Moment 31 - How To Instantly Improve Your Creativity: Bruce Daisley

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Creativity is often labelled a skill which only certain people are born with. A gift for only those lucky enough to have it. This statement is NOT correct. We are all creative and we can all train this skill. Bruce Daisley (Ex VP of Twitter) explains beautifully how we can almost instantaneously engage the creative parts of our brains and allow ideas to flow. Here’s how to instantly improve your creativity. Episode 66 - https://g2ul0.app.link/fEZR9DRs4kb Bruce: https://twitter.com/brucedaisley https://www.instagram.com/brucedaisley/ Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/StevenBartlettYT?sub_confirmation=1 The Diary Of A CEO live - Sign up here - https://g2ul0.app.link/diaryofaceolive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Creativity, something you've talked about at length and for me, I've always believed that I'm least creative in the office. I've always thought I'm more creative in the gym and in the shower than I am when I'm sat in a boardroom with a bunch of people. And I know this is something you've spoken about, so I wanted to get your take on where we're most creative, what kills and causes creativity.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Let me tell you what I've discovered, that neuroscience is really intriguing. The most compelling thing about neuroscience is when you look into it. Neuroscientists used to work on experimenting on animals, you know, I'm not that keen on that. I was like, I was, you know, in a protest group about animal experimentation when I was younger. And they used to look at brain injuries. So that used to be the main way that neuroscience worked. And it's only the last 20 years that brain scans have had any degree of sophistication. But what they've discovered in like the time that they've had brain scanners is some of the things that they presumed about the way our brain works aren't necessarily right. So let me give you one example. When they used to put people in these brand new brain scanners and they would watch what their brains did, they'd give them a puzzle, they'd

• 1:08Speaker 01

  give them a Rubik's Cube, their brains would light up in these sort of different places. And then they'd notice what happened when people stopped playing on the puzzle. And their brains would light up in sort of loads of places as well. And so it was baffling, what's going on right now, they'd say to these people. They'd say, oh, right, sorry, I was a million miles away, I was daydreaming. So, okay, right, that's interesting. Your brain's lighting up when you're, when you're not thinking about something, when you're sort of switched off. And so the way that neuroscientists categorize this broadly, they say, these three systems of cognition. First one is like when you're doing that Rubik's Cube, or when you're typing an email, it's called the executive attention network. So it's the main thing you're focusing on. And then you'll know while your executive attention

• 1:53Speaker 01

  network is watching Netflix, or while you're writing an email, you can also be aware of like the room you're in. That's called the salience network. And the third one, the third, so there's three of these systems. The third one is that one when you're daydreaming, the one where you're a million miles away, the one when you're in the shower. Which is called the default network. But what we discover is that people generally report having their best creative ideas, not when they're frowning into their laptop screen, but when they're in these default mode situations. So you might have it in the old days, if you're on a train somewhere or on a plane somewhere, loads of people, I've got a friend who says she has all her best ideas staring out the windows of planes.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if that was you, then this year has been an uncreative year. But my favourite example of it is a really famous screenwriter called Aaron Sorkin. He's written The West Wing, he wrote, there was a film he had on Netflix just before Christmas called The Chicago Seven. He's written all these big things, very famous for zingy dialogues. He wrote The Social Network Film, things like that, sort of, you know, really, sort of really, what's better than a million, a billion, like, he's written all these zingy lines. And he's realised that he has all his best ideas, exactly like you in the shower. He said he had, he told Hollywood Reporter magazine, he had a shower installed in the corner of his office, and he has eight showers a day. And he was asked by them, hang on,

• 3:21Speaker 01

  is this like some weird OCD thing? He said, not at all. I find that when I, you know, start, I'll be sitting there thinking of something, trying to come up with an idea, but it's only when I disengage my brain that something comes to me, an idea comes to me. And so what you described is exactly what a lot of these people whose job it is to be creative have recognised. And as soon as you know that, you start thinking, wow, okay, I need to think differently about being creative. Because creativity can then be, right, I'm sitting at my desk, I'm sort of taking all this inspiration in, stimulation, ideas, but then it's about disengaging, going for a walk, going for a cycle ride,

• 4:04Speaker 01

  going to do a workout, might be the moment where the idea hits you. And I don't think necessarily we think about that enough. You know, if you go back to this idea that your brain is a bit like your phone battery, then some of those moments that effectively can recharge your battery can be the moments where creativity hits you and inspiration hits you. So I think sort of rethinking the way that we treat a productive week of work of, you know, these blocks of work, but then moments where, you know, it might be your personal routine is you go for a walk every lunchtime. That can be far more creative and productive than you might imagine.

• 4:44Steven Bartlett?

