To be a leader demands creativity. Fortunately, we are all equipped to be creative. The human intellect is a problem-solving phenomenon, constantly evaluating the way it finds the world and pondering how it might change things for the better. It is a creative power in search of challenges. Directed by hubris, it is dangerous; guided by love, it is the hope of humanity.
Over many years of studying, practising and speaking about creativity, I have used a demonstration that seems to convey with a certain cogency exactly what human creativity involves. Consistently arresting, this simple demonstration is not just an astonishing physical feat, it is also a concrete illustration of the creative process. It is not my own, and I regret that I am unable to give credit to whoever devised it originally.
The demonstration involves a glass bottle, a fork, a spoon, and a matchstick. The task is to somehow balance the eating implements and the match on the rim of the bottle with contact restricted to a single point. Remarkably, because I am certain that I am not the only person in the world who has performed this trick for others, only once has someone in my workshops seen it done before.
Performing the feat involves connecting the eating implements by weaving the lip of the spoon between the prongs of the fork to create a metal arc. Then one end of the match is hooked through the prongs at the centre-point of that arc, and the other end is placed on the lip of the bottle so that the handles of the implements are suspended on either side. The physical reality has to be seen to be believed, and even then belief is strained. Though there is obviously a simple scientific explanation for the phenomenon, it does not detract from the truth that our cosmos is a strange and wonderful place.
How does this illustrate the process of human creativity? Perhaps it is best to first define human creativity. Consider the following prescriptions from some famous creative people.
“An idea is a feat of association.” Poet Robert Frost
“Thinking is connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.” Author G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy
“Lateral thinking is restructuring patterns and provoking new ones.” Creative guru Edward De Bono in Lateral Thinking
“Creativity is to see what everyone else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.” Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“Creativeness often consists of turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?” Advertising guru Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Each of the definitions is itself a creative insight, but all say essentially the same thing — that physical and mental reality in all its multifarious manifestations, whether familiar or strange, presents itself in forms which people, through the use of free will and intellect, may choose to look at in different ways, and even to reconfigure so as to change reality. Admittedly limited and fallible, the human mind nonetheless has the power to shape the future. If you believe that life has meaning beyond self-gratification, it implies an awesome responsibility; if you do not believe it, you are equipped to do a great deal of harm to your fellow human beings and the environment.
The fork, spoon, match, and bottle trick illustrates various aspects of the definitions above: it shows ‘a feat of association’ that involves ‘connecting things’; it ‘connects unconventionally’, so ‘restructuring patterns’; and it provides evidence of someone thinking ‘what nobody else has thought’.
Leadership is, by definition, creative, and human intellect and free will equip all people to be creative, and therefore capable of leadership.
The reality is that fear of failure, a lack of the spirit of adventure, or just plain laziness often hold too many people back from realising their creative potential. And their ability to provide leadership.
(Excerpted from the book, Leaders & Misleaders by Andre van Heerden)
