Creativity and our digital selves

I am grateful to have the opportunity to continue exchanging ideas with IMT Business School staff and students. 

This time, masters students from there visited Royal Holloway and I could give them a bit of a tour guide as well as continue encouraging to pursue their creativity.  I would like to thank my collaborators Maria Alejandra, Diego Martinez-Castro and Xiaouyu Zhang (Kevin), with whom we ran a very engaging workshop for these students.

It was challenging to pitch a session for an audience who combines studying and working on a weekly basis.  Creativity offers though the possibility of reflecting how work offers opportunities for self -realization, and how challenges and skills need to be carefully managed by ourselves and our bosses at work to keep creativity alive and flourishing. 

To achieve this requires courage, as our systemic thinker Russ Ackoff always said. Courage to ask for what we need, and to place ourselves in appropriate and supportive working environments.  Courage to acknowledge our skills and limitations, and seek challenges appropriate to our current situation and values. And courage to keep trying, to stand up for what we believe, and follow our own path even if that is not what our loved ones want for us.   

After we touched on the individual and work dimensions of creativity, we ventured in proposing to our students a number of challenges related to what we called 'our digital selves'.  Increasingly, we as individuals are nudged to present and manage our online identities and other footprints of our lives, often to our dislike.  Under the idea that this could help us improve our opportunities in life, we are now part of many online outlets.  

Diverging in formulating several possibilities before deciding

I then proposed to students to form groups and address one of three challenges: a) supporting university students having mental health problems (a worrying trend in the UK), b) protecting households data from unwanted use by utility service providers (related to Kevin's research), and c) helping marginalised communities preserve their memories through digital (potentially related to Diego's research).  They were to draw a storyboard explaining their solution. 

For a variety of reasons, students chose to address the first of the above challenge.  It might have been that they felt a degree of connection to it, or that they considered the other two 'too technical'.  In their choice there was discussion.   We then asked students to elaborate a storyboard of a digital solution which they thought could help them address the challenge.  And I encouraged them to think not only in an app as an innovation. 

A combined app and device

Students came up with very sensitive and thoughtful proposals.   As seen in this picture on the left, someone with a mental health condition could be supported by a digital innovation (app and device called buddy) that records her moods and provides options for sharing / not sharing this information with relevant others, also depending on circumstances. It was also interesting to see that the device might not be a mobile phone.  

IMT students presenting their work

Through the presentations and short discussion afterwards, I noticed that these students were very open in considering either/or possibilities.  With this exercise, many of them valued the  opportunity to reflect on their own careers, as well as finding bit more about what the world of work or research has to offer in the near future.   A key insight that could be drawn for me is that we could use our creativity to better shape the ways in which we want to see our selves in the digital world and work with others in doing so.

It seems that with the right learning environment and activities, we can encourage our students to be thoughtful and creative.   Thank you for visiting us and for venturing to explore your own creativity!

Student Elise Deffain from IMT

My Creativity Book Tour - Second Stop: Paris, France

Sahid and Imed from IMT, Myself and Ines from Royal Holloway

It was a pleasure to accept the invitation from the Information Systems Department of IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom) Business School to visit them in Paris, and use it to present my book on Managing Creativity.  I was also fortunate to take one of my undergraduate Royal Holloway management students, Ines Boussofara,  to be part of the conversations and activities during this visit. 

IMT staff were very kind, making sure I was looked after at all times. That also included helping us move hotels when reservations for our second night there were missing!.

At my book presentation, it was great to see how my colleague educators and researchers wanted to make something workable and usable of the book ideas. Something to guide information systems researchers or company managers. Perhaps something that could be publishable in a journal article.

Staff members from IMT Business School, Ines and Myself

My answer to this was that the book is an attempt ( a risky one considering pressures to publish journal articles) to bridge gaps between disciplines (creativity, systems thinking).  I added that my proposal to use the systems idea as an inquiring device to help me make sense of my own creativity (which then became two creativities) could be of some use.  I had to say though, and referring to my own research, that in the field or discipline of information systems we have become good at using some ideas as 'front ends' of systems implementation or adoption processes.  In this regard, I wished we could talk to students and to other researchers less about success and more about failure and anti-innovation.  

At IMT creativity means innovation, making ideas happen, making them commercially successful. Students are continuously challenged to work with others from different disciplines, to learn how to do things on the go, to present ideas, to elaborate business plans. This is a valuable form of creativity, one which in management education has taken center stage. It might be useful to see it as a form that could be further enhanced by linking it to creators' inner motivations, a form that if it fails, should not take down creators with them. 

IMT Incubator Hall of Fame

Me talking during the seminar (I was just getting started!) 

During the presentation, it was rightly pointed out by the audience that the ideas of the book, in a way which I did not fully intend, could help us reflect on creativity, its manifestations, how it unfolds in contexts like universities, and how it could become a mere instrument of economic power if we do not pause and reflect.


