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April 30, 2009

I was pleased to accept your invitation to be here today for two reasons. The first was my interest in the subject of your conference, “Leading Creative Organizations,” and the emphasis your leadership narrative placed on relationships. The second was the fact that all of us work in human potential organizations, organizations mandated to invest in human capital. In the case of the Canada Council for the Arts, our mandate focuses on artistic creativity and how investing in arts practice benefits Canadians, but regardless of how our organizations may differ, our professions have much in common.

I grew up in Toronto as part of the first wave of the baby boom. I attended public schools at a time when investment in public education in Ontario was growing exponentially. I was the first in my family to go to university, something which in those days I was able to do without going into debt, using only income from scholarships and part-time jobs. By the time I entered the work force, I had a choice of employment options, all of which paid well and were tied to my university education. 

The ease with which I advanced though this system resulted in my ending up with the misguided notion that getting ahead was based on being smart. For 18 years I had been part of a system in which the rules remained relatively stable: someone in authority would ask me a question, and if I gave the right answer, I could move forward. After many years of positive reinforcement, I believed that having the right answers was what was necessary to succeed in life. Success seemed irrevocably tied to being smart.

Today I’d like to talk a bit about the fallacy of this logic, and the limitation of what I learned as a young man about relying on “right answers” to get ahead. If I need a literary source, let it be Oscar Wilde, who facetiously wrote: “I’m not young enough to know everything.”    

The notion of the right answer that I picked up as a student is relatively simplistic. It corresponds to the image of someone answering a multiple-choice question; the host of So You Want to be a Millionaire asking “Is that your final answer?”; a spelling-bee contestant agonizing over whether or not there are double letters in the word “hemorrhage.”

In our professional lives, especially in jobs that involve working with other people, it is rare to encounter challenges that are so one-dimensional in nature. Simplistic is the last word I would use to describe leading creative organizations. Yet for people like myself, it is not a short or easy journey to move from a naive faith that being smart is what’s important to a more contextual, three-dimensional approach to the world.  In my case, the transition took decades, with what seemed like endless frustrations along the way.

And frustrations can have many damaging side-effects. One of the worst of these is how they can contribute to a sense that life is unfair. When you believe that success is tied to being smart, and you are convinced on the basis of the feedback you’ve received as a young person that you are smart, then every setback later in life, every job or promotion that doesn’t come your way, every grant submission or mortgage application that isn’t approved, adds to a sense of injustice in the outside world. And there is nothing worse than being around people who blame others for everything that isn’t right with their lives.

In my own journey there are a few milestones that stand out, and with your indulgence, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about a couple of them.

An early insight into the limitations of right answers came to me in a report published in 1972 by an organization called the Club of Rome. Some of you may be old enough to remember that the early 1970s were marked by the first global energy crisis, the so-called OPEC crisis, when petroleum reserves simply dried up. In nations highly dependent on petroleum imports like the UK, legislation was passed to impose a three-day work week, something that had never happened before or since. In North America, the bright lights of the urban skyline disappeared, as laws were passed to force office buildings to turn off their lights after working hours. I distinctly remember a totally darkened Toronto skyline.

The Club of Rome, which still functions today, was started in 1968 as an international think-tank to wrestle with global issues. In 1972, a full year before the OPEC crisis, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, a cautionary report on the need to introduce on a global scale sustainable development strategies. The report sold over 30 million copies. One of the arguments presented in the report was the need to distinguish between problems and circumstances. Problems, the authors argued, have solutions, and once the solutions are identified, the problems are “solved” and go away. Circumstances, on the other hand, trigger responses; the responses do not “solve” the circumstances but react to them, usually with the intention of mitigating negative consequences. While the particulars of circumstances may change over time, their presence is essentially permanent, with the result that new responses too must continually evolve going forward.

Limits to Growth used global energy needs as an example. Energy is not a problem, the authors argued, because it has no solution. The need for energy is instead a circumstance that will always be with us, and appropriate responses to satisfy this need will be a constant requirement for the future of mankind.

