 And welcome back to The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii developed by the American Creativity Association. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece, and our co-host is Darlene Boyd. Today on the show, we'll be discussing who killed creativity and how do we get it back? Our guests are Andrew Grant and Dr. Jaya Grant. They are a husband and wife team who co-own Tyrion Innovative Solutions, which is based in Sydney, Australia. They have co-authored two books. One is the innovation race, how to change a culture to change the game. And secondly, somewhat epidemic for our show's title today, they've written a book called Who Killed Creativity and How Can We Get It Back? So Andrew and Jaya, aloha, and welcome to The Creative Life. Tell us, why did you write a book called Who Killed Creativity and How Can We Get It Back? Well, we had been teaching creative thinking and design thinking for many, many years. And whilst we were very passionate, as all of us on this show are, about the concept of creativity and the importance of using creative problem solving to solve problems, many of the people that were sent to our workshops by their boss couldn't see the need for it. And so we thought there was no point in teaching more steps or writing another book on creative thinking unless we could actually deal with some of the issues. And we discovered it wasn't so much their lack of willingness to be creative, but it was the journey that many people had been on that they discovered they were creative as kids, but they seemed to have lost it. And there was no point in teaching anything more about creativity until we could address the issues that were blocking the creativity. So we worked with a neuroscientist and a psychologist to really validate some of the things that we'd come up with in workshops of what was blocking people's creativity and how could we help them discover those blocks and before we could get it back. And of course, then we had to put a theme around the book because no one wants to write a book on creativity and not actually be creative. But we wanted the theme to be more than a gimmick. We wanted to be really memorable and we wanted to be genuine in terms of making a crime scene because when you think about it, if we were creative as children and we've lost it now as adults, maybe there is a crime scene just to play with the metaphor a little bit. I was intrigued to see that your book was based on, as you pointed out, neurosciences and psychology. And here in Irvine, we have a colleague friend that's been studying psychopaths. And he determined that there is a pattern among psychopaths, serial killers, Lizzie Borden, all of our famous repertoire, that there is a part of the brain that they share. And I'm not a neuroscientist, so I wouldn't dare to explain that. And we know from the discussion of creativity that our brain, it is implied right brain, left brain. But in your research, perhaps this is a question for you, Jaya, did you see or come across any traits of our brain that indicates a propensity towards creativity or being more creative? Well, I should clarify, I'm not a neuroscientist either. We worked alongside a neuroscientist. My specialization is in innovation in organizations. So I've looked at the individual, the ability to think creatively and then also looked at the organizational culture and the blocks in the organization. But in terms of what we found out in our research in writing this book, was that there are indeed parts of brain that are able to be more creative. But what we were particularly interested in, and then some people can tap into those more easily, and some people have a bias or an ability to use those parts of the brain more easily. But what we became really interested in was what blocks that part of the brain. And so we started to look at the stressors that could impact creative thinking. So we looked at how, for example, when you're under stress corticosteroids are released, and they can impact the hypothalamus and they can impact the parts of the brain, the hippocampus, where you rely on your creative thinking. So you need to tap into those memories to be creative. We found that brain cells are killed when we're under stress. So you have that fight or flight mode. And instead of being able to think of creative solutions, we suddenly our brains shut down and we use the primitive stem of our brain, instead of using the prefrontal cortex and relying on that more creative, critical thinking that can really come up with different solutions. So there's a number of ways in which the brain is impacted when we're under pressure. And that stops us from accessing our creative capabilities. We just saw a slide quickly come up there and we'll talk a little bit about the game we've developed later on. But as I mentioned, we came up with to keep it simple, seven suspects, seven locations, seven weapons, seven rescuers and seven rescue strategies. Again, to keep it simple. And of course, one of the big ones is, is, you know, going to the boss's office and how many times have we heard people say they went to the boss's office with this great idea. And look, many ideas are silly, we already know that, but the boss completely shut them down. And it wasn't so much that the boss said no, but it was the way the boss said it. And that really killed their creativity. And it means they