Another question related to this latter aspect of creativity was about how we could enthuse our management students to think of big ethical questions. This is not only relevant for students in information systems but in all other areas of management. Perhaps by consciously developing our creativity, we could then use systems ideas as tools to help us talk about ethical values and do something about them.


To make this happen, it might be that we need to acknowledge that we as educators and our students pursue limited forms of creativity, those which help us secure employment or give us economic and social benefits in the short term. It was good to know that at IMT they also value mindfulness as an alternative to living our lives in pilot modes.  This commonality, together with possibilities to entice students to think of using their ideas to deal with pressing issues in our societies (i.e. recycling), could help us positively shape the role of education in helping us all to save our planet. 

Ines and myself at the IMT business/technology incubator. Be mindful of the alien!  

Ines made great contributions at the seminar by giving her own examples of how the use of some creativity tools (i.e. de Bono's six hats) and working on 'real' problems (i.e. student ideas for recycling at residences) have enabled her to identify and appreciate different perspectives, and think of new ways of using information technologies to deal with emerging problems.  During our visit, she taught me a lot about her use of social media and mobile technologies.  I could see that she belongs to a new generation of people who make technology part of their daily lives, as perhaps I did many years ago! Maybe it is time for me to learn new things.

I was left curious by other questions related to how some social structures or institutions shape our creativity.  My book has a framework to help make sense of some of these when it comes to collaborate between academics and social organisations.  This idea that the use of systems thinking might not show these structures or institutions keeps popping up when I talk with other academics.  I would still like to think that we have some degree of freedom when deciding to include or marginalize these structures in our creativity efforts.  

Thank you IMT for having me, hope to be there again soon! 

My Creativity Book Tour - First Stop: Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

So off I went with my newly published book on Managing Creativity to show it to dear colleagues and students. First stop in 2019 has been at Universitat Rovira I Virgili (URV), in Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.

Near Tarragona with Teresa

My colleague Teresa Torres kindly hosted me, and the presentation of the book was intertwined with a fantastic experiential learning situation where we got to practice some ideas on creativity with curios and engaged students.

At the seminar, I got a warm feeling that I was among people who want to be creative and like myself, find several institutional challenges and constraints to make it happen. Paradoxically, creativity is being institutionalised as a way of bringing more students to our universities, something that we did not see it coming but that we now need to manage and do so creatively!

Our students in Tarragona value experiential learning. They like to see how to use ideas in practice, they would like to have hands on experience, perhaps by working in projects. This idea of project or problem-based learning seems to be a common trend in other countries including the UK and France. URV has great connections with local industry, which gives students unique possibilities to learn in a job whilst studying.

We as academics still think that alongside, we need to infuse a critical spirit in our educational activities, so that people have a chance to become aware and act to save our planet. This call inevitably links to our own local contexts, where we also need to sensitise our management students to what goes on, what is in front of us and we cannot just dismiss.  If we think of creativity as inquiring system as I propose in my book, reflecting on our values could help us connect them with the activities we do, both as educators and as human beings in general.

Students and staff at URV

In Tarragona, creativity as a combination of experiential learning and critique is developed by enabling students with learning difficulties have the opportunity of attending university and gaining skills if not a community of friends to help them gain or regain employment. To me this is a worthy goal towards which creativity could be directed.

 The hope is that my book’s ideas inspire students and educators to think of their values and linking those with their activities, be them in education or elsewhere. We also need to rescue our curiosity, that which we held dearly as children, and which could also help us deal with the complex challenges that we face.

Digital Innovation Laboratories for Management Education

As an management educator, and despite my ego telling me to be at the forefront of the action, I have come to accept that I am too old or too wise to be part of the group that makes decisions when it comes to innovate in management education. However the corridor chat, a coffee with a a dear friend and the apparently innocuous email gave me some insights about what is going on.

There is to be a new digital innovation laboratory at work.

Yes.

Yes, an attempt to catch up with what goes on in industry, a test bed for ideas to be incorporated in the classroom. Something that has happened, is to happen.

Yes, bit more of the same, a mechanism of isomorphic behavior so that we are seen as doing what others are doing.

No, I am not trying to be cynical, just to be me, which means I am supporting it. However, in the past, I have seen new labs being set up, some of their metamorphoses to make them more appealing, some intended and unexpected uses of it, some people taking charge when it matters, others being taken charge of when it does not, and finally, some noise being turned off.

So this is my take on it:

Inevitable, necessary, something that needs to be done, something to live with, something that some people have decided, and some others will have to justify so as to face corporate face. Something that in a few months hopes not to be forgotten.

There is still, some room for action.

If I was to be included in this, which I have some hope for, this is what I would do to rediscover creativity using this lab:

• Instill some playfulness. So that we have some fun exercises and gradually find our way into it.
• Instill curiosity, so that those teaching and learning find ourselves as not knowing everything, in a good environment of trying and failing. 
• Instill some safe failure, so that we try to break the lab by rearranging it, by inviting unexpected guests (my children, your children, my inner child, yours maybe?), by switching it on and off.

Let the fun begin!