Creativity requires us to collaborate with others. This course is designed to make you a better creative collaborator. Creativity can require us to bring together knowledge from different areas, often known by different people. We need to foster effective collaboration rather than have those differences lead to misunderstandings and conflict. The ideas that we generate, individually or collectively, will be evaluated by others, such as bosses, funders, and customers. These audiences will likely have different concerns when they hear about your ideas and are likely to evaluate ideas differently than you do. We need to pitch our ideas in ways that get others excited about them, rather than bored or confused, so that we can expand the group of collaborators in our creative efforts.
Michael Day full-length interview
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来自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的课程
Creativity Toolkit II: Creative Collaboration
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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课程 4（共 7 门，Specialization Innovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship）
与讲师见面
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
So, Michael, thank you for joining us.
We're very pleased to have you here.
I would love to just start by asking you about your work,
and what it is that you do in museums?
What role does creativity play in the work that you've done?
You've had so many varied experiences.
So, I've spent my whole working career in museums and heritage.
From being a curator and then to a manager and then into leadership roles.
Creativity is not a word that you used to associate with museums,
except of course artists, and makers,
and scientists whose work was represented in collections,
but the people who ran museums didn't do creative.
They did curating, they did cataloging, they did cleaning,
and putting in cases,
and tools and that sort of stuff,
but creative was not a word that was associated.
But it seems it's been increasingly the case as we in museums and
heritage organizations have responded to the challenges
of operating in a more competitive environment,
looking for audience, looking to do our work better to reach more people,
that we've had to look for new ways to do that.
So, I see creativity operating in two big areas.
One is in the interface with our public, with our audience,
and how we engage people differently,
to be inspired, to see,
have new insights to make new meanings,
and then the way that we run our organizations to respond
to all the challenges that we face day, and week, and month.
I'm actually curious if you could expand a bit on the last point
about changing the way you
present the information in a way to engage the public differently,
or change their perspective.
Can you give an example of one approach that you found was really insightful?
Yes. So, if you think about for example,
a lot of my work has been in historic sites,
and there historic house museums all over the States
that actually look pretty much the same as every other one.
They're about different people,
but the experience of going round them is the same.
It's been the case that for the last 60 or 70 years.
I think it started actually by the National Trust in England who
started owning historic houses in the 1930s.
That the way that that was done was always the same.
There's almost about 10 given things that you have to do, and then you've opened it.
It's created a blueprint for doing things without
anybody ever intending that that should be the case.
So, one of the things that I've been doing in a lot of my work in
the last 10 or 15 years is to just ask the question,
does it have to be this way?
What other interventions can we make in
a historic space to provoke people to learn differently?
Have different insights?
So, you took it upon yourself to initiate the creative process.
In a way or was there something that cued you to the need for creativity?
Or what made you decide this isn't working.
I was just conscious having watched a lot of visitors go around historic properties.
Actually having gone round a lot myself,
how actually crushingly boring the experience was.
I mean people wonder around,
they engage at a certain level,
they have a pleasant time,
they leave and mostly it just gets forgotten.
So, it seemed to me that if you can make different interventions,
which provoke wonder, or surprise,
or curiosity, then people are more predisposed to learn.
I've always believed that learning starts with curiosity and wonder.
It doesn't start with information being thrown out.
I'm a little curious. Sorry I'm like.
As a teacher, I don't know if I can relate to that. Of course.
It's my approach.
Absolutely.
So, is there an example of something that triggered curiosity.
The approach that you were very curious about?
So, let me recount
the project we did in the Island of Jersey in the UK 15 or so years ago,
which we had a great medieval castle, a ruin.
The expensive go around most ruined castles is the same, the world over.
There's nothing much to see.
Use your imagination a lot,
because there are very few collections that survive from deep history,
and it's very hard to show things in those spaces.
So, we decided to work with a group of artists,
and we picked about 20 different artists,
20 different spaces and ideas,
and invited the artists to create interventions that responded to those.
And it was completely strange and weird, and amazing.
Yeah.
There are some things you have to be careful of.
You have to be careful of doing things that still fit with the grain of the place.
