Creativity: The Inner Nature of Leadership
by Peter M. Senge

This is the first in a series of articles revolving around the topics that will be presented at the 15th Annual Leadership Summit scheduled for September 27-29, 2007 at the Union League Club of Chicago in Chicago, IL.  The program entitled, The Art and Practice of Leadership in Local Government’ includes underlying themes on creativity and the inner nature of leadership. 
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Note: This excerpt of a full-featured article entitled, “Creating Desired Futures in a Global Economy” was printed in Volume 5, Number 1, 2003, “Reflections: The SoL Journal” on Knowledge, Learning, and Change, published by The Society for Organizational Learning, Cambridge, MA.  For the full article and others go to http://www.solonline.org/reflections
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There’s nothing more elemental to the work of leaders than creating results. But it’s no longer possible to create positive results in isolation. With organizations, economies, governments and entire societies increasingly interconnected, our actions affect (and are affected by) others, often literally a world away. It’s impossible, in today’s world, to think about how to have an impact in our local community without also asking ourselves a deeper question: What does it mean to live in a global society?

This question was brought home to me by Mieko Nishimizu, one of the most gifted executives at the World Bank. In August 2002, she addressed business and political leaders observing the 50th anniversary of Japan’s membership in the post-World War II Bretton Woods Agreements. Speaking with candor unusual for such an affair, she described what it meant for her, after growing up with many material benefits, to come to grips with poverty.

Few of our institutions are prepared for a truly global society. Indeed, it appears that much of the preparation nature has invested in us – our physiological, cognitive, psychological, and cultural evolution – is failing us. We focus on immediate needs and problems, and are trapped by the illusion that what is most tangible is most real. We’ve been conditioned for thousands of years to identify with our family, our tribe, and our local social structures. A future that asks us to overcome this conditioning and identify with all of humankind looks alien indeed.

On the other hand, in some ways we’ve long understood our place in the world. Early in our history, we learned that if we depleted our topsoil or our local fishery, we paid a price. Today, we call it sustainability. However, we’ve never before lived in a world in which one’s actions, through global business, can have their primary consequence on the other side of the world. Nor have we ever been so dependent on the actions of others.

The challenges of living in such an alien, interconnected world are both practical and deeply personal. Ultimately they lead us to reflect on who we are individually, who we are in our local community, and what we’re committed to. Such understanding is essential to being effective in our work as city leaders, managers, teachers, parents, and citizens.

Creating Desired Results
Adam Kahane, a gifted facilitator who specializes in cross-sector dialogue and scenario building, says that three types of increasing complexity are at the root of organizations’ and societies’ toughest problems:
• dynamic complexity: cause and effect distant in time and space
• social complexity: diverse stakeholders with different agendas and worldviews
• generative complexity: emergent realities wherein solutions from the past no longer fit.

In the face of such complexity, the very concept of “problem solving” can be an impediment. It can lead us to think of fixing something that is broken. It can lead to imposing solutions from the past. And, it can lead to seeing reality as the adversary rather than the ally. But, none of these arises necessarily if we see problem solving as part of a larger process of creating what we truly want.

Realizing desired results in a global society – in local government, or in any context – requires both learning and leadership, but above all it involves collective creating. In fact, I see learning, leading, and creating as three ways to talk about the same basic phenomenon.

Effective leadership, for instance, draws on the belief that we have positive choices and can overcome fear to bring about or create a better future together.

Effective learning – whether learning to lead local government, manage a department, speak a language, or raise a child – is about creating new capacities to bring new outcomes into reality, especially outcomes we genuinely care about.

That is also the root definition of “create” – to bring into existence.

Creating is not a mystical state that we simply fall into; it is a discipline that can be understood and developed. Robert Fritz, a musician, filmmaker, organizational consultant (and in many ways my mentor in the study of creating as a discipline), has articulated three principles that can help leaders of all sorts more effectively create desired outcomes.

1. Creating is different from problem solving.
The fundamental difference between creating and problem solving is simple. In problem solving we seek to make something we do not like go away. In creating, we seek to make what we truly care about exist. Few distinctions are more basic.

Of course, most of us, in both professional and private life, spend far more time problem solving and reacting to circumstances than focusing our energies on creating what we really value. Indeed, we can get so caught up in reacting to problems that it is easy to forget what we actually want. We must do both – resolve day-to-day problems and generate new results.

