Meet David Chislett - Author, poet, musician, artist, entrepreneur, and a man on a mission to activate creativity in as many people as he can. This podcast will challenge your perception of creativity, what it is, how it works and how to unleash creativity in your team.

1:55    David’s story

6:10    Going deep into innovation & creativity

22:20 Music & managing creatives

28:00 Labels

35:00 What is a creativity workshop?

37:00 Creating a culture of innovation

49:00 Is now the time?

57:10 How do you start your day?

1:02:50  Advice to your 25yr old self

[Transcript]

[00:00:58] In this episode, you'll make David Chislett. David wants to activate creativity in as many people as he can. And in his own words, he wants [00:01:00] to turn people into weapons of mass creation. Wow. That's a powerful statement. He understands creativity better than anybody I have met. And if you're anything like me, you struggle a bit with this term, creativity and innovation.

[00:01:42] Very nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me along. Now you are quite an interesting fellow to say the least. So, first of all, first and foremost, what's your story right? From the very beginning. Where were you born and what brought you [00:02:00] to where you are today? Well, yeah, I'll try and keep it short. No, please just go to us.

[00:02:35] And eventually when I was halfway through a post-graduate degree, I decided that academic life was not for me. And I fled to South Africa for the bright lights of London in part, I guess, because as an English speaking, South African I'd never been made to feel particularly South African or particularly like I belonged six months in London.

[00:03:38] Uh, more band management, more promotions, um, then ended up working in book publishing, marketing in particular before going back to London and working for a large live events agency in Soho. Um, then back to South Africa, again, for another 10 years where I began publishing a lot of my own work [00:04:00] and started getting involved in training for the first time running workshops, um, on the business of the music industry, leadership skills and various other things.

[00:04:30] And I dunno, six months, six years, no idea. And yeah, I'm now married. We have two kids in a house in the suburbs. I'm not going anywhere. And, um, this move to the Netherlands is also what precipitated a major change in direction for me, because I was living in a non-English speaking country for the first time in my life.

[00:05:27] With the waste, this idea that the people I was helping had something to offer the world to make it a better place. And, um, with the help of a friend of mine, and I was able to bring that into really stock focus and to understand that actually for the first time in my life, I was like, Oh, I have a purpose.

[00:06:20] Yeah, and inspire and ignite creativity. And we talk a lot about innovation and creativity. And often in the corporate world, innovation is considered this thing that maybe the engineering guy or the R and D person is responsible for. Well, just come up with a, you know, a better widget, that's more innovative.

[00:07:03] I've got somebody working on that. And that seems to me like that's so wrong because innovation is how you think. I think it's about your culture. It's so much broader than that. And I know this instinctively, but I don't have the skills or the ability to go down deeper. Right? You do, you go right down into creativity and innovation.

[00:08:03] You know, creativity is not to be mistaken with things. It's more like a process. It's this capacity that we have human beings have. Now when you're in a business situation, you're talking about wanting more innovation. You need to be able to meet the conditions of creativity in order to get the innovation.

[00:08:51] And outputs is exactly the opposite of the kind of safe space that is required for creativity. So merely by the way that we [00:09:00] choose to manage our people, even if they are in an innovation factory is quite often counter productive. The other big issue is the fact that we have an innovation factory, that we are sitting with our creative genius or just that person in a silo that is not connected to anything else, because we are then creating then treating creativity as a discreet thing.

[00:09:55] They're not allowed to step outside of that silo to find new or interesting dots. So [00:10:00] quite often the things that they come up with don't actually result in much and. We're starting to see a lot of research and responses coming out now where people are basically saying that the innovation team, the innovation factory isn't actually delivering anything of use.

[00:10:57] It would cut down on time, which means I could [00:11:00] deliver more, which means you could employ less people, which would result in a significant saving. And the customers will be really pleased. You make their lives interesting. It would be a great innovation, but most often there is no structure in place to accept such feedback.

[00:11:38] We're superbly good at looking at a set of occurrences and spotting a pattern. Unfortunately, quite often what we are doing is reading a pattern into things which have no pattern. And then what we do is we use that pattern to extrapolate scenarios into the future. And then we act on those scenarios as if they are true in order [00:12:00] to create the future that we desire.

