discipline and safety as foundations of creativity

One of my friends told me a lovely story of a deer. A deer with its beautiful horns and shining skin is very fond of its personality. A deer though feels that its legs are not as beautiful as its horns and feels little sad about it. When a tiger comes hunting , those very legs save the deer from getting hunted and the horns are a liability as the deer runs a huge risk of horns getting entangled in bushes while running. This story highlighted a fact that sometimes it’s the non-glamorous stuff that can be a real savior.

When it comes to ideation or creativity, words like “Discipline” and “process” look non-glamorous. I have heard many talking about creativity as a free-flowing state of mind which cannot be hampered by pre-defined rules. It always sounded ok to me till I had a very interesting experience

I was conducting an offsite for a leadership team recently. Part of the offsite was regular business reviews and I was invited as an observer for that part . One of the non-negotiable rules I set up for any meeting / discussion that I am part of is “safe learning / sharing zone” where participants agree that there is no punishment for speaking the uncomfortable facts / incidents. The rules of how we would interact during the offsite were set up right in the beginning.

During the review presentations,  one of the Business Unit Heads made a very simple statement,” I shouldn’t have accepted the target from the board when deep down I had concerns about the feasibility etc”. I could see the Chairman of the company sitting in the room getting very uncomfortable when this happened. He simply asked” Don’t you realize that you misled the board?” I could sense the situation getting very tense and suddenly the tension in the room was so thick that you could have cut it with  a knife 😊 Intuitively I jumped in and told the audience that it takes raw guts to stand there and I had never seen such brilliant honesty in admitting the shortfall in such a simple manner. The mood changed and everyone clapped for the gentleman who was presenting. With this unexpected response, the presenter had tears in his eyes.

However, the real magic happened afterwards. The atmosphere in the room became much lighter and suddenly it was “OK” to have dialogue about one’s failure / vulnerability. People became comfortable with their own vulnerabilities and ideas started flowing freely. The Chairman of the company later on told me that he had never seen his team contributing so much. I politely told him that they would always do this if they felt safer in the environment.

I think as a facilitators/ coaches we all have responsibility to stick to our process and discipline that we have laid down with the target audience. No amount of provocation and especially senior leadership intervention should sway us away from the discipline and pose a threat to safety. Many a times we allow some senior leaders to hijack the agenda when they break the rules. It is primary job of a facilitator and a coach to ensure that he / she is guardian of the process. This discipline on part of the facilitator / coach creates safety in which creativity naturally blooms 😊