So, you can intervene in ways that are surprising,
yet still need to fit,
because otherwise, I think the experience jars and people reject it.
It just reminded me of a experience in the museum.
I think it was in Sicily actually.
It was in a castle and they had two mummies set up playing chess with each other.
Then we walked in and my daughter was just, "What is this?"
So, I think it's interesting that there could be
different ways of presenting information that is historical.
Your daughters experience is really interesting because if she says, "What is this?"
That's the first brilliant reaction.
However, it needs to be followed with some working out, which is, "Oh.
I see what this is,
and I see what this is making me."
You need to go on from the what is this.
So, if the intervention is just surprise,
it's just shock, then it doesn't do the job.
So, just plunking art, that doesn't fit.
Right.
In the space, just for the benefit of shock,
it is not for me enough.
It has to then lead on to some insights about the space, the people who live,
there the stories that inhabited,
that you wouldn't have had otherwise,
and then they have to add up to something as you go around.
So to be successful there needs to be some kind
of learning or synthesis is what I'm hearing?
Yeah. Because because in the end organizations need a purpose,
and everything needs to fit with the underlying purpose.
So a heritage organization is normally trying to do two things.
One is to care for things long term,
obviously self evidently and the second is to inspire people to learn,
to make new meaning for themselves,
and that meaning has to have some relevance to the stories that inhabit the space.
So, just throwing things in and there's been plenty of examples around
the world of heritage organizations that have
used contemporary artists just for shock value.
Which is fine, but,
it's a kind of think so what.
Yeah, it's a missed opportunity.
You want this people to have an insight that they wouldn't have had otherwise,
if they just had a conventional presentation.
Yeah.
And that it's most profound,
it can stick with you forever.
It can really do.
There have been one or two moments when that intervention can really stay.
So, when I do teaching around this, I actually,
I often ask people to think about a piece of
information they learnt in a historic site or museum, a fact.
And in the main,
most people can't remember anything because actually they've thrown information,
and they don't absorb it.
Then if you ask people there to think of one moment
that they were really moved at an old place,
the historic site, or old house, or a castle,
most people who've got an experience,
and it normally is in here, not in there.
Very interesting.
It's telling a story rather than presenting objects out of order.
The story is the thing.
The story is the thing because if you think about pre-industrial society,
all knowledge and wisdom is passed on in story, isn't it?
Elders sit around the campfire,
and they tell the stories,
and the point of the stories is learning, isn't it?
This is the stuff that you need you younger ones to help survive.
So, the story is the thing that matters.
So, create different ways of creating a means of telling the stories,
it's the things that have really interested in.
So, as you talked about the shock value approach versus meaning,
one element is how to get people to change
their perspectives on the material they're seeing.
But another element I think is a judgment that
you're making about what a good idea is from a not so good idea.
How do you know that what you see it?
So, see you're clearly making a judgment that's some approaches aren't good,
so how do you make that decision?
And it's good.
It's a really, really interesting question.
Just as you were asking,
I was thinking of a couple of moments where I've seen
an idea which one time I thought how brilliant,
and another but that's just not going to work.
So, we made a maritime museum using
the same methodology of working with a group of this time about 50 different artists,
and taking the original collections and making
this fantastically sort of eclectic museum.
One of the artistic suggestions to have some real drama outside the museum,
the artist wanted to buy a redundant Russian nuclear submarine and have it
emerging from this sort of paved area
outside the museum as if it is sort of run into and come up.
Now, it would have looked amazing,
but I suspect that I would have been fired for having spend public money.
So, there's a point where you just think that's so brilliant.
At Kensington Palace, my last job is Chief Executive royal palaces,
we had a two-year project.
While there was a big building program going on outside,
we had a few of the rooms left untouched inside.
And we used another group of artists and
creative people to create an installation called The Enchanted Palace.
Enchanted palace was extraordinary in the public reaction it provoked.
Normally, people go round palaces and historic sites and are kind of like,
"That was okay, it was pleasant enough."
We had some people saying,
this was the most magical moving wonderful experience I've ever had.
Right across to the other,
this is absolutely terrible,
a waste of money, and on two occasions,
visitors actually got violent with our staff.