[00:12:30] No, of course it seems self-evident because of all the other information we have access to. And that's what happens with innovation. You just don't actually know what's going to happen next. And so by limiting the number of people who are thinking creatively, coming up with ideas, joining the dots and making suggestions, you are hamstringing your company's ability to keep up with the times and specialists.

[00:13:24] And so it falls flat. No, it's a bit like the tree that fell over in the forest and no one was there to hear it. It's like what, who cares? Um, which is why diversity is so important. Innovation, a multitude of viewpoints from people with more or less experienced with more or less education from definite different ethnic, economic, social, gender, sexual orientation, age, you name it.

[00:14:18] Obviously we didn't have it this year, but I went like last year and the year before. And I just loved it because your brain is going from one thing to another to another, you might be listening to somebody talking about a business related issue, and then you're jumping to music and then something else, and then maybe poetry and you're all over the place.

[00:14:58] But I could just [00:15:00] imagine going into the corporate world and saying, I want to take my team to TEDx. And then the response being, what's the impact to the bottom line. If you can't draw a direct impact between that expenditure and the bottom line, then it's not approved. It's like, well, just trust me. It's just because I want us to be in this more creative space so we can have conversations about stuff that somehow we'll be able to bring a little smidge of something back into the workplace, which could, could possibly be the next greatest innovation on the planet.

[00:15:56] It's not going to happen overnight. And if you doubt that for one second, [00:16:00] considering that something like the automotive industry is pretty well established, quite traditional lean lean was invented by Toyota, an auto manufacturer. Now you've got lean startup, you've got lean. This you've got lean that, and you got lean.

[00:16:42] And all of a sudden things got better. That's why you should send your team to TEDx because they could discover the next lean or the next agile, not necessarily the next wonderful Bridget, because creativity is a four level construct. It's about processes. It's about people, [00:17:00] it's about products and it's about the environment or the press.

[00:17:35] Obey conform consume. And I used to have a t-shirt because I was a bit of a punk, her growing up and I found it, you know, beautifully tongue in cheek, sarcastically. Yeah. I'm not surprised that you were a punk going up by the way. Yeah. And I was thinking about getting a new t-shirt because the one I had in the early nineties clearly fallen apart by now and I couldn't find it [00:18:00] anywhere.

[00:18:23] And suddenly I wasn't comfortable with that anymore. So I asked myself, what is the complete opposite of obey. Rebel conform reject, consume. Well create. Now most of the time people see that rebel reject create and they think, Oh yeah, yeah, you all punk Rocky, you, this is all, you know, and I keep burning the place down and that's actually not what it's all about.

[00:19:17] And that's what it's really about. It's about stepping away from the known through rebellion and rejection. So you can enter into a place which has ambiguous and complex enough for you to find new answers to old problems and to new ones. I would think to do that. You've got to, first of all, be very comfortable in your own skin.

[00:19:59] You don't know, [00:20:00] you can't see, you don't know what's going to happen. That's why, you know, that's, my micromanagement is so dangerous because it encourages people to stay so far inside the tracks that they don't even, um, I don't even achieve, you know, they just kind of meet the minimum requirement and it's all about fear.

[00:20:38] They've they've learned that if I say something stupid while I was trying to figure something out, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean I'm stupid. Doesn't mean I'm a failure, you know, all that kind of negative self-talk, which we indulge in, especially around failure. Um, creative people have somehow gotten a lot better at dealing with and, you know, it's [00:21:00] very, very cool and trendy at the moment to talk about failure as the new success, you know, the, these amazing nights where you, uh, you get up on stage and boast about how badly you failed, um, which is a pity because it masks a more fundamental truth that if you failed, it means you've means you've tried.

[00:21:41] You invented the light bulb. He was like, well, first I discovered 2,995 ways, how not to make a light bulb. Um, and people forget always that part. We're so attracted to the magic, to the glitz, the rock and roll with glam, um, about creativity that people tend to overlook the fact that it is [00:22:00] always preceded by a lot of grunt, collecting a lot of dots, building a lot of prototypes, failing a lot.

[00:22:33] He's amazing. And, and I remember talking to him about the design of the website and he said to me, you know, what music do you like? And I said, well, ACDC, you know, and he said, I'm okay. He said, I'm going to listen to that when I'm working on your website on your branding. And I thought, Oh, okay. And then I thought about it for a minute.

