Leadership Wisdom of the Week #22

“Stop, collaborate, and listen”

– Allen Gannett, The Creative Curve

This week’s quote comes from Allen Gannett, who has explored how creativity works and sets out to challenge the idea that creative breakthroughs are the work of individual geniuses suddenly struck by brilliant insights. Instead, he describes creativity and innovation as processes that can and should be planned.

One of his examples is the classic Beatles song Yesterday, which is often described as having appeared to Paul McCartney in a dream – a sudden, intuitive moment of creativity. However, what is often forgotten is that it took McCartney – and the people around him – two years to turn that flash of genius into the classic we know today. The original idea was important, but so were the time, work and collaboration needed to develop it.

One of Gannett’s central arguments is that creativity and innovation are not individual pursuits. Even though we have a cultural habit of attributing innovations to individuals, it is often the people around them who enable something new to emerge – by listening, supporting, challenging and innovating together.

One of the best things you can do to nurture your own creativity is to collaborate with people whose personalities, backgrounds and experiences differ from yours. Gannett calls them conflicting collaborators: people who complement one another, bring different perspectives to the table and are willing to challenge each other’s thinking.

One of the major responsibilities leaders have in organisations is to create opportunities for people with different perspectives to meet and develop something new together. This does not happen in meetings where everyone simply reports on their progress. We need to truly stop, collaborate, and listen.

Creativity matters at every level of an organisation. It may involve finding solutions to everyday issues, making small improvements to processes, services or products, or developing major innovations in business models. It requires an understanding of the current situation, an ability to look at it through new lenses, and active, structured collaboration around the ideas that emerge.

These everyday words – stop, collaborate, and listen – describe a process that is becoming less and less visible in many organisations. As AI becomes capable of taking over more routine tasks, it is critical that we human beings do not get caught up in the need to become even more efficient every moment. Leaders have an important choice to make: do we use the time that is freed up simply to produce more, or do we also use it to develop practices that support better thinking and shared creativity?

Every organisation is full of ideas – and has the potential to generate many more. There are many Yesterdays that never see the light of day because the circumstances are not right for them. As leaders, we do not need to believe that we must come up with all the ideas and solutions ourselves. Instead, we can aim to create an environment where people feel that it is natural to stop, collaborate, and listen. What makes this possible in your organisation – and what tends to get in the way?