So, angry were they at what we done.
What was triggering the matter?
Well, just because it was the shock and surprise of they were
expecting a kind of
classic British palace experience and
got an installation which was anything other than that.
What was it? It scares [inaudible].
So, the proposition was the builders have come into the palace,
we had this big project going on,
and the foundations have been shaken metaphorically,
and the stories are tumbling out with the dust.
So, when we try to evoke
the stories of seven princesses
who'd lived there at these different times of their lives,
who had very sad moments.
We used fashion designers,
lighting designers, Vivienne Westwood did an installation for us.
Photographers, we used theater group,
and they did different things.
One of the critics said, "It's like falling into a fairytale."
So, it did have this magical quality and was very powerful,
but it didn't conform to some people's expectations of what a day in a palace would be.
That's an interesting tension.
It is. I mean we learnt after that actually,
to be much more explicit,
it was only on for two years while the building program was on,
and we learnt to be more explicit,
almost to the point of saying to some visitors, "Sorry,
you look like the kind of person who's probably not going to learn."
Yes, Chito, come in and pay your money.
That's really interesting.
How did you pick up on that?Essentially you're saying you're open-minded,
creative type of guy like Dallas versus you know.
So, what are the keys you would-.
I'll recommend an alternative.
I'm slightly excited.
But the point was, we ended up being
much more explicit to people about what they were doing and saying.
If you don't think this sounds like you,
we come back when the big project is finished,
and the building gets returned to something a bit more that you would regard as normal.
Classy.
But what was really interesting from that experience is that
our organization learnt a lot more about how to be creative.
Because we had all these different new ideas
coming in from people seeing our world differently,
and by working with them,
and that's also mediating their suggestions,
that we created something which helped us to
understand different ways that people can react.
And what you're always trying to do a thinking creativity
to make a general point is to create
new ways of doing things which give you
learning so that you don't
necessarily say we're always going to do it like that from here on.
But if you do this,
then you're more inclined to get this kind of outcome.
So, you learn to be more creative organization.
Yeah. I think we learn that
our own boundaries didn't have to be there because I think a lot of
organizations self-impose boundaries based on the way we've always done things,
the way that the sector has always done things,
what we think people will think about as acceptable normal.
And that's both in the product but also in the process,
by doing things differently,
you often end up in a different place.
I've learnt a lot about creativity in that way.
I might tell you about another organization that I'm associated with,
Battersea Arts Centre in South London.
I'm the chair of the board there.
Battersea pioneered a way of making theater called scratch.
It's a term which has become much more widespread,
but they started doing that about 15 years ago.
Now most people understand new theater to be made by a playwright sitting in a garrote,
writing his or her work.
Producer picks it up, appoints a director,
appoints a cast, makes the production, rehearse it.
On the first night, they expose it to an audience and the critics,
and then everybody sits back and sees what it's like.
Scratch was completely different from that.
Scratch says you take your artist,
you take a producer,
and you start working the thing up.
You start developing the work.
It's a very early stage.
You put it in front of an audience that knows exactly what it's getting i.e.
the work in an early stage.
Prototyping I think.
Yeah, and the audience feeds back,
the audience as we like that bit,
but we're not sure about that that it's a bit long and needs tightening up,
that jokes not working,
moments of tragic drama isn't really getting to me.
Gradually, the work might take 18 months,
but when it finally hits the audience,
you know it's going to work.
Not only that, but older people have been part of that process,
including the audience feel a real sense of pride and ownership in the work.
Suddenly, the work isn't the creative act of
one person but the creative act of the collective group.
I wonder if there might be a downside if the group were the collective.
The last example you talked about some people really don't want creativity.
So you're really taking their point of view into account early on,
and is it possible that the really interesting stuff gets sort of weeded
out through this process of sort of creativity by consensus almost?
I think that risk exists,
but to see that your typical scratch audience is a group of people who
are up for watching things that are a bit ragged around the edges and take it.
I mean, the typical back field is fairly radical anyway,
and a lot can come to the scratch performances.
They know.