  Well, how do we make our work environments more conducive with creativity then? Is there a way or do we just resign to the fact that that's not going to be the best place for our creativity? And if we're gonna reach our creative potential, it's probably gonna be away from the office.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I think it's about recognizing there's a yin yang, there's a balance of work and imagination. So I always loved the example of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens, obviously incredibly productive. I think he wrote 15 novels, 200 short stories. He edited a weekly magazine about a mile from here, you know, sort of incredibly productive. But he didn't work afternoons. And so Charles Dickens would sit down at his desk at eight in the morning. He'd write for about four or five hours and then he'd go and walk. And he'd walk 10 miles every afternoon. And that was like him lost in his thoughts, you know, striding through East London, probably sort of imagination popping. When he sat down the next day, he had loads of ideas.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  And I think some of us have eliminated that, sort of the brain fermenting ideas. We've eliminated that a bit. So, you know, it might be that your way to do this yourself is to make sure you've just got some downtime or you've just got some time where, you know, you put music on, but you turn podcasts off. Or you just, you try and get a bit more balance in how you're using your energy.

• 6:08Steven Bartlett?

  So let's conclude this point about work and creativity. Say that I today made you the CEO of a company that had 100 employees. And you could design from scratch the working environment, how often people worked and some of the sort of key sort of principles and foundations of that working environment. What kind of things would be important to you, based on all you know?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  So let's look into what happened in lockdown. The first part of lockdown, most people reported that their engagement went up. And why did their engagement went up? Their engagement went up because they were solving problems, right? We'd never worked like this before. Everyone was, you know, the first moment you're getting on a Zoom call or a Google Hangout, or you're getting on these things, these like, you know, even though you're in this crazy situation, there's a degree of excitement. It's fight or flight almost. Right. And, and so what do we know about that? We know that people felt that they were involved in firstly, a bit of team collaboration. But secondly, they were helping solve problems. And so, you know, the whole organisations, computer sales have gone through the roof, the whole organisations that had no laptop computers.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So they had to arm their teams with kit. And so people felt really engaged by the fact that they, back to what we talked about earlier, had some control, they had a bit of influence. So number one thing that we discover is the more that people feel that they can have an impact in their job. And it might be something similar, simple, they're, they're just responsible for a couple of things themselves. The more that they feel that they've got some agency, some control themselves, they feel motivated in their jobs. When do we feel unmotivated in our jobs? When our boss tells us what to do, but we don't get any input into it. We don't necessarily think it's the best thing to do. We're doing repetitive things that don't feel very rewarding.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  So the, the best thing that any of us can do is think, well, how can I make teams feel small? And teams feel like they've got a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in what they're doing. So that's what I would be saying. What you discover is 100 is a really nice size, actually. Anytime a company goes over 100, what you discover is you lose a bit of some of that camaraderie. You better almost, there's a few organisations that do this, when you go over 100, split it into two teams. Because you're, that sort of cohesion you get works really well when we, we've got a familiarity with each other. And what happens is when you go over that, you start losing it. And you think, we want, we want it to feel like it used to feel. It's never going to feel like that. Humans don't work like that.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So it's far better to say, you know, we've got two teams that love each other, but we're, we're working on separate goals. So keeping things small is really critical. And there's lots of evidence of the smaller you can keep things, you almost get the economies of engagement compared to the economies of scale. That when people feel they're part of something that they're having an input into, their engagement is higher, they they they work more effectively. So I would say that would be the defining part, making people feel like they've got things that they're responsible for. And generally, all of those things encourage a active engagement. What you find when you look into some of the stats, they're terrifying.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  So when you globally, this an organisation Gallup do this workforce survey, opinion poll company, and they they do this workforce survey. And they say that globally, thirteen percent of people are engaged in their jobs. When they look into it, what they mean by that is that these there's almost as many people, there's about twenty two percent of people who would actively disengage their jobs. So by actively disengaged, they kind of hate their organisation and they want to bring the downfall of their organisation. So anytime you meet someone on the tube or in the street, they're almost twice as likely to want to destroy their company as make it succeed. But then the vast majority of everyone else, over fifty percent of people are just disengaged. They're not actively disengaged, they're just passively disengaged.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  So work for most of us is something is something that sort of feels arduous. We don't necessarily enjoy it, we don't necessarily value the decisions. And you'll know as someone who's run a company where culture was the defining thing, you'll know that when you get it right, it can be this superpower.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Where, you know, you're on high octane fuel compared to, you know, the the energy can feel low otherwise. And so just getting those things right generally is far more about people feeling a personal connection with the people they're around, feeling like they're contributing something. These things play a really big part.