[00:23:15] I would have never thought about that. And you can see the results. You can see the little ECDC, Gothic lettering thread coming through, which is absolutely me. He nailed it. But the one thing I, I, I noticed was trying to manage him the way that I've managed every other supplier in my career. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:24:00] [00:23:59] They're a gate Gates and checkpoints and all this stuff. That did not work at all now. Thankfully I sensed it and I felt it early enough to recognize it and pull back. But I go to imagine that there's a lot of creative people out there, even in, you know, an industry as conservative, as automotive that are just, I just paralyzed because they've got all this, all these requirements and check-ins and checklists around them.

[00:24:48] It's less true these days than it used to be when we were young, but your tastes in music is deeply personal. And you know, if you were born before the nineties, You know, [00:25:00] probably identity forming. In other words, if someone designs something for you, that centers around your music tastes, it's going to reflect a deeper you than you probably project in your normal day-to-day business life.

[00:25:40] And to pick up on the other thing about deadlines and monitoring, you can see a lot of that stuff as closed questions. Do you like chocolate? Yes. No. Right. When you have [00:26:00] closed questions, you either get confirmation or denial. That's it? When you say, what do you like about chocolate? Or why do you like chocolate?

[00:26:38] And basically you're kind of going, I'm not sure if I want you to listen to ACDC. Why? Instead of saying, but say, and. Yeah, but ACDC is really not corporate. So I'm in the automotive industry. People aren't going to go for this, you say, well, and I'm also into the cure and a bit of Susie and the Banshees and classical music [00:27:00] like, Oh, all of a sudden, he's got a lot more to work with.

[00:27:33] OESA and they said, put something out there that nobody knows about you. And I actually put a picture of Susie out there and I said, I was influenced by Susie and the Banshees. So I can't believe that you just picked up on that. Yay. Joining the dots. I got to touch her once. That's impressive. At reunion shows somewhere in the mid nineties, I had to fight off five goth chicks to get close enough to touch her head when she was singing.

[00:28:32] Once he's also being creative. Yes. He might not have spiky hair or phalanx boots, but he's definitely being creative, right? Because it doesn't just fit. It's not a cookie cutter process. He's got to interpret, he's got to extrapolate, he's got to join the dots from what he knows and what he knows you did last time.

[00:29:14] Well, not for you, therefore you created it essentially out of nothing. You had M and a element B and you went well, if a is true, and then B is true, but I need to get to D then I must go via C ah, there we go. There's the answer. That's new, it's new to you and you made it. And that's what human beings do on all sorts of levels and where it starts, where people get confused is they start confusing the skills that we drive through the creative capacity for the process.

[00:30:09] And just because the business entrepreneur doesn't look like a punk rocker, so many people don't call them. It's the label, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's a misconception. It's a fundamental misunderstanding. Um, but the thing is, is though you can't, like you were talking about your web designer, you can't control creativity, you can't measure it because it involves the conscious rational mind, as well as our subconscious unconscious mind, you know, our rational minds are able to access X amount of information.

[00:31:07] It's magic. An angel reached down from the cloud, touched me on the head and said, Dave, I have the answer for you because we're so unused to that notion that that is actually an alternative function of our brain, but it is, it's not divine intervention. It's not the muses it's smell. Even the drugs you're taking.

[00:31:53] That's why your dreams are so crazy psychedelic skitzo because your brain is bringing things [00:32:00] together that ordinarily wouldn't belong together. And that's how you come up with really super-duper innovative ideas is by getting them into your unconscious. And that's why you can't be on the clock. And that's what freaks management out.

[00:32:42] In other words, your brain can't be doing too much. It can't be thinking too much because every time you have thoughts, neurons, fire, and in order, just to think about what you're going to have for lunch, several tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of neurons fire, but the amount of neurons that fire, when you make a connection, when you have an [00:33:00] aha moment is in the thousands.

[00:33:27] You have to be slightly happy. In other words, no unhappy, not stressed, not angry, just content. And the last one, you mustn't try too hard. So when you're in the shower, you're definitely not trying too hard. Cause you've showered quite a few times before you know what to do. It requires no effort. Yeah, definitely slightly happy because it's warm and the negative ions have a positive recharging influence on your body.