might come up with another great idea tomorrow, but they're not going to come back to the boss's office. And so we use the example, you know, similar to the game of Clue or a murder mystery, you know, was it was an excess stress with a weapon of noxious negativity in the boss's office? Is that what kills your creativity? And of course, when you say that you see a lot of people nodding or was it, you know, bureaucracy in the finance department? Look, we're not there to point fingers at anyone. But I do think it's quite important that we do create some sort of diagnostic tool where people can genuinely talk about some of their fears. And we're going back to the psychopaths. Unfortunately, there is more research. There are more psychopaths in corporate offices than there are in English prisons in leadership positions. So we won't go into that in any more detail other than to say that control is a big killer of creativity, and it often finds its way to the top. That explains some of the experiences that perhaps we have had with our bosses. Exactly. And we need to be careful. As I said, I'm not here. If you're a boss, you should be listening. But if you're not a boss, then we'll just think about what are the workarounds? How are you going to stop those voices getting into your personal head and killing your own creativity? If you get discouraged by someone telling you that's a silly idea, are you going to let it wash off your back like water off a duck's back? Or are you going to let it really bother you and kill your creativity? And that's what the book and the game is about. The book is research on it, and the game is a chance to explore it in a safe environment. No one's going to go into their boss's office and say, you killed my creativity. But hey, you play a game, a couple of cards, a bit of fun, and all of a sudden someone anonymously slips that card through and says, yeah, we do feel a bit like this in the boss's office. I'm a boss. I played it with my team. I got that card and it was very sobering. Oh, so you use the cards as metaphors for the real life issues that are coming up, but they take the edge off and make the point. So yeah, I'm having, I want to get to the game, but I am struck with the gravity of what you are bringing out, Chaya, about the anxiety and the blockers to creativity, like we've been doing all year with COVID. Whatever the anxiety-provoking cues are for psychopaths. It's a really serious subject. And I'm feeling a little drawn between exploring that some more and then looking at the game that you played in order to talk about this serious subject with lighthearted metaphors and icons. And I'd like to come back and touch on the research and innovation-based information that you've got because you're very valuable for us. And we're going to have, just so the audience knows, we're going to have Chaya back in September on a show to allow her to share with us her breakthrough research on creativity and innovation. But for today, let's look over at your game that I got to play with you in Austin, Texas, Andrew. And you've stimulated a lot of conversation and laughter around it. And tell us a little bit about this game that is, became the book or the book that became the game? The book became the game, actually, because, again, we really wanted to just start by helping people understand it. And my background is education. So we developed a game called Who Killed Creativity, and it is based around a mystery. It's not a competitive game, so there's no testosterone involved in it. But it really is a clever metaphor as a diagnostic tool to help people understand some of the killers, some of the suspects, and as I mentioned, some of the rescuers and where they might feel creativity is being blocked as they maybe walk around an office or walk around a schoolroom or walk around wherever their workplace is or even at home. And what we did is, as I mentioned, we came up with, we sort of brought it down to seven suspects, seven weapons, seven rescuers and seven rescue strategies, and then locations. And all we're asking people to do is is discuss each of these at one at a time, talk about where they feel it happens. Like I said, it might be control in the boss's office. It might be bureaucracy or might be your KPIs. Or on the positive side, I feel much more creative when I'm out in the playground or the classic, you know, the research of Google's canteen, that Google didn't make a canteen just to be nice. They knew that that beautiful canteen is where ideas meet and clash and bang together. And so we wanted to really put that in a game board and then have the opportunity for people to talk about that game board. And we've now put it online. I think there's a video coming up just to show what the game's like. So we were also disrupted with the recent crisis that we've had. So we used to have a physical game board and people would come around and play that game round a table. And again, it was a chance for people to discuss and talk and share ideas in a safe environment, hiding behind metaphoric characters. Now we've put that game online, so people can download it and just play it with their team with a professional facilitator or if they're feeling game, just let it practice. The instructions are all there. So that's a COVID creative outcome where you went from in-person game, being the game master to online gaming, which of