Around the edge of that. So you're not going to hear a kind of me moderating.
But that was your same idea with the museum,
which is in effect you identify the audience for whom this is a fit.
I think in effect there is this sort of funneling process at the early stage,
people who are going to be excited at week three of the scratch project
versus week 83 is different whenever the weekend is.
So it's not a traditional theater audience. It's a scratch audience.
Different taste.
So you are finding the level of creativity and the level of
novelty that's fit to the appropriate group.
It's a mechanism for doing that.
Yeah, for sure.
The way it works so well about is that the audience absolutely knows what it's getting.
Where we've had problems in some of
the heritage organizations I've worked is at putting things in front of
people who were expecting something more conventional and not getting it.
Then reacting against that.
So I mean, not in a big way,
but when you get those moments,
it can be quite uncomfortable.
So how does that then ripple into the organization?
Did you have those same kinds of this is early stage,
we want you thinking wildly,
or this is later stage,
this is almost ready to start implementing.
So put on your more conventional hat.
I mean, do you find yourself echoing those same issues and
internal processes that you're seeing in your audiences externally?
The interesting thing about that is the extent to which you
try to get the audience insight
early into the process even if you can't put the work in front of them.
So, how do you make sure that what you're doing
is stretching and pushing the audience in a way they'd be prepared to go,
but not taking them somewhere where they're going to push
back and really hate what you're doing?
I think as well you have to be ready to have a process,
which allows opening up ideas for a certain time.
Then if the organization isn't to get
completely wrapped up thing going round and round in circles,
you need a point to which you say, "Okay,
now we've just got to go from being open and
creative to actually delivering," because one of the other things
that it's become very apparent to me over time is that we always tend to
think of creativity as a kind of process of tada.
Yeah, the moment.
The moment, and normally done by one person over a short time.
Actually, it's not as it is It's often
a collective act done over quite a long time with a lot of trial and error and process.
The risk in organizations is that if you're not
clear in leadership terms about what point
you move from conceiving to delivering,
then you become stultified.
For me creativity is not just about having the idea.
It's about having the idea that becomes something.
It's about conceiving and making, not just conceiving.
Execution.
Absolutely, the execution has to be there,
otherwise, it was just an idea.
An idea is pretty easy actually.
It's the idea that becomes the reality that becomes a success that
creates a product and experience that people want to buy, consume.
I would imagine there is a fair amount of shift
and change and development if you will the idea in that process,
that the implementation if you will,
the ideas still continues to change and grow.
Is that possible?
I think it's not any closer.
I think it's absolutely centralized as a proposition.
Very rarely do fully-formed things just arrive and then are unchanged.
I think that often you can't even quite remember how you got to where you ended up.
Which raises this really interesting question about you talk about
switching phases from generating idea to implement,
but it sounds like the idea continues to evolve.
So what's the managerial?
Okay, folks, we're going to commit to this.
So we don't exactly know what's going to happen,
but it's going to be something kind of like this. Is that?
Yeah, we taught today choppy quite a
lot about time for opening up and the time for closing down.
So the time for opening up is when we're in this ideas exploration,
looking for different ways to do things, developing the idea.
But if the thing's going to hit the delivery date,
at a certain moment in a certain budget to a certain quality,
then you can't let that thing just keep on going round and round for too long.
I think problems come in organizations.
If they get so hooked into this notion of let's keep exploring and exploring,
as you've flipped into delivery mode,
most of the people you get still something, "Well, hang on a minute."
Just now, they're more.
We're on with this now and because we need to open it by next month.
But I think that takes
a kind of project to a product from
original conception through to the moment of delivery.
But actually the world works beautifully, doesn't it?
Often that product then starts to get changed and developed as it gets adapted.
I'm fascinated by perhaps the most successful creative product almost ever,
which I guess you could say was the Apple computer.
If you look Apple One,
and you look at what it looks like and that was the result of the two Steves.
Let's make this.
There was a little creative idea that became a product.
Now you look at what Apple computers look like today.
So the creative act has carried on, hasn't it?
Both in the company and in exchange with consumers for the last 45 how many years.
One thing it raises a question for me is a question of claiming credit.
