Craig Wright, director of human resources for Textron Fluid & Power, would seem to have a work force recruiting problem. For the second year in a row, he said, the United States has graduated more theater majors than engineers.
But as a business leaders learned last week at an Arts & Business Council of Rhode Island forum entitled “Clobbering the Competition with Creativity,” technical skill is not the only way to success in today’s world.
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In the first of a two-part series, sponsored by a grant from the MetLife Foundation, Wright was one of the panelists answering questions such as, what are the best practices for companies wanting to use creativity in solving problems? and how are companies using the arts to inspire employees to be more creative?
He spoke of how Textron has used creativity to find workers to replace the retiring baby boomers on the company’s staff, especially in the technical fields.
“We needed to think differently about what we’re looking for,” Wright said. “Part of that is, for example, taking somebody that has a degree in English or theater and letting them demonstrate what kind of transferable skills they have to do things like accounting or finance or logistics.”
The company found that liberal arts and fine arts graduates perform well in positions such as sales and marketing, he said. “When you think about selling and transferable skills, it’s essentially performing. All you do is give them a script.”
The company found another solution in letting employees work from home. That required a lot of convincing, Wright noted, because most managers buck the notion that employees will be productive at home.
The at-home workers are a viable new resource, he said, and using them allows the company to hire people living in other states, thus expanding its pool of skilled potential workers.
Wright said the next hurdle is finding ways to develop and nurture creativity in new employees once they are hired.
“Nine times out of 10, when you look at [creativity] and then you try to develop it, it’s in the category that’s hardest to develop,” he said. “If you look at the people inside the organization that are highly rewarded … over and over and over again, creativity keeps coming up.”
But how do you teach people to be more creative?
Wright said that’s a challenge, because there is no way to measure a person’s creativity. And without a way to measure creativity, it’s difficult to know what makes a person creative.
That’s where the arts play into the argument. Some contend that providing some form of experience in the arts makes people more creative.
Unlocking creativity was panelist Robert Thomas’ greatest challenge while teaching students, many of whom were 35-year-old mid-level engineers, in the Leaders For Manufacturing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thomas worked at MIT before becoming involved in Accenture, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm specializing in delivering innovation to businesses.
One way Thomas found to unleash creativity in his students was through dance.
Through a colleague, he had met Miki Ohlsen, the artistic director of Island Moving Company, the contemporary ballet company in Newport. The result, he said, was an afternoon with the students, Ohlsen and a troupe of dancers. They all stood in a circle while each person went to the center and performed a signature step. Then they used those steps to choreograph an original dance.
“By the time they were done, every inhibition had been thrown out the window,” Thomas said. “That whole-body approach to creativity actually enabled them to be far more effective as engineers. … And that really became a theme in a lot of the work that I’ve done.”
Thomas has since used that exercise at companies he works with as a consultant. He said many times, participants compare creating the dance to managing large-scale projects: The dance teaches participants how to harness the collective energy of a group to reach an ultimate goal.
But there’s more to building creativity than using dance or other art forms.
For Ohlsen, the third panelist in the discussion, creativity is about creating an environment where people feel comfortable admitting they do not know the answer to a question.
When people admit they don’t know, she said, it sometimes opens the door for creativity to come into the conversation. It allows everyone to contribute ideas if it’s a non-threatening environment.
To further the discussion, moderator Roger Mandel, president of Rhode Island School of Design, asked the panelists whether giving employees the leeway to make mistakes is a way to encourage creativity in the workplace.
Wright answered yes. “If you’re going to feed that creative process, you’ve got to let people be wrong,” he said.
For example, he said, 3M’s Post-it notes were a mistake. “They were trying to come up with a really, really strong glue and instead they got Post-it notes, which uses a glue that hardly sticks at all.”
Wright added that one of 3M’s secrets to success is that it encourages employees to steal 10 percent of their time to develop innovative products. And 3M provides extra compensation to employees for their time and ideas.
“It distinguishes them from their competitors in terms of their ability to innovate,” Wright said. “It’s a different model they have, and one we could use. It seems to work for them. It seems to spur creativity. They have some really, really free thinkers there.”