[00:34:23] And so when you've quiet, everything down, your subconscious goes, Oh, by the way, here's that thing you asked for? So walking the dog, doing the ironing long distance, driving, exercising, anything you do so much that the actual action you're completing is automated requires no conscious focus. Your conscious mind kind of goes, Oh, I'm so bored.

[00:35:18] And when I look at that, I think. A creativity workshop. What the heck is that? I can't even imagine what it would be, you know, what, how it would work and what the output would be. And I'm not looking for, you know, an impact to the bottom line. I'm just, I just can't even get my mind around it. So educate me and others, please.

[00:35:58] What habits do you need to [00:36:00] acquire? What skills do you need? Um, w what conditions do you mean to need, and then giving people techniques in order to facilitate them, getting that the idea being is that everyone who walks out of that workshop is. Far better equipped to get into a creative mind state on a reliable, predictable basis in order to solve better solve problems, come up with better ideas and so on.

[00:36:54] Hmm. Okay. That's fascinating. Yeah. [00:37:00] So tell me about a client or a leader, perhaps in a business that you've seen, who you would say really understands creativity. I mean, you don't, I'm not asking you to name them, but just tell me that the kind of person they are and how they do it. Well, mostly creative leaders create a culture of innovation by walking the walk, no, by, by being open enough, to be creative themselves and by thereby holding a space for others to do it.

[00:37:54] And those are the people in the team. You know, that's not typical management [00:38:00] structures whatsoever, you know, I love it. Right. So it's focusing on outputs as opposed to measuring hours. Um, so leaders who were successfully able to do this, first of all, make sure that the environment that people step into is conducive that it's not a gray cubicle farm.

[00:38:35] And only after five o'clock, does anyone ever play football? Because the management is going, Oh, look at that another two hours wasted. Um, if there was a real culture of innovation there, that equipment would be utilized on an ongoing, regular interchangeable basis. So, you know, when you start talking about a culture of innovation and a leader, which is who is able to [00:39:00] nurture that, you're not talking about window dressing, you're talking about actual behaviors, you know, there's a great, and our damn, I can't remember who said this, but it's like, you want to know what your company culture is.

[00:39:39] Do you think it's possible for these conservative companies to change and get there? Yes, I do. I do. Um, it, it, it, what it requires is a change in mindset and, and, you know, uh, really Frank acknowledgement that actually the old ways of doing things just aren't. [00:40:00] Delivering what they're used to, you know, the people who are coming into the workforce just don't behave the way that people coming into the workforce 20 years ago.

[00:40:35] Um, and realize that if you do not do that, you are closely related to the captain of the Titanic because you know, up until then, that's how you sail through icebergs, you know, full speed.

[00:41:13] They tried to shut it down, but there's a fundamental rule of business. The moment a new piece of technology hits your industry. The old business model becomes obsolete and you need to find it the new one, the music industry didn't. And that's why we only have, I think it's now down to three major labels left, and that's why there is nowhere near as much money in the record industry as there was during the eighties, anytime between the sixties and the eighties and the music industry can whine and scream and, and blame piracy, everything they want.

[00:42:12] No one's going to want to car because there'll be self-driving things that you can inhale at the drop of a hat using your app on your phone. And what is the point of owning a car? You don't have to pay for parking. I have to pay for insurance. You'd have to pay for maintenance. You'd have to pay for fuel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:42:53] And I know in America right now, With reference to cause is possibly quite hard to [00:43:00] believe, but it's already happening in Europe and it will get there. And the question is one earth or Cami who's going to do when that happens. Yes. Well, we're seeing some of that already. We're seeing vehicles coming out.

[00:43:44] And then we try to put the technology in the vehicle. And it's very, very different because the culture and the mindset in California is very different to the culture and the mindset you're in Detroit. So it's, it's the merging together of these two worlds that we see [00:44:00] happening. It's unfolding in front of our eyes right now.

[00:44:23] There was a Tesla cab. I think it was right there. Yeah. Yeah. They're hugely subsidized by the Amsterdam. I'm going to spandexy and I liked your example there about these, these, um, sort of tech startups who are, you know, doing cars that are all about the tech, not so much about the car, um, because it also brings to mind another classic example in the music industry.

