New Lessons on Creativity from the Old Masters
When Leonardo da Vinci was instructing his pupils about painting, he told them to ‘Saper vedere’ - learn how to see. He would practice this in many ways, one of which was to ‘soften the eyes’ so that they lost their insistent focus on detail and could pick up patterns. This he learned during a long stay in bed as a child with fever, looking at stains on the wall as they ballooned into scenes of battle and storms at sea. Today’s innovators need to learn how to see too - to see through the flood of information and capture the pattern behind it. They need to learn how to tell the signal of the customer’s need from the noise in the marketplace.
Another of Leonardo’s lessons was ‘Corporalita’. This was about the body. Getting away from abstract and verbal reasoning to the here-and-now of life. Tom Kelley of IDEO has the same idea when he advises us ‘never go to a meeting without a prototype’. He also complained that people running new product development projects should get used to ‘squinting’ at prototypes, so as not to get hung up on the detail, the material or the finish, for example, but get the idea itself. Working in Sardinia once, I brought a product development team into a pizza kitchen to get lessons in cooking pizzas. Why? Because they were too woolly in their thinking. (Many of today’s young execs don’t cook because they have not got the time, and so they lose the ‘corporalita’ they need to give lifeblood to their ideas. One such told me his eating habits were as follows: ‘It’s either a matter of Ding Ding or Ding Dong: Ding Ding is the microwave and Ding Dong is the pizza delivery man’.) So get people making things and working with their hands rather than thinking too much.
Another lesson of Da Vinci’s was about the principle of ‘Sfumato’: ‘smokiness’. This is about ambiguity: the difficulty of interpreting weak signals. Uncertainty is an inseparable part of contemporary business life. Try forecasting the Next Big Thing in mobile communications technology (Quote Galbraith here on economic forecasting). Leonardo used Sfumato in the background to the Mona Lisa to suggest a distant, ideal landscape. Leaders use it to give scale to their ideas without specifying details. As one Production Manager in Rolls-Royce advised me, ‘Let’s not get lost in the bike-sheds’. Innovators have got to be comfortable with ambiguity, because it is their lot to be swimming in ‘maybe’s’.
Leo Esaki, a recent Japanese winner of the Nobel prize, advises us to never lose our childhood curiosity. And ‘Curiosita’ was Da Vinci’s 4th principle. When a supervisor in Baileys Engineering in Wexford was asked how people could complete 2 wiring harnesses at the same time he said it could not be done. But later he returned to the problem, and changed his mind. In studying the table where the harnesses were made he realised that the process could be twice as fast if the table were to flip over. How could it be made to do that? With a motor and a timing device. Where might he find those? Earlier that day he had wandered next door to take a look at an extension they were building. There he had seen a cement mixer. He cannibalised this for the parts he needed.
General Patton once did something which exemplifies Da Vinci’s 5th principle, ‘Dimostrazione’. It was the year 1943, and the Allies were making their way eastwards across France. Patton’s amy were stopped by a river. There was a big meeting going on, maps out on a table under canvas, serious faces studying the detail. No one saw Patton leave the tent. He returned a few moments later, walked up to the table and pointed at a place on the map: ‘Here is where we cross’ he said with complete confidence. The others studied that place on the map even more closely. ‘How do you know?’ they asked. ‘Because’, he replied, stepping back from the table to reveal trousers wet to the knee, ‘I have just crossed the river there myself.’ There is no answer to demonstration, which is why hi tech product launches do it, and why food and beverage marketers encourage sampling. Dave Phelan used sampling at the recent launch of Coole Swan, the new super premium Irish cream liqueur, because he knew how important the taste is to the brand.
If you are looking for a short cut to innovation and creativity - for example in the development of a new product against a deadline - then working with the senses is useful. Leonardo called it Sensazione (the 6th principle), and designers often use this as a way of refreshing their thinking. Take your team out to a supermarket to get a first-hand feel for the the retail scene. Meet outdoors. Take a leaf out of Jack Welch’s book and hold chairless meetings: they will be short! Have your staff organise an Open Day, as a client of mine did recently, and it will unleash staff creativity: my client made 3 very important discoveries that day:
‘We have unearthed a lot of talent’
‘Pride - our factory is no place to be ashamed of’
‘Innovation is inseparable from risk: we trusted our people to earn our trust, and they did’.
Connessione, the 7th Da Vinci principle, is making connections between disparate things, and this is another useful tool in the innovator’s toolkit. Newton did this when the apple famously fell on his head, and he made the connection - the mega-connection - with gravity. Archimedes is supposed to have run naked from his bath into the street when he stumbled on a solution to a tough problem set by the king. Penicillin was only discovered by accident because Fleming was not a subscriber to the ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ policy and left a slide festering in the sunlight. Breakthrough ideas often come about accidentally, when new connections are made. So multiply the potential connections by hiring from outside, linking with creative outsiders, encouraging cross-functional teams, and bringing customers into the developmental process.
So if you are managing people charged with innovation ask yourself these questions:
What are they reading? Is it expanding their horizons?
Are they learning new skills all the time, e.g. a new language?
Do they have the chance to ‘step back’ from their work occasionally?
Can their environment be made more stimulating?
And
Are you recruiting people who challenge you or who merely think about things the same way you do?