I was greatly influenced by this distinction between solutions and responses. It made the world a lot more complicated than I had thought before, and it challenged my faith in coming up with the right answer for every situation. Somehow I had conflated the notion of problems and questions, and consequently the concepts of solutions and answers. When the limitations of the problem-solving paradigm became clear, I began to have doubts for the first time about my reliance on right answers.

The possibility of such doubts makes a good segue into another of the milestones that marked my own journey. This deals with research after the Second World War into what was described at the time as the authoritarian personality. With the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, researchers began to explore whether they could identify a psychological pre-disposition for different kinds of political systems. Out of this research came the finding that people are different in their ability to tolerate ambiguity, to perceive ambiguity in information and behaviour in a neutral and open way. Simply put, some people feel comfortable with ambiguity, and others feel threatened by it. Some people express a need for clear answers to every uncertainty in life, and others do not.

Tolerance for ambiguity is discussed extensively in the literature on education, creativity, and management, so it is likely you have already encountered the concept in your professional careers as educators. There is an interesting tie-in to the arts, however, that is worth citing. Research on university students has shown that students who choose to study the arts and humanities have a higher tolerance for ambiguity than those who enter faculties of science and engineering. And when they graduate, the differences are even greater: arts and humanities students gain even greater tolerance for ambiguity during their studies, while engineering and science students acquire greater discomfort.

One doesn’t want to read too much into these findings. We need engineering professionals with the capacity to provide clear measures of the strength of a piece of steel or the stress that a bridge can sustain during a hurricane. There are some parts of our life where clarity is paramount. But there are other parts where ambiguity is desirable. The degree of comfort a society has with such things as cultural and religious diversity, differing lifestyles, and cross-cultural communication is one of the measures many of us use for social progress. It may very well be that some of the psychological attributes that characterize arts students are linked to values which are highly prized by Canadians.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with all of this, let me pull some of the threads together. Leading creative organizations means making room for other people’s input. It means having as a starting point a willingness to accept many different points of view, and a recognition that everyone in the organization, no matter where they find themselves in the institutional hierarchy, has something of value to offer.

This approach is hard to sustain if you view the world through a problem-solving lens, especially if you believe you already know the solution. Nor is it compatible with a view that there is only one right answer to each challenge, one approach that is demonstrably superior to all others. 

While making room for other people’s input, creative leaders must also give themselves permission to not have all the answers. For many, this is the hardest challenge of all. After growing up in an environment where advancement is tied to having right answers, it seems counter-intuitive to believe that we can get ahead by focusing on alternative strategies. Yet that’s an important part of successfully leading creative teams.

I recently came across a quote that applies this view to arts management. It was in a book entitled The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations by Michael Kaiser, the CEO of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. While I found much of what Kaiser had to say in the book unduly prescriptive, two pages from the end he offered the following insight:

To be honest, when I started my career I was convinced that the planning process had to result in a structured report. I am less certain of that today. I would rather create a short, clear, smart, entrepreneurial plan that can adapt to change quickly than a beautiful, long, well-reasoned leather-bound volume.  In fact, best of all is a staff and board who think strategically every minute of the day. (p. 177)

I am convinced that what these statements reflect is Kaiser’s own journey from solutions to responses, from the singular to the multiple, from the individual to the team. And this is a journey that is not possible without challenging the sanctity of the right answer.

Before joining the Canada Council I worked for 15 years at Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto. During that time I became fascinated by how limited the public’s notion of intelligence is, of what it means to be smart. Every day I saw young people in the dance studio respond to a complex barrage of directions and corrections. I watched as they developed elaborate strategies to use their bodies to achieve aesthetic goals, and I was amazed at their intensity and focus.

You can imagine my puzzlement when I discovered that many lay people I met assumed that dancers were not intelligent, and that a stereotype existed of the “dumb dancer.” At first I wrote this off to the fact that in the past talented dancers often left school at 15 or 16 to focus their energies full-time on their training. Then I thought perhaps it was because ballet dancers begin dancing professionally while still in their teens and don’t go to university until much later, usually in their 30s or 40s when age takes its toll on their bodies and forces them to change careers.

