Growing need to swell creative thinking

IT SEEMS my life is about creative thinking; teaching it, evangelising it and now working on a project to instil this into the education system.

Many people don’t understand why we should have creative thinking at all – and that’s the worst mistake of them all.

So, let’s start with that.

We work in environments established on the industrial age based on command and control that stifle creativity and full engagement. Because of that, we don’t challenge the status quo, we don’t think outside of the box and yet we are living in an era where change is the only constant and an uncertain future, our only guarantee and innovation is a non-negotiable.

It’s worse, though. We at business schools spend our time having to get students to unlearn these bad habits that can no longer serve the emerging world as we rekindle their innate creativity.

My journey down this path started in 2007 when I went to business school at the University of Cape Town to study for an MBA. I was a computer sciences and statistics graduate who had been working in IT for seven years and now wanted to gain business skills.

I faced an existential question: how much did I apply myself at work? I realised it was only about 10%. I was only 27 years old and I realised that if I had 33 years’ work ahead of me, by the time I reached 60, I would be a redundant product because I would have used only 10% of me for 40 hours a week at my workplace.

I decided to change my approach and discover how people can bring their full selves to bear. UCT offered me the opportunity to start an IT department in the humanities faculty after completing my MBA.

I had a blank canvas to apply creative thinking and design thinking in designing digital solutions for the humanities faculty and, in the process, establishing a creative agency that provided IT rather than a conventional IT department.

The results were spectacular. I did my PhD thesis on creative problem solving and design thinking in project management, establishing a framework called project artistry in the process.

When I finished, the man who had forced me to ask that question of myself during my MBA, Jon FosterPedley, was now dean and director of Henley Business School in Johannesburg. He asked me to come to Johannesburg to start Henley’s Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Centre.

Up here in Johannesburg, we have been creating action learning projects to unlock people’s creative selves, exposing them to the fourth industrial revolution, to be able to reinvent themselves and reimagine their industries and designing innovation courses for corporate clients.

Creativity is vitally important. A lot of people think about creativity in the context of art and music or a play, but when we talk about creativity, we are talking about rigour and science mixed with imagination and intuition, all of which are leavened with logic, so they all exist in a whole rather than separately.

This has become my latest project, following my selection as one of the 19 members of the class of 2019’s Women Leaders of the World fellowship based in San Francisco.

When I got there earlier this year, I met other women who have done amazing things, changing legislation of countries, reversing systems and challenging patriarchy in all its forms. Some have risked their lives to tackle civil wars. Many are solving real social issues that affect women in their communities. It was an immensely humbling experience to be among them and also being selected post the programme, to be in the Women Leaders of the World Counsil.

I have a vested interest in helping to create an education system that empowers teachers to be able to produce a future workforce that is creative and can leverage the fourth industrial revolution to elevate the human experience on the earth.

We need to create holistic individuals because the world is changing very fast. Nobody knows what the future looks like, we can only assume what it might look like and, because of that, we are increasingly relying on our imagination rather than what we know.

Knowledge is important but imagination is even more important because we need to invent.

Unlocking that creativity has to be our most pressing challenge if we are to conquer this revolution – rather than being conquered by it.