, is when I feel that I’ve gotten something down accurately.  The main bliss, whether I read Henry Green or Nabokov or Proust or Tolstoy, is the sense that they’ve described precisely a certain moment of experience, whether it’s a dress, a chair or how a person’s face looks.”

The novelist Nicholson Baker beat me the punch when he wrote U & I, a book that chronicles his magnificent obsession with Updike. Out of admiration and memory mixed with a seemingly unhealthy does of envy, Baker created a disarmingly touching look into the often unrequited relationship between readers and writers.

Much like Wyeth, Updike had the ability to breath life into the seemingly mundane.  A trip to the blood bank.  An underused swimming pool.  A man walking his wife’s friend home while snow begins to fall.  But what made Updike one of my favorite writers, is that his work always resonated with me although we were a generation apart.

There is no clearer example, than his autobiographical musings – Self-Consciousness. Updike remarked, "A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward."   I believe that a writer is always a bit schizophrenic – he or she is observing and recording and marrying images and thoughts while interacting with others.  You are there and not there.

Even Mark Twain’s best friend, William Dean Howell’s said, “You were always there for him, but he wasn’t always there for you.” It was less a chide than an observation that Twain was somewhere else in his mind.  This “self-consciousness” is about living a dual life, liver and observer.  Updike describes those minute and intimate details that make up the fabric of the extraordinary that lies hidden in the ordinary.

Since I am an Uncle many times over, I will share one of my favorite Updike’s essays, My Uncle’s Death. 

“He died while shaving; when I was told of this, I pictured him staggering back heavily, stricken, his own amazed face in the mirror the last thing he ever saw. His face flashed there for him, hung there, slipped backward; and then the mirror was full of the blank bathroom wall.  I pictured this so sharply I seemed to have been there.

At his funeral, I felt, for the first time my adult height. The Manatees are not a family of breeders, and the number of relatives was small; walking up the aisle to the front pew with my parents, my aunt and my two cousins, I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.

...

“I cannot reach him. I can remember nothing about him that is quite real except his death; he is like a celestial body which only an eclipse renders measurable. He was six feet, four inches tall, but his immensity was narrow-shouldered, small boned and unmuscular. He was vain of having, for so outsized a man, rather small feet.  He usually wore neat black loafers, virtually slippers, of English leather, and sprawling, soddenly in a chair,  he generally contrived to thrust his feet forward on the floor, or up on a stool,  so they were noticed.  I can remember my mother – I must have been ten or eleven – teasing him about his dainty feet. I cannot recapture her words, but she was still slim then, and her pose as she spoke – head tilted back, hands half lifted – stuck in my my mind; she so seldom struck an unmotherly attitude that it was as if a strange spirit had come for a moment and possessed her body.  My uncle, presumably, responded with a dry flutter of  the sheepish gallantry that he seemed to reserve for my mother and waitresses in restaurants.  My mother seemed exempt from the rather lazy distaste with which uncle viewed the rest of the world, and perhaps as her son, I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.”

Updike’s self-consciousness reveals itself at the funeral.  “I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.”

His awareness at 10 or 11 of the subtle interactions between his mother and his Uncle are remarkable. While it is viewed from the prism of an older version of himself, he self-consciously remembers that “I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.”  It is as much about Updike as it is his Uncle.

My Uncle Carl’s funeral was the first funeral I ever experienced.  I was about the same age as Updike when his uncle died.  I remember my Uncle’s widow wailing.   It is impossible to know another’s grief, but I do remember my mother whispering to my grandmother that it was “a bit much.”  I remember the chairs arranged at the grave site and how there was a kind of hierarchy of who sat where.  And I remember the American Flag folded tightly and given gently to my Aunt.

But I remember nearly every detail about the service and the post-funeral gathering at my Uncle’s home. I recall the sublime taste of Ginger ale that flowed freely. I saw walls filled with porcelain figurines he collected while he was stationed as a Colonel in Germany.  But mostly, I remember that it was the first sibling death for my mother.  Much like Updike’s uncle, my mother and Carl had an especially close relationship and even at 16, I understood this and it was difficult to gauge her own grief.

Updike’s acute observation and his mingling of memory and detail continue to move me.  He is often the catalyst to discovering what I missed in life by being equally self conscious. The creativity of John Updike is about honoring his gift of observation and dancing with the alphabet.

In Updike’s honor and with much feeling, I am opening up a bottle of ginger ale and it will flow freely.  I will miss him.

Occasionally, and well out of earshot of homeowners who've been financially and emotionally bitten by them, I have developed a modicum of compassion for the much-maligned termite.  They are a paradox of nature. They are strong enough to eat a house, but their bodies are soft, delicate and prone to drying out.

And soldiers, whose sole job is to defend the colony, can't even feed themselves. Termites develop wings so they can leave the colony and find a new home, helping the termite population grow. But winged termites are terrible flyers, and most don't survive the journey.