[00:45:17] And as a result, Apple was able to. Pole vault into the lead on the whole digital music front, and actually have more power than all the major labels combined because the record labels just kind of on purpose, remained ignorant and fought against this thing. And again, you know, that's, that's the risk that any industry faces, I mean, consider 3d printers pretty soon.

[00:46:04] What then for delivery services? What for shopping malls? What for sales reps, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I don't think anyone's going to carbon print a car anytime soon, but all it requires is an Apple to make an electronic vehicle. That catches the imagination of the current public in a way that a normal car doesn't and the whole industry is screwed.

[00:46:55] It is, it is a catalyst, I mean, for transformation because [00:47:00] people people's minds are more open now than ever before. To change because their whole lives of everything they've ever known has been torn apart. They couldn't even get toilet, paper and groceries. So, you know, they're working from home that in some cases that was never heard of in some companies now they're embracing it.

[00:47:48] Right. I mean, and it takes us straight back to Toyota, um, you know, lean. Okay, great. But the other great thing that came out of Toyota was Kaizen incremental change, you know, every day do [00:48:00] one thing slightly better and, you know, Yeah, incremental change. Doesn't lead to massive innovation, except if you do one little thing and your entire workforce is doing one little thing better every single day it does because innovation is a bit like evolution.

[00:48:50] You know, at least half of your workforce is your target market. So if you don't know what the audience wants, ask your workforce. [00:49:00] Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Do you believe that? I'm sorry. And start doing it, you know, start working on it now. Who cares? If it's all a complete disaster you're hemorrhaging money.

[00:49:38] It's about starting. It's always about starting because once you started things change and once you've started changing, things will continue to change and you'll be forced to play catch up. So the fundamental principle is to take the first step and then to keep showing up. And then the rest of the stuff kind of takes care of [00:50:00] itself, but you got to have someone keeping you honest, keeping on showing up and making sure that those steps actually taken.

[00:50:32] Um, and that once we're back in some form of a comfort zone, a lot of people will revert to type and, um, and go back into their shells because the people around them will revert to type and it'll become too dangerous to be creative and to express yourself, you know, socially, uh, dangerous rather than physically.

[00:51:19] You know, I think there is. And so massive change has never precipitated by the majority just requires a tipping point. So the optimist in me says maybe enough people have been turned on for us to be approaching a tipping point. I feel years ago, I discovered we work. I'm sure you're familiar with WeWork.

[00:52:01] You know, my energy was different and I loved it. And I remember that my boss at the time really had. Trouble understanding, you know, why, why I would want to leave the so-called comfort of the corporate office to go down to this environment where all these youngsters, where, and, and who knows, you know, what he thought was actually going on there.

[00:52:39] And, and then how am I going to run a business? So what do you say to the leaders that, that may have some of those concerns? Yeah. Well, they've often also fallen victim to one of the major myths about creativity. I'm. An extraordinarily creative human being. You know, I sculpted stone, I draw, I make music, I write poetry.

[00:53:25] There are all sorts of types of creative people. There's big picture detail. There's um, high detail people. There's people who are only really interested in the end goal. There's people who interested in the process. There's people interested in the tools is people interested people. So on that, first of all, there's no guarantee that just because you've activated your entire staff to not be creative, that the all going to turn into Jimmy Hendrix and start throwing TVs out of hotel windows and taking heroin.

[00:54:02] [00:54:00] yeah, I've said it a few times during the course of this conversation, creativity's about joining the dots. In other words, in order to be creative, you need to spend a fair amount of time obtaining dots. And that involves working, reading, studying, researching, and experimenting, you know, all credible business activities basically.

[00:55:05] And if you're interested in outcomes rather than just efficiency, isn't that what you want? So I think unfortunately, and this is a common reaction that people are like, well, you know, I don't want a massive unmanageable people on my hands. It's a massive generalization informed by a huge ignorance about what creativity actually is and, and, you know, rooted in a stereotype about creatives that is actually about artists.

[00:55:57] He's all over the place and all sorts of [00:56:00] interesting things, but he's brutally effective. I mean, you know, not withstanding whatever shortcomings might be packaged into that on other areas, but you know what it is, it's a polarization, it's a classic empty creative response. It's basically saying this is the rule of order.