course connects very well with social media and our millennials and everyone else. So have you had good success with our people giving you feedback about how what it's, of course it's new, isn't it? How about over the years that you've been playing the game? What kind of success stories do you have for people who play the game? How does that port over into their daily life or their work or their play life? We've had people in companies say that what's taken them two or three years to solve a problem trying to use a design thinking methodology was solved in a couple of hours. And that's because, as we said, once you get rid of those blockers, you can't just give people pizza and coke and tell them to have a hackathon on a Friday night if you've been oppressive all day or all week or all culture. But all of a sudden you give people a chance to talk about it and share about it. And then when it comes to actually being creative, they've realized, boy, I really was held back by fear or I really was held back by pressure or I've been very narrow minded. And once we get those off the table and say, right, they're behind us now, now let's try and be creative. Here are the rescue strategies. It just flows so much quicker and so much easier. Significantly changing people from it with problems. I can give you a specific example of an organization that we worked with that had real creative thinking challenges. And they needed to come up with creative solutions for their customers. And the team just wasn't able to come up with these solutions. So I spent a long period of time with this organization. We started with this sort of diagnostic exercise. And the first thing that we realized was that the boss, although he wanted creative thinking in his organization, he wasn't able to draw out that creative thinking and those creative ideas. And we realized it was because he was shutting down ideas when they were raised. He didn't know that. So as soon as he realized that there was this fear in the room and this anxiety, and that that was stopping the generation of creative ideas, we were able to change his patterns of behavior, his leadership style to open up and allow more freedom. And you'll see that we had amazing results. The team then became more confident individually. There was up to a 25% improvement in individual creative thinking in team culture and in organization culture overall. People felt like there was a lot more opportunity to express themselves and to have their ideas heard and then to actually go ahead and implement ideas without fear. And so we could see that that followed through consistently in terms of how individuals felt about their creative thinking capabilities. And we gave workshops that helped develop specific skills. We had mentoring sessions. We had specific coaching and guidance for the boss. And overall, there was a huge improvement in the culture. So you can see it works. You just need to provide those opportunities to open up those discussions and make it a safe place and then a safe space for these discussions. And then you can see the results. You can see on slide 12 is another, I'll just show you slide 12 is another company. As I said, we don't want to say which company doesn't matter. But you can see this group here just full of ideas and just lots and lots of ideas. And we know that the right idea comes from lots of ideas. So they had done the hook your creativity, the prelude to the diagnostic tool. And then by the afternoon, they were just charging through. There was no politics. There was lots of trust. Everyone was aligned. Everyone was focused on the end goal. A lot of companies asked me, we want to do creativity, but my team's dysfunctional. Well, we've got to get that functionality back because otherwise, all these other things creep in and people hold back. So it really is about doing this free understanding of the concept before you then move into the creativity side of it. You have a repertoire of successes, extensive successes and not all consultants or practitioners in introducing some kind of banter. Do you think your success, is there any connection to the fact that you two are a team and work very intensively together versus if it was one or the other of you? And how long, how long did the game take to develop? Well, I think there's always to be many, many years to develop. But I think we have to practice what we preach. And if we're going to teach people about collaboration, we need to be able to demonstrate that. And, you know, that's not always easy. And we are authentic and we're quite open when we're disagreeing about something. And when there is that creative collision, because we're both very strong in what we think and our creative ideas. But we want to demonstrate that it's through facilitating these as positive, constructive processes that where there's respect and where there's open dialogue that you can come up with really creative and innovative solutions. So the research has found that heterogeneous teams or teams made up of different people with different backgrounds, different ideas, different beliefs come up with faster period and more creative ideas than homogeneous teams or teams of like-minded people. But here's the catch. It will take a lot longer to come up with these ideas. So homogeneous teams come up with ideas faster, but they're inferior. They're more simple and safe. Heterogeneous