But soon I was drawn more and more to the work of Howard Gardner, who first published his theory of multiple intelligences while a professor of education at Harvard in 1983. Gardner argued that our traditional approach to intelligence, the kind of thing measured by IQ tests, was far too limited, and that humans had at least eight kinds of intelligence. He identified these as:

• Linguistic intelligence (being word smart);
• Logical-mathematical intelligence (being number or reasoning smart);
• Spatial intelligence (being picture smart);
• Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (being body smart);
• Musical intelligence (being music smart);
• Interpersonal intelligence (being people smart);
• Intrapersonal intelligence (being self smart); and
• Naturalist intelligence (being nature smart).  

Gardner argued that we were focusing too much on linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence in our education system, and that society should place more attention on those gifted in the other intelligences, including artists, musicians, and dancers. You can imagine how welcome I found these ideas. Not only did they validate the worth of the gifted students in my midst, they suggested that there were at least eight different ways to teach or learn anything. They supported making the arts a stronger part of all school curricula, and they made room for students whose potential might have been overlooked in the past.

Those of you who have heard of the academic achievements of National Ballet School graduates may think that I am exaggerating the challenges. I assure you that I am not. In 2002 I took a small team working on the National Ballet School’s capital expansion project to visit benchmark facilities in London, Paris and Seattle. In London we were toured through the facilities of the Royal Ballet School still under construction across from the Royal Opera House. The facilities were specifically designed to accommodate the training and academic needs of Royal Ballet School students at the secondary school level, and our guide was the lead architect of the new facilities.

One of the things I noticed was how little space had been allocated to the academic program. When I asked the architect why this was so, his answer was chillingly misguided: “Students of the Royal Ballet School are not academically inclined.”

One of the strengths of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is that it is as applicable to adult learners as it is to children. And to those of us seeking better ways to lead and manage, having multiple teaching strategies at our disposal is a powerful asset. Just as I talked earlier about making room for other people’s inputs, so too must we make room for multiple learning styles.

At the Canada Council I am somewhat out of step with a number of my colleagues in my rejection of PowerPoint as a preferred means to get information across. It is not the technology I don’t trust, but the way that information is predigested. It smacks of having all the answers in advance, and is too “literal” to me in its assumptions.  I much prefer unscripted presentations, with graphics as needed to reinforce the message. I even find myself gravitating back to the black board presentations of my student days, where visual and verbal stimuli are woven together with a strong sense of immediacy and physicality. I think this form of presentation draws on more teaching styles than verbal presentations alone, and is more respectful of the multiple learning styles of others.

A basic principle in communications theory is the difference between the message sent and the message received. It’s like the joke about the teacher who complains to the student: “I don’t understand why you keep making the same mistake. I’ve taught you that three times.” The hard truth, of course, is that if the student is still making the same mistake, the teacher hasn’t taught it once.

One of the major lessons of life is that getting ahead is not tied to being smart, but to achieving results. My remarks today are premised on a very simple idea: that what you are trying to achieve in leading creative organizations is positive outcomes, and that such outcomes have the highest probability of success when you can engage the creative contributions of as many people in your organization as possible.  Compliance in creative organizations does not come from telling other people what to do, no matter how smart you might think you are, or how good your proposal, but by engaging them in determining a shared course of action. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago while reading Joseph Boyden’s 2005 novel Three Day Road. In it Boyden cites the practice in the First World War of taking soldiers behind the lines and shooting them if they didn’t follow orders. May I hasten to say that this is not an approach I would recommend for the Ottawa Carleton District School Board. 

If you want compliance, empower your staff to play an active role in determining how to respond to the challenges you face. Let them have a real say in charting their own course, and hold them accountable, as peers, for their performance. I am convinced that this approach is a major contributor to the exceptional performance of staff within my own organization, and is fully consistent with the leadership narrative you have prepared for yourselves.

On that note, may I now open up the discussion by turning the session back to you for questions and comments.