But if your primary role is to fix problems, individually or collectively, rather than create something new and meaningful, it’s hard to maintain a sense of purpose. And without a deep sense of purpose, it’s difficult to harness the energy, passion, commitment, and perseverance needed to thrive in challenging times.

If you wonder which is primary in your work, simply ask yourself or your team, “What are we trying to accomplish today?” Usually teams will describe a set of problems they’re trying to manage. Then, ask what they could accomplish by eliminating those problems. Typically, they’ll describe yet another set of problems that could then be tackled – for instance, preventing a service breakdown if only they first could solve their interpersonal conflicts.

What often is forgotten is the more basic question: What are we trying to create? Without a compelling answer to this question, it is hard to know why all the problem solving actually matters.

Problem solving becomes the busywork of organizations in which people have forgotten their purpose and vision. Reconnecting with that purpose always starts with asking questions like: Why are we here? What are we trying to create that will make the world a better place? And, who would miss us if we were gone?

2. The creative process is animated by the gap between vision and reality.
When we picture something we want to create, we’re imaging a vision of the future, which also evokes the implicit difference from what currently exists. Every creative artist understands this principle. Fritz calls it “structural tension,” and says it can be resolved by taking action to achieve our vision.

Closing the gap between vision and reality is the essence of the creative arts. Artists get no credit for brilliant ideas unless they can bring them into reality. This “bringing of vision to reality” is also the essence of great social, business, or political leadership.

However, because this tension between vision and reality can be uncomfortable, creative tension becomes emotional tension and we often seek ways around it. One way to lessen the emotional tension is simply to reduce our true vision, to give up our dreams and aim for only “realistic goals.” While this might reduce our discomfort, it also reduces creative energy.

The second way is even more troubling: we do not tell the truth about current reality. Just as the dynamics of compromise – lowering our vision – are common in human affairs, so too are the dynamics of denial. But to the extent that we misrepresent current reality, we lose the capacity to change that reality. The energy of the creative process is released not just by holding true to a vision, but also by telling the truth about what is.

3. Understanding your constraints frees you to create.
One thing that distinguishes the master from the novice is an appreciation of the constraints of his or her medium. Or, as Fritz put it, “No painter paints on an infinite canvas.”

John Elter, a former vice president at Xerox, used this principle to great effect. Early in a multiyear, product-development process to create the company’s first fully digital copiers, Elter took his team on a two-day wilderness expedition in the New Mexico desert. On the way back, they happened to walk by a dump – at the bottom of which they discovered a Xerox copier. It was a revelation. They returned to work with a new vision for the product and their entire enterprise: “Zero to landfill, for our children.”  (Note: This was well before “global warming” was the issue that it is today.)

Says Elter, “Most of the constraints engineering teams deal with are management claptrap. All the managers make them up: The product has got to grow revenue by this amount. It’s got to achieve these cost targets.” However, says Elter, after their epiphany in the desert, “We discovered our real constraint – nothing from this product should ever go into a landfill.” The product they designed was ultimately 94 percent re-manufacturable and 98 percent recyclable.  It met or exceeded all its sales targets. The team created a great product by redefining the constraints they worked against.

As Elter and his team showed, as we go forward, the constraints that can enable creativity will come from appreciating the environmental and social realities of an increasingly interdependent world. Nature produces no waste.

Why should business or local government be any different today? By and large, we fail to see these constraints because we fail to see the interdependence out of which they arise. When we understand our constraints, we free ourselves to create. What distinguishes the master from the novice is an appreciation of the constraints of his or her medium.

Do you recognize your constraints? Do you, as a local city leader, create new capacities to bring new outcomes into reality in your community? 

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Peter Senge is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is the author of several books, including “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” (1990). His most recent book, “Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future” (SoL 2004), co-authored with C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, documents their development of a new theory about change and learning.  Their journey of discovery articulates a new way of seeing the world and understanding our part in creating it—as it is and as it might be.

The annual Leadership Summit is NLC’s premiere leadership development program for local officials.  The advance registration deadline is July 15th.  Designed as a leadership retreat, the Summit provides personal leadership development that is focused on community perspectives.  For more information, contact the Leadership Training Institute at (202) 626-3127 or visit the NLC website at www.nlc.org