teams take a longer to come up with a good idea and they need to be facilitated. That process needs to be facilitated because they often can't do it on their own. They need to be really conscious of this need come together for this united goal and to work together towards a solution. So I think that's what we've had to learn to practice in our own marriage and in our own working relationship. We're constantly battling with that. But to answer your other question, as Andrew said, it's taken years and years to develop this material. We really have been working for over 35 years. And for the last 25 years in particular, we've been developing creative ideas, playing with them and finding about the last 15 to 18 years, our clients came to us and said, how are you so creative? Can we learn how to become creative ourselves? And we thought, oh, actually, that's a really good question. How do we come up with these creative ideas? And that's when we started that deeper process of research, of studying the material that's out there. And then I went into the PhD research to really try to understand how can we be more creative ourselves? How can we tap into that potential? And how can we understand how to make teams and organizations and communities that are more creative and that allow for that creative freedom? When you mentioned the heterogeneous groups having more success, do you find that their solutions have sustainability more so? Yes, because they're more thought through. The whole idea is, we often look at those great breakthrough ideas and think, oh, I could have done that. But I don't think we realize the culture that was there to make them happen. And the number of bad ideas that have gone before it, before you get to the good one. But if you've got a controlling person shutting it down or you've got too much pressure or too much fear or you become too apathetic, you'll never get to that really, really good one. So we look at these really good inventions or creative ideas as history and hindsight thinking, oh, they're great. But we just don't realize how much work and experience has gone into them. So the ideas that are the most thought through and have been through a process of creative problem solving or design thinking, by the time they get to the end of that process, they've been tested, they've been prototyped, they've done the what if, what went wrong, what could have gone wrong? Because you want the failures to happen back in the lab, not out in the real world. And there's too many stories of companies that have had very expensive failures in the real world. And you wonder, how did they get that far? Because maybe there was a culture where people couldn't feel comfortable to share and say, hey, I don't think a foldable phone will work unless we, when Samson brought out the foldable phone and people were trying to peel the foldable screen saver off it. They thought it was a screen saver. I don't know why that wasn't done in the lab and someone had given it to an average person. And that's back to Jay's issue of diversity. I think it's really important that we get people looking at from every perspective. You can't have all the same people looking at a problem. I'm curious, you've talked about spending months with that, one of the companies, maybe both of the companies that got very productive in your proof of concept case studies. And I'm wondering how that you introduce other modalities for preparing them to play the game. Are there, I don't know what your consulting process is around the issue of creativity and innovation. But is it always related to the game? Or do you do other things and then play the game? Or does the game come back in different iterations until you get to the fight? When you said by the end of the day, they were really idea producing. But in the morning, they had to do the trust building. And are there trust building exercises? Are they in either of your books or online? What are some of the other tools? We have lots and lots of tools on, I hate the word team building, it's so overused. But helping teams become functional. And as I was speaking to a client the other day, and he said, I want to jump straight into being creative. Actually, now they want to jump straight into innovation because that's the new buzzword. Creativity has become a little bit old fashioned. And I said, well, actually, you can't come up with innovative solutions until you're first of all got a creative mindset. And you can't have a creative mindset within the company if your team is dysfunctional. And as I mentioned, there's lack of trust or politics or alignment or just poor communication. So he wanted to jump straight into Jaya's innovation workshop. I then talked to him about the importance of the creativity one. I then back, back, back, back, blocked that and said, we need to do the game. And then I said, actually, we probably need to do some just basic team dynamic stuff to see how the team's feeling. So yes, sometimes you need to just keep going back until you find out where it is, because a dysfunctional team, or people that have got these, as I said, these challenges in their brain, they won't, it's going to be really hard to be creative because you're going to be using the base part of your brain, which is the fight flight or freeze mode. Yeah, which is a great part of our brain to help us survive an emergency when a crisis