S2E19 The Creativity and Curiosity Edition with James Taylor

James Nathan 0:55 Hello and welcome to The Only One Business Show with me your host James Nathan and a fabulous guest for you again today, this gentleman is an award winning speaker and internationally recognized leader in creativity and innovation. For over 20 years he’s been teaching entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders, writers, as well as rock stars, how to be innovative organizations, and design the creative life they desire. As the founder of C School, and host of the Creative Life Podcast and TV show, he’s taught thousands of individuals in over 120 countries through his online courses, books, videos, and keynote speeches. After advising some of the most creative individuals and companies ranging from Grammy Award winning music artists, and best selling authors to Silicon Valley startups and innovative multinationals, he designed a framework for creativity that helps individuals and organizations achieve exponential growth. His clients have included Apple, Yamaha, Sony, Bertelsmann, Johnson and Johnson as well as high profile one on one coaching clients. As an in demand creativity expert he’s been featured in countless media outlets, and was the subject of a 30 minute BBC documentary about his life and his work. Please welcome James Taylor. James, how are you?

 

James Taylor 2:16 Wonderful, lovely to speak with you today into the talk with your listeners, and looking forward to getting into this.

 

James Nathan 2:23 Well, look, you know, you’ve had a fascinating background, why don’t you give us a little bit of a history of James Taylor.

 

James Taylor 2:30  Sure. So I initially started I come to the music industry. My, my father was a professional jazz musician. My grandfather was a professional musician. And so when I first left school, I actually became a professional musician. I was a jazz drummer. And then I kind of realized that actually, as much as I love music, and I love business, probably even more. So as I was kind of doing this, I actually started managing the careers of artists along side playing. And then from there, I started my A number of Grammy Award winning artist which took to me early about Tommy Emmanuel, great Australian artist, started working with members of the Rolling Stones, managed a band called Deacon Blue, that sold over 6 million albums, lots of different artists around the world. And that was all going great. I was you know, enjoying just being, I guess it can svengali type person in the music industry. And then I get call one day to be asked to move to Silicon Valley in about 2010. And that was to help launch a series of online academies, online schools are now online education was really just starting to take off. And so that I was basically moved over to the Bay Area, and got involved in the whole world of online and online learning and technology. And then that got me really interested in things like artificial intelligence, machine learning. And because of those things, that kind of started coming together, as you know, so many speakers we hear is really, they’ve had these different journeys in their lives. And then there’s a couple of threads kind of start to come together and for me, it was this mixture of creativity, human creativity and human potential. And things like artificial intelligence and how it was possible now to augment human creativity with things like AI and machine learning and robotics. So that’s kind of where I am now. So today, I give, you know, 50 to 80 keynotes around the world, I think this year, done 26 countries, I think so far this year. And so, yeah, so I have a phenomenal job, I just get to go and travel around the world speaking to lots of big companies and medium sized companies, associations, governments, all about what the future looks like in this world of artificial intelligence.

 

James Nathan 4:38 You know, it’s an area which I’m sure we’ll get into in quite some detail when you talk about creativity. And then you talk about AI. You know, some people throw their hands up in horror that you know, creativity is a human thing, Ai’s a machine thing. But I guess not AI as we know it now, but there’s been interference in human creativity for a very long time by using computers and, other stuff, hasn’t there?

 

James Taylor 5:05 Yeah, I mean, it’s, I mean, it’s interesting that we’ve been going through a spell more recently, since about 2010. Actually 2011, probably around that period, where you actually started to see creativity levels around the world start to decline. So IQ levels around the world have been increasing for many years, but creativity level started to decline. And that was a function really, of education systems in a lot of countries teaching very much to have tests. And the thing that made in a lot of countries very, very creative and the citizens very very creative, that kind of got changed a little bit at the start of the century. And now actually, what they’re discovering is, you know, you don’t have to take it from me go to people like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, richest man, his company’s one of the pioneers in artificial intelligence, and he said don’t bother trying to compete with machines on things you could do better, faster and cheaper. You need to focus on that one advantage that you have as a human, which is your creativity, your curiosity, your ability to innovate. So actually it is now coming full circle. And so I get into some of the big companies who will bring me in because they’re doing amazing things and things with artificial intelligence. But then they really asked themselves, well, what is the role of the people in our organization? What skills do they have? What do they need to have in order to survive and thrive in this new age? And that’s the kind of the point that we’re at just now. I don’t see….. I mean, I’m generally pretty optimistic about things like AI. I think it’s obviously a lot of jobs will disappear over the next few years, but there will be a lot of new roles created. And I’m really interested in that symbiosis of how humans plus machines are working together.

 

James Nathan 6:45 It’s interesting, you mentioned creativity declining, is that still on the decline? Or is that being rectified?

