Short audio preview

The Comedy Store has a uniquely unsettling atmosphere. Wherever you sit, you feel close to the stage - vulnerable to audience participation. The ceiling is low, the acoustics are perfect, the spotlights are merciless. You can almost sense the ridicule this place has dispensed over the years. Yet when Sir Ken Robinson came here to address the London Business Forum, he seemed to feel perfectly at home, and he quickly made the audience feel the same way.

Robinson speaks in a soft voice (with a Liverpudlian lilt), as if he were talking to each audience-member personally, over the dinner table. But he's meticulous too. Each sentence is highly concentrated, and each point includes all sorts of pleasant diversions. Most importantly, he's very, very funny.

He spent the first five minutes of this event describing a recent trip to Las Vegas, during which he and and his wife visited the "Elvis Chapel" to renew their wedding vows. "We had the the 'Blue Hawaii' package," he said, explaining that this included "the Elvis impersonator (Adrian), four songs of your choice, a hula-girl," and a puff of dry ice as you walked in. "For another $100, we could have had a pink cadillac, but we thought that was a bit tacky."

Robinson peppered his speech with such anecdotes. But he had a serious argument to make too: that the world is facing a crisis of human resources, as well as one of natural resources. "I believe that fundamentally we have both underestimated and continue to misuse - if not actually abuse - many of our most important talents," he said, "our talents, our children's talents, and the talents of the people who work with us. And unless we fix [this crisis], I feel we're not going to make much progress fixing the other one."

Both crises, he suggested, are the result of our "industrial mindset," which is incompatible with modern society, as well as modern business. And both manifest themselves in terms of imbalances. In the natural world our chief problem is the imbalance of gases in our atmosphere, though human activity is disrupting many other ecosystems. Meanwhile, in society, we have "legions of people dislocated from their own talents, legions of people suffering from all kinds of anxiety, legions of people in dysfunctional communities. And the enormous cost of mopping this stuff up."

California, where Robinson now lives, provides a classic case study of this phenomenon, he said. "California spends $3.5bn a year on the state university system; it spends $9.9bn on the state prison system," he pointed out, and you'd see similar figures in other Western countries, as well as other American states. Similarly, the UK "spends millions of pounds a year on remedial education, to try to get kids through this system which many of them are bucking against. [And] we spend millions of pounds a year on career counselling, because people have not found their way."

What all this means for educators, employers and HR professionals is that it is vital to have an understanding of "the ecology of human resources."

As a society, we need to improve our understanding of human capabilities, Robinson argued. We believe mistakenly, for example, that creativity and intelligence vary in inverse proportion to one another. Indeed, this point was proven by a quick straw-poll of the audience, who were asked to rate themselves for each attribute on a scale of one to ten - the vast majority gave unequal scores. "These things that we take for granted as being true are the problem," Robinson exclaimed. "The enemy of making the best of ourselves is common sense."

Thankfully, he said, creativity is not dead but merely latent, in most adults. In support of this view, he cited a book called Break Point And Beyond, by George Land and Beth Jarman. The book included the results of many tests for "divergent thinking," which Robinson described as a "fundamental capacity you need to plot alternative courses and think alternative thoughts... to see lots of possible connections between different ideas, to see patterns, to see analogies, to think in metaphors, to see multiple answers to a question rather than just one."

For example, Land and Jarman sampled 1,500 children aged 3-5, and found that 98% ranked as "geniuses" in divergent thinking. But when they repeated the test for older age groups, they recorded very different results. Robinson called up a Powerpoint slide onto the screen behind him entitled "The Decline of Genius."

The clear implication was that children become less creative as they grow older. And what coincides with this period of development, aside from hormonal changes and socialisation, is that they enter formal education. "They have learnt that there is one answer [to every question]," Robinson said, "and they have learnt: 'Don't look, because that's cheating!' and 'Don't copy from anybody else, because that's cheating too!' Even though outside schools we call this collaboration."

Moreover, such habits of mind persist beyond school and college. In Land and Jarman's control test of two-thousand adults (aged 25+), only 2% ranked as geniuses. "These are the people you're hiring," Robinson stressed. "We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, because of the ways in which we become institutionalised and socialised. Education is a big piece [of this], but work is an even bigger piece."

Creativity is obviously associated, in the workplace, with innovation. However, Robinson suggested it has an equally important role to play in helping society cope with, and harness, technological advances. "It doesn't matter what you do or where you do it, technology is going to swamp you," he said. "New information systems are going to subvert all the things we take for granted."

People can be divided, where technology is concerned, into two categories, he said: "digital natives," and "digital immigrants." These terms, coined by US education commentator Mark Prensky, refer respectively to the under-25s and everyone else. "We [the over-25s] think we're OK, but we're not great, truthfully," Robinson said. "We may have Blackberries and think we're groovy, [but] we have learnt digital technology like a second language, so we kind of speak phrasebook digital compared with our kids."

IT systems are becoming more and more pervasive, he continued, but they're not "fundamentally avoiding the powerful need for better and better use of human resources. To the contrary. Human resource is the only way we'll be able to engage with these things properly. And at the moment we tend to be locked into an industrial mindset about our own capabilities."

So how can business people help to nurture creativity and imagination? The first step, Robinson said, is to stop thinking of organisations as mechanisms. "We tend to evaluate people on whether they do a specific thing well, like we might do if we're dismantling a machine," and looking at its individual components, he pointed out. "The thing is that most organisations... are more like organisms than they are like mechanisms."

Instead of using a metaphor from industry, we should be using one from agriculture, he argued. "If you're a farmer, you don't make a plant grow. You can't. You don't stick the petals on and paint the thing and attach the leaves. A plant grows itself. What you do, if you're any good, is provide the conditions for growth... And a great plant doesn't just grow from the top, [it] grows everywhere simultaneously, as do healthy organisations, which have a reciprocating relationship among the parts."

The leading practitioners of this type of thinking, Robinson said, are those organisations that know how to compose teams specifically for the purpose of creative thinking. "There's a huge difference between a creative team and committee," he said. "Great creative teams require real expertise among managers and leaders to work... It's a skill-set that we need to be teaching managers and leaders."

Great teams also "model the human mind," he suggested. "All the great teams I know, large or small, are deliberately diverse - that is, they have people from different backgrounds, experiences, ages, responsibilities in the organisation." Moreover, he said, the processes employed by these teams ensure that their diversity is "not an impediment but a resource." The best senior managers, he continued, are those who are unafraid to let teams congregate for specific tasks and then disband, to form other teams as necessary. This is, he said, "one of the [best] ways to spread cultural information around the organisation."

Lastly, you have to create the right habitat, in terms of both culture as well as environment. "Anyone who's serious about making more of people is serious about the environment they work in," Robinson concluded, pointing out that he didn't just mean the colour of the walls. Innovative organisations have "a rigorous approach to questioning algorithms of behaviour, and changing the environment as need be."