we've been through two bombs and living in Indonesia. And you know, when the bomb goes off, you don't have time to be creative. So that that back of your brain is really good for an emergency situation. But unfortunately, too many people at work, live in that back part of their brain, they live in the fight flight or freeze or the stress mode 24 seven, not just meant to be a quick escape. So until we can bring people into the prefrontal cortex, which is where all the creativity happens, where they can actually start to feel comfortable to explore ideas. As we mentioned, you can watch as many YouTube videos and read as many books as you like on how to be creative. But we've got to get the people feeling comfortable and the right environment. Once they're in the right environment, both up here and culturally, then the creative ideas, then all the design thinking, then that can happen well. But I was going to say that the game itself can also trigger that. So it's designed in a way that we don't jump straight into, you know, what kills your creativity or what kills your team's creativity. We actually start with what do you think in general impacts our creativity. So we talk about the problem in general with, you know, how as Andrew said, we 98% of two year old scores creative geniuses on divergent thinking tests. And yet, by the time we're 25 and over, if that's dropped to 2%. So something's happening over our lifespan, and that drops quite rapidly during the school years, you can see a graph there. So that by the time children are 13 to 15 years old, it's only 20% of children who are creative thinking geniuses on divergent thinking tests. And so school is almost, it appears to be killing our creativity rather than encouraging it to thrive, which you wouldn't expect it to do. And so we've got this, this general issue in the population. And we can talk about the statistics, we can also talk about the trends from the 1990s. Creative thinking as compared to IQ, or CQ compared to IQ has been dropping. So up until the 1990s, DQ and IQ were both rising. And then in the 1990s, there was something called the Flynn effect, where IQ continued to rise because we have these wonderful rich environments. And at that time, CQ or the creative quotient started to drop. And so you can look historically what's happening there. Maybe it was the impact of technology. And maybe, as children, as humans, as people were spending more time immersed in other people's ideas on the internet, or watching other people's ideas on the television, they were spending less time outside playing, experimenting. And so, there's these general trends that we talk about. And that gets people thinking, oh, yes, I've noticed that. I've seen that. I've felt that. So we talk generally about it. And then that gives us the opportunity. Well, that then brings it into the game. And as Jay said, the game is not a hard landing. It really is the opportunity to just very gently explore, set the scene. Again, we love starting with a very safe metaphor where there's no threat. People feel very comfortable. I know Peter Stenge used to talk about creating a safe space before that word became trendy. He used to talk about creating a safe space where people could feel comfortable to talk and share and not feel threatened. And the game then very carefully guides them through to the point where they do go, oh, yeah, this is how I feel. And we want to do it in a non-threatening way. And then start to bring it back and talk about the rescuers and some action planning. That's on slide eight, is the action planning. So then really, we've got to get a wall up and get people to start saying, well, okay, we've gone down. We've explored these challenging ideas. Now we can start, whether it's sticky notes or the online version, now we can start putting up some strategies, some actions of what we can do differently. And maybe I'll just finish on slide 13, because that is the whole model that we've put together. And maybe if you're watching this non-live, you can pause this model and have a look at it. It'll probably bring everything together that we've talked about. On the inside, you've got the journey of the suspects. And on the outside, you've got the life cycle. I don't want to be too negative today. It's a vicious cycle and a virtuous cycle. Yeah. And we do see this in companies. We do see companies, if we've worked with companies for many years, we do see them going through these cycles. And one of the questions is, which one are you on? Because they're not just independent things. They do tend to lead to each other. Well, that was perfect timing, because we're down to our last minute. But I really want to thank you on behalf of American Creativity Association for all the training you've done within our ranks. And then again today, we'll have to leave it here. And to let the audience know, you've been watching The Creative Life on Tink-Tek-Kawaii. I'm Phyllis Guice. Today, Darlene Boyd and I have been discussing who killed creativity and how can we get it back with Andrew Grant and Dr. Jaya Grant. Mahalo for participating, Andrew and Jaya. And thank you to the viewers. We will be back in two weeks with another edition of The Creative Life. Dr. Jane Horan, who hails from Singapore, will be talking about the intersection of creativity and our life cycle. So we're very much looking forward to that. Aloha.