RealClear Defense Interview: Leading with a Creator Mindset

Americans are living through an era of unprecedented prosperity. And yet, something has been lost amidst the comfort and fulfillment of modern life. We once used emotions like fear and anger to survive, to solve our most fundamental problems. Today, we “ride roller coasters to trigger those same physiological impulses but toward unproductive ends,” leadership expert Nir Bashan told me from his home in Florida. Bashan believes that by trading in visceral experience for simulation, we lose some of the raw energy (and urgency) that fuels innovation. “We need to get back to an environment where we can feel these impulses of our DNA in a way that is constructive.” Though we’ve evolved to become safer and more satisfied in our lives, we’ve also become less daring in how we think less creatively solve problems.

And that’s the premise of his book, The Creator Mindset (McGraw-Hill, 2020), which suggests that mankind is most dynamic when we channel our primordial, “creative” brains toward solving important problems. Creativity shouldn’t be a “nice to have” leadership trait, Bashan argues. It’s the key to success in every workplace, endeavor or industry. “If we can refocus adrenaline and dopamine on things that matter for the world – cleaning up air pollution, defending the country against pandemics or emerging national security threats, curing horrible diseases – then we can get to solutions once thought impossible.”   

I spoke with Bashan about how this concept can apply to leadership in government and the military. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. 

Distinguish creativity as an end in itself and the “leadership creativity” you explore in the book. What is the difference?

For me, art is really a tiny subset of creativity, and yet it is where we are introduced to creativity. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Creativity is problem-solving in a way that has never been done before, and that’s where creative leadership differentiates. We’re experiencing runaway success for companies that are creative. Just take a look at Virgin Galactic or Elon Musk and Tesla. These companies are wildly successful while a bunch of secondary companies are standing on the sidelines asking, why not us? Their answers are always analytical – it’s our hiring, it’s our policy, and so on, but you have to embed creativity in everything you do. Virgin Galactic and Tesla understand that ideas will come from everywhere if you reward creativity from sales, business, and legal, all these different areas. If you fail to reward this behavior, then everything comes down to rankings and hierarchy and processes. You prioritize routinized thinking over the spark of creative thinking, which can be hard to recognize let alone cultivate. Now, there is a certain glory in the details of military life, for instance. The discipline of making your bed a certain way, marching a certain way, dressing a certain way. Adherence to rules is important and should not be replaced, but creativity is another technique you can use when a novel problem presents itself. What we need to encourage more in the military and in government is having a bunch of different contingencies and building in the flexibility to adjust as unexpected problems arise.

Name a few differences between the leader with a creator mindset and the leader without this mindset.

The leader without the Creator Mindset is analytical above all else. He or she looks at the numbers, data, statistics – everything that can be reduced to information. Inevitably, you get more efficient and you squeeze out more value, but if you’re not continuing to innovate, then you end up squeezing diminishing amounts of value out of the system. The person without a Creator Mindset is not looking into the rearview mirror, and she is not thinking historically above all else, though she uses history. She asks questions and does not look at analytics alone. More than anything, she asks: why are we doing this? 

Col. Tom Gordon said to encourage creativity among your staff, leaders should ask a big question and be quiet. This gives subordinates a chance to put their ideas on the table before the leader declares a preference. Do you agree with that technique?

Yes, I agree with that. When we ask the questions, we empower our staff to come up with new pathways to innovation and that invites a culture of creativity. You look into the rearview only for context around the new idea or vision. I love methodologies that say, “stop for a second and ask questions.” This isn’t about art or dance or aligning our chakras. This is about expanding a thought into an incredible advantage to the organization.

I often heard “never lead by email” and “death by Power Point” in the military. Technology gives comfort but can invite complacency and laziness. Is that true?

Yes. Doing what is not easy is critical to leading with a Creator Mindset. In America, we elevate the idea above all other things because we know we can do the work to make it reality. However, as soon as we over-analyze the problem or the idea, and decide that the work is too complicated or too hard, then we will lose our way.

We’ve gotten lazy as a society of leaders, in terms of what we offload to technology. We need to take a look at a lot of the things we offload. Technology is a tool that needs to be used for very specific things, like communicating a quick message on email, but it should never substitute for the complex, difficult-to-ascertain work of resolving a dilemma. Creativity is based on personal connections and relationships, and we’ve traded them for what we think is easier. It’s a shame. Technology will promise that it can do anything and everything, and it’s a myth we bought into. Sometimes getting together is better than the impersonal, sterile, computerized complacency we’ve fallen into, and so we have to go back to the foundation: person-to-person. Just because we’re not “reinventing the wheel” or taking the hard way, doesn’t mean that someone else is not doing the hard work in our place. America is still the place people want to come to, and we want those thinkers and doers and tinkerers to come here. There is no shortcut to becoming more creative. The results can be astonishing when we elevate a good idea and put in the work. 

There is something fearful about leading too much through analytics. Perhaps information becomes a crutch, a buffer against risk. 

Certainly. The current marketplace rewards people who are conservative in their outreach and innovation. Fifty or 60 years ago the training was more general, I think, than the academic training for business leaders today. Our current business school logic, MBA-program mindset says, “stick to one thing and do it extremely well.” I did a workshop with a top company recently and they were very, very bright people, but in a very specific, niche way. These business leaders thought of their product in terms of volume and not in terms of meaning. Many people sold this product, I told them, and they disagreed. They told me about the history of their product, their founder, and they started to get excited about the brand. I like to believe they began to conceptualize their product as an experience, and so they came up with a broader set of products to offer, spun-off from the original product. 

Remember that it's easy to grade and judge on data and findings. This type of "quantitative" thinking is easy for us to understand and communicate, but it doesn't capture the quality. We grade on quantity and volume but overlook quality or brilliance. Pay attention to the quality of what you quantify.  

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” People in government and the military know this saying and the mindset it describes. Why is it wrong?

There are thousands of books written to debunk that myth. There are so many case studies of products, companies, and countries that are gone because they thought like that. Pan-Am, Toys R Us, and Blockbuster video have all gone the way of the dinosaur because of this thinking. The world changes too fast and it comes for everyone and everything. And so, we must constantly ask “why” and “how do we get better.” We must be in a constant state of tinkering and exploring.

Tinkering is about a bunch of different methods. If you have an idea, try to apply the idea and see if it works or fails. If it fails, then take it back and revise and renew the idea with the lessons learned. Now, don’t launch every bad idea you have, but there’s a difference between testing an idea to death and knowing when to bring it into the public domain. You have to be willing to tinker and fail in order to make improvements, and never take the failure personally. Tinkering is openness and an important part of creative leadership.

-John Waters is a writer in Nebraska