Do you have any conflicts over because it's collaborative and
it occurs over time and there are accumulated insight?
Do you have any conflicts over this was really mine?
That happened with Steve Jobs.
Yes, it did.
I suppose in the commercial world,
the ownership of the idea of
the intellectual property is an incredibly valuable and important commodity, isn't it?
In the nonprofit world,
we can all afford to be a bit more loving with each other.
So, I've always wanted in our organization,
for the organization to take credit, at least externally.
I think internally, we would happily celebrate
individual's contributions but always wanting to make
sure that the operations team are getting as much credit as the creative guys.
But I'm struck by how much of what you said.
The Battersea Scratch example,
the Enchantment example, and the Apple example,
all three of those examples to me indicate a dialogue with the audience,
a dialog with the participant of the creation if you will,
and that then feeds back to the next creation.
So, each in effect are pushing and learning, right?
Once you learn this, great,
now let's see the next direction I'm going in.
Does that feel right to you?
Yeah.
How explicit is that in your work that we're
working with developing our audience and pushing each other?
Increasingly so, and I think that if you look at agile methodology that's
so used in digital programs, and projects now.
That's essentially the same idea, isn't it?
It's short bursts of activity.
Yeah.
Get it out there, test it,
see if it works,
and move it along.
Rather than briefing, designing, you know,
complex build, launch, failure,
and then very expensive to unpick.
So, any process which can have lots and lots of
different stages where you're constantly getting it out and testing it and learning,
but it requires a certain humility, doesn't it?
Requires a humility on the part of the people who are making the product or
the program or the project to be ready to change from the great idea that they had.
Because we all get terribly possessive. I've had a great idea.
Yeah.
It's mine. I love it. I'm not letting anybody do anything to it. It's like my child.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why you see, it's why I think architects so often go amiss.
Interesting, yeah.
One of the more creative groups in our planet are architects.
And yet, how many buildings get opened and always work beautifully?
Hardly any.
Most of them fail horribly.
Don't they? To even be fit for purpose ten years later.
The roof leaks, signs have to be all changed,
people don't use the building the way they ought to because
the architect is sat and designed.
They built the building.
It's not easy, of course, to build a building in an iterative process.
I guess maybe we are going to need a virtual reality that will allow
the iteration or you can generate
a model or a mockup and walk people through segments of it.
But you're right. It's a much larger intensive process.
So, the iteration, in theater,
is much more accessible.
We did it at Battersea with the building because we
inherited a 120-year-old Victorian town hall.
A huge great rambling construction.
Very elegant from the late 19th century with
a huge hole in the middle of it and lots of about 70 spaces in it.
And rather than try and conceive
a project that would completely restore the building in one hit,
we did a seven-year exercise which we call playgrounding in which we
kept on trying different things to see how people react to a playground.
Playground, it's very nice. Yeah.
So, I'm very interested in the work of
an American writer called Stewart Brand and who has done,
the foundation is called The Clock of the Long Now,
but he's also done some work on how buildings learn.
He's very fascinating about
how the best buildings actually learn and adapt and develop over time.
But we have to build buildings in case of doing it.
He talks very eloquently about
how many architects will build a building and never even visit it after it's finished.
Because they don't want to see people in it making a mess of it.
It's safe to say a lot of buildings we live in now are not designed by architects.
They're designed by builders and there was a blog,
I'm a huge fan of it's called McMansion Hell.
Now, everything's become generic without that inputs.
When you look at some of the most successful buildings,
so the ones that have been adapted and changed and developed over time.
There I think, you have people being creative with the asset, with the physical asset,
which is a very different thing from the architect being creative
and designing something that might look amazing,
but actually probably went well.
In the domain of heritage,
that's must present some challenges too.
What is it mean to preserve?
Now we're into really dig to that.
It's a very interesting philosophical question.
There have been debates running for a century or more
about the extent to which it's right to restore,
to what period and the extent to which you can take
things away that have being put in by previous generations.
I have a particular stance and it is not that mainstream compared to
the way that world's normally done these things over the last 50 years.
I think it is changing now.
In the end, in buildings I think,
we look for significance.