But here's a fact that tossed a wet dose of Mennen Skin Bracer reality into my tender streak.  Termites do more damage than all fires, hurricanes and tornadoes combined.  

There are about 3,000 termite species living in the most temperate parts of the world.  But I want to talk about the termites who build mounds and an architect named Mick Pearce.  A few months ago, I had the opportunity to listen to  Frans Johansson, author of the Medici Effect talk about innovation and the termite saga is one of his favorite stories.

Pearce accepted a tough challenge from Old Mutual, an insurance and real estate conglomerate:  Build an attractive, functioning office building that uses no air conditioning.  And do it in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Born in Zimbabwe and trained as an architect in London, Pearce was uniquely prepared for the challenge.  He achieved it by basing his architectural designs on how termites cool their tower-like mounds of mud and dirt.

Termites must keep the internal temperature in their mounds at a constant 87 degrees to grow an essential fungus.  Which is no small task considering that temperatures on the African plains can range from over 100 degrees by day to below 40 in the evening.  

The termites manage it by directing breezes at the base of the mound into chambers with cool, wet mud and then redirecting the cooled air to the peak.  By continually building new vents and closing old ones, the termites can regulate the temperature very efficiently.

The result of Pearce's insight into termite ecosystems and his knowledge of architecture was an office complex called Eastgate. It is the largest commercial/retail complex in Zimbabwe. It maintains a steady temperature of 73 to 77 degrees and uses less than 10% of the energy consumed other buildings its size. 

Old Mutual saved 3.5 million dollars immediately because they did not have to install air conditioning.  Eastgate ultimately became a reference point for architects and Mick Pearce earned a reputation as a groundbreaking innovator.

Johansson calls Pearce's innovation the result of the Intersection. "When you step into the intersection of fields, disciplines or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas."

While Johansson observation isn't a new idea to innovators, he was able to reinforce and promote the idea that that we need to make a conscious effort to break down silos of thinking and expose ourselves to a variety of diverse input.  

Do you feel your organization or institution is too insular?  How diverse is your collective thinking?  What steps can you take to create more intersectional thinking?  When you feel a compassionate urge, ask a termite.

Here's a link to a Johansson talk in Providence about risk taking and creativity:

http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/innovationstorystudio/bif4fjohansson.php

 Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep on his estate in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania at the age of 91.  His death, like many of his paintings, happened in the empty cold and the crisp sunlight of winter.  While I have many favorite painters from Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Wyeth was my favorite.

But even in death, there was criticism.  He was painted by the critics as too populist, too realistic, too obvious a craftsman than a thinker.  In my childhood home, there were only two works of art hanging on the walls. In the kitchen, there was an illustration of a wagon filled with pots and pans and virtually any circa 1900 item you could imagine.  The caption read, “You can’t do business with an empty wagon.”  My parents weren’t business people, so the reasons for hoisting this on the wall are forever lost to their memory.

The second painting was Wyeth’s Christina’s World.  It is Wyeth’s most iconic piece and it lives in the Museum of Modern Art.  For years, I only saw a beautiful woman in a faded pink dress lying in the grass gazing at a house on a hill.  I remember the faint tire tracks leading to the house and curved line that delineated the mowed area of the property. 

My mother once asked me to look closer at Christina.  I noticed her arm was oddly shaped and my mother told me that Christina was cripple and that the moment captured was the struggle of Wyeth’s polio-stricken neighbor crawling toward home. I discovered years later that Wyeth painted it indoors from memory and his sketches.  The “Christina” from this painting was a combination of the real Christina and Wyeth’s wife Betsy.

A few years ago, I walked along a winding road next to Kuerner’s Farm. A place where Wyeth created over 1,000 works of art – drawing and painting the buildings, the people, the animals and the landscape.  I looked at the barn and noticed that it had four windows.  In one of Wyeth’s paintings of the barn, I saw only a single lit widow.

It is a small abstraction, but I think it reveals the essence of Wyeth’s creativity.  His paintings weren’t merely photographs in egg tempera on panel, but a kind of impressionism that was uniquely his. His learned his craft from his famous father, N.C., his aunt and a friend of the family, Peter Hurd.

He was the youngest of a very talented family and always retained a kind of impish, child-like joy of discovering the subtle details that resonated with his artistic sensibilities.  Peter Hurd taught him the painstaking technique of egg tempera -- a medium that requires layers of cross-hatching to create colors and tones. 

Wyeth inspired me to take up painting at age of 40. I was able to push an ounce of talent into a gallery show and I sold four paintings.  And for that, I am grateful.  Through his paintings, I learned how to see.  I learned how to tell a story from Edward Hopper.  And I learned how to embrace my imagination through Picasso and Matisse.  

Wyeth also taught me that painting is among the most intimate of the arts.  Every painting is a filter of someone’s perception and a brief look into their heart.  Andrew Wyeth had a tremendous heart and we are all the better for it.