The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 31 - How To Instantly Improve Your Creativity: Bruce Daisley

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

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

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. creativity something you've talked about at length and um for me i've 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 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 let me tell you um what i've

i've discovered that neuroscience is really intriguing the most compelling thing about neuroscience is when you look into it uh neuroscientists used to work on experimenting on animals you know i'm not keen on that i was like i was you know in a protest group about animal experimentation when i was younger um 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 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 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 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 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. And so, you

know, if that was you, then this year has been an uncreative year. But my favorite example of it, there's a really famous screenwriter called aaron sorkin it's he's written the west wing he wrote there was a um 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 um really sort of really what's better than a million a billion like He's written all these zingy lines. And he's realized 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, he was asked by them, hang on, is this like some weird OCD thing? He said, not at all. I find that when I, you know I start 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 recognized. 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, 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 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 going to reach our creative potential, it's probably going to be away from the office. I think it's about recognising there's a yin yang, there a balance of work and and imagination so i i always love the example of charles dickens charles dickens obviously um like 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 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 that in how you're using your energy 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 um and you could design from scratch the the working environment how often people worked and some of the sort of key sort of principles and foundations of that working environment what 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? 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 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 organizations, computer sales have gone through the roof, whole organizations that had no laptop computers. 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 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. So 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 organizations that do this, when you go over 100, split it into two teams because that sort of cohesion you get works really well when 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 it to feel like it used to feel. It's never going to feel like that. Humans don't work like that. So far better to say, you know, we've got two teams that love each other,

but 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 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. Generally, all of those things encourage active engagement. What you find when you look into some of the stats, they're terrifying. So globally, an organization, Gallup, do this workforce survey, a opinion poll company, and they do this workforce survey. And they say that globally, 13% of people are engaged in their jobs when they look into it. What they mean by that is that there's almost as many people, there's about 22% of people who would actively disengage their jobs.

So by actively disengaged they kind of hate their organization and they want to bring the downfall of their organization 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 50 percent of people are just disengaged they're not actively disengaged. They're not actively disengaged. They're just passively disengaged. So work for most of us 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 where you're on high-octane fuel compared thing, you'll know that when you get it right, it can be the superpower where, you know, you're on high octane fuel compared to, you know, 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 that are around, feeling like they're contributing something. These things play a really big part.