We look to take what's significant about the building,
in terms of its design, its stories,
its structure, and then we
look to hold the significance and there are many different ways to do that.
So, it's a bit I guess
a change of a topic but I'm just curious how you got into this work.
What was your, I mean let's say
your educational background that lead. What was the trajectory?
I've got a degree in English literature which then got me into social history.
I've developed an interest in 18th and 19th century social history through
my literature reading actually and then into into museums as a curator.
Is that a typical trajectory for this career?
Is there not one, I'm just curious.
I don't think there is one really.
I think well maybe there's a typical one which starts with history or archaeology and
goes through into museum studies or cultural heritage management or whatever.
But back in the depths of archaeological past when I started,
life always seemed a lot more possible.
We were so naive back in the '70s that we just believed after university that
we get a great job and actually it just happened. I was lucky.
But actually what I have done having gone in as a curator was,
I began to take quite seriously the business of management and the business of
organizations probably earlier in my career than a lot of my colleagues did.
Because I realized that if you were ever to get
anywhere you need organizations that work for people.
That's pretty self-evident thing,
but it's extraordinary how dysfunctional most museum organizations have been in the past,
and indeed still are.
Actually, if we look at the manifold stories of
chief execs losing their jobs controversially.
So, boards are still often appointing for the wrong reasons.
They're not looking for leadership skills.
They're not looking for that sort of quality of a person.
So, how different do you think, are these organizations?
Do you think these are the same challenges in any organization or do you think there's
something particular about museums' inherited sites as organizations.
I'm not sure what to predict.
I think all organizations share a certain number of identical challenges.
I think that there are some, in addition to that,
distinct characteristics of nonprofit organizations as against for profit organizations.
The cultural drivers in a nonprofit organization.
The complexity of the bottom lines.
The importance of purpose.
The way that people feel motivated to work.
The stakeholder relationships.
I think they're all quite markedly different.
So, I've always felt that 70% of
organizational theory and leadership theory applies just equally to my world.
The next 20% which is nonprofit stuff is different.
Then there's a further layer of oddness and weirdness that applies to
museums and culture and heritage which I think guides another bit of a dimension.
But I think it's often in subtle change rather than in massive difference.
I've had on boards of my organizations,
people coming in who've had stellar careers in the commercial world.
They've been chief exec of this national corporation or chair of this FTSE 100 company,
and they come in, and they look at it,
and it looks quite small by comparison,
and then they suddenly after about a year say,
"Guys, quite difficult this is, isn't it?"
Just because the world,
it's very nuanced and it's never altogether clear what being successful looks like.
Did mentorship play a role in your career and have you mentored
people talking about storytelling for the next generation. What role has that played?
So, I was very fortunate at various times early in my career
to come across people older than me who I really admired and respected.
There was never a formal mentoring relationship back then.
Then in sort of mid career,
found a co-mentoring group.
There were about 15 of us who found
ourselves at broadly same stage of our careers, first leadership jobs,
trying to lead change,
and we set up a group which is still going
today 20 years later where we used to meet every year.
We used to bring in a facilitator help work through problems.
More recently in the last 10 or 15 years,
I've been teaching this stuff more.
I've actually done formal mentoring of quite a few emerging leaders and I
really enjoy it because it's
interesting to see them fighting with some of the same challenges,
but actually some different ones today.
The world has changed and so I learn from them too.
I feel the same way mentoring doctoral students.
I say now you tell me what's going on with the world.
I'm losing touch rapidly.
Well, it is.
I think that the young people who've grown up in a digital world are
just seeing possibilities and patterns and the way that things connect in a way that,
much as I get my iPhone out and do all the things,
it's not the same.
I'm still an analog brain trying to cope in a digital environment.
I don't see the possibilities in a big interconnected way that they will often see now.
So, I'm actually quite glad to be leaving it to them now.
Fascinating and I hope they can make a better feast of sorting out some of the things,
of the mess that we seem to have made.
Well, thank you this has been-
This is organizational behaviour. There you go.
This is really fascinating.
It's been a great conversation, thanks.
Thank you, we appreciate.