[00:56:48] And it extends in so many directions and creativity is a big victim of that kind of black and white polarized thinking. Yeah. That's beautifully said beautifully said [00:57:00] yes. Wow. You've you've really pushed me in my thinking. Today you, you really have you've stretched me and made me think deeper. And that's the reason I wanted you on the podcast, because this is your field.

[00:57:41] So would you tell us a little bit more about how you start your day? I like to get up really early. Um, I'm at a terribly early bed, uh, whether that's nature or nurture. I'm not sure. My father was an early bird, but I found if I'm on my computer at 5:00 AM, by the time 9:00 AM [00:58:00] rolls around, I've done four hours work.

[00:58:25] Um, and I find if I do not get a running start to my morning, I've just gotten so used to having a running start to my morning that if I don't get one, the rest of my day in big danger of falling apart. Yeah. Well, I, I agree wholeheartedly. And how you start your day is everything. Either you set it up for success, so you set it up for failure.

[00:59:04] Because otherwise, you know, you, you, you, you never get to it. You get distracted. So we focus on getting that done right away, and then you've got the rest of the day. Yeah to do, you know, maybe other things, if you want to spend time on social media, that's okay. If you want to walk the dog or whatever you want to do, you know, you can do it right.

[00:59:48] You know, because first of all, just spending the rest of the day, beating yourself up about not having gotten up early enough to do X, Y, and Z is just counterproductive. But more importantly, because I [01:00:00] know that tomorrow. I'm going to get up at the same time and I'm going to go at it again because I've been doing it my entire adult life, and I know it's going to happen.

[01:00:31] Uh, so we can get that dopamine hit that we love so much instead of going to the big things first and that's, and then you, if you don't finish everything on your list, then you feel bad and it's like, why do you chase these lists? I seriously don't have a to-do list. I don't have a task list. I have it. I mean, a lot of it's in my head, which is typical entrepreneur.

[01:01:10] And it just, yeah. So here's a tip prime, um, spend a couple of days a weeks observing yourself, not do during a normal day and take particular note of the times of day when you are doing whatever you're doing almost effortlessly. Now the work is just flowing. You're solving the problems. You're, whatever it is that you're busy with, it just happens with what appears to be the minimal effort.

[01:01:55] I do all of that stuff in the afternoon because I don't need to be my [01:02:00] 100% golden optimal self to do that stuff. But when I'm creating content and I'm writing a new book, I'm generating a training program, I need to be as sharp as I possibly can. And so I reserve that time for that act. Yeah, I do much the same.

[01:02:35] Remember I gotta have my tea, so I have a cup of tea and then I'm, I'm in, I'm on, you know, I feel good and I'm ready to, to get into something really meaty. And then meetings then in the rest of the afternoon is whatever, whatever happens, happens in the afternoon. Okay. Um, so I have a question for you. What advice would you give to your [01:03:00] 25 year old self in today's environment?

[01:03:29] If I just paid 20 minutes, Monday to Friday every week from then till now I'd be wiping the floor with Jimmy Hendrix. But because I didn't, I could still barely string four chords together and I have to practice for weeks to be able to play a song without making mistakes and that I regret. But more importantly, I regret not in, not re rooting that discipline and that notion deeper in my life.

[01:04:17] Um, look, I I'm, I've embarked into a field that is littered with neuroscientists and professors of psychology and top end, highly experienced business consultants. And what have you all talking about creativity and innovation, and I'm just this, this, this punk rock poet. Who's combining my hands on experience of working with creativity and creative people for the last 30 years with their written works.

[01:05:07] That would be cool. Yes. Yes. Well, you're very, you know, you're very authentic. You are who you are, right. You're obviously very comfortable in your own skin. You, you know, your, your subject matter, edit depth and breadth that I have never seen. And I can't wait to see how your business evolves and, and how this, you know, creating this weapon of mass creation, how that evolves over time.

[01:06:32] Thank you for listening to the automotive leaders podcast. Click the Listen link in the show notes to subscribe for free on your platform of choice. And don't forget to download the 21 traits of authentic leadership PDF by clicking on the link below. And remember, stay true to yourself, be you and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.