 

James Taylor 6:51 It’s changing in different places, actually, it was encouraging to see in India, they had an education system that was churning out lots of engineers, lots of MBAs, but they weren’t necessarily churning out MBAs that were creating massive businesses, that were transforming things. And so the interesting thing, about five years ago, they actually started making a change. And they realized we need to create a more holistic education system. When the focus is not just on teaching what we call STEM, you know, science, technology, engineering, math, but STEAM4, so science, technology, engineering, art and math. And so it was it was making things and what for, so actually, I think there’s a lot of good things are going on there, that the Nordic countries always been very good. Singapore’s is very good. America, really, under the first Bush administration, they had a policy called No Child Left Behind. And that’s really when you start to see the decline and levels of creativity. And so a lot of companies have had to do is they’ve really had to almost be backfilling and I speak to a lot of CEOs and senior HR people, and they say you know, we bring in these freshly minted MBAs, or accountants or lawyers and they have a certain set of skills, you know, book knowledge. But we now need people to come up with the ideas that grow and grow business and think more laterally and more creatively. And that’s the bit that companies and are really investing in.

 

James Nathan 8:21 I think it’s fascinating and also fantastic that businesses are starting to be sensible about this. I remember, you know, going into life, my first career as a chartered accountant and, you know, there was very much a mentality of, you’re at work and there was a lot of presenteeism, you know, jacket on the back of the chair to prove you there early and all that sort of crap. But people stayed at their desk, they ate at their desk, they left there that, you know, went home, came back sat at their desks, and there’s been that big shift in work environments, I guess, as well, where people are actually discouraged from sitting about, they’re encouraged to move around, you know, you go into a into the big, you know, you mentioned some of the big the high techs and stuff and you know, with play rooms and stuff like that. And but I go into loads of businesses James where they’ve got pool tables and bean bags and PlayStations and no one dares go near the damn thing. They’re almost, you know, they collect dust.

 

James Taylor 9:19 Yeah, you come from the world of accounting and one of my clients is EY, formerly Ernst and Young and they’ve been doing a very interesting thing. I was speaking for the global partners and leaders the other day in Barcelona, and they have a new thing called wave space now, which is, they have one, Madrid Antwerp, I think London now has one they’ve got them all around the world. And what what is doing is it’s creating spaces where they can bring clients into, to display information in a much more interesting way. And to simply brainstorm and discuss ideas on ways to how to grow their business, how to become more tax efficient, or wherever this thing may be. So actually, you know, the accounting world is is a really interesting one for this. Because, you know, if you look at the role of the bookkeeper, for example, that has a 98% chance of disappearing over the next few years because automation because we have things like zero now and you don’t need bookkeepers in the same way. And so a lot of accountants, accounting firms thinking, Well, what is our role? And what I think you’re starting to see now is the accountant, as always had a role, certainly with the small business, now entrepreneur, of being a trusted advisor. And you’re actually seeing and I think this is a very interesting thing, where you’re seeing a lot of the big accounting firms saying, we will actually be your trusted advisor on your digital transformation. And so these companies, if you look at a lot of the revenues of the growth is coming from it’s in the advisory services is the consulting services are not necessarily in the traditional audit. And so that’s a perfect example where I’m working with a lot of big accounting firms and accounting networks, where they are now to completely rescale, retool and really think about what what is our role now as accountants, it’s not just to do the annual accounts type thing anymore. They have to think much more creatively, much more innovatively about how we can grow your business.

 

James Nathan 11:12 You know, it’s a really interesting thing, because the stereotype of an accountant certainly isn’t what you’ve described. And I left…. and being a chartered accountant, I still pay my subs, even though I left the profession in 1997. James, but, you know, it’s an industry where, which is misunderstood in many ways. I think it’s the same for most professional services businesses. But that business advisor thing, when I was training, you know, we were accountants and business advisors. There was very little business advice that went on. And it’s interesting to me that still that’s the case in lots of businesses. They sell themselves in that way, but they don’t provide that extra level of service that actually makes the big difference to people. When you talk about creativity in businesses though, what difference does it make?

 

James Taylor 12:02 Well, you can use it in different ways. Creativity is just a tool. You know, creative thinking is a tool. And I go in and I work with senior leaders, which is often more about the culture, developing more creative culture in the organization and breaking down barriers, breaking down silos, especially across global offices of a company. So for example, the other day, I was working with one of the top 10 legal firms in the world. And this was all their intellectual property, senior partners, managing partners. And then this, there’s like, for example, as amazing things going on in the Tokyo office, but they’re not telling people in the New York office about this. And they’re not sharing what’s kind of going on. And so what we do in groups like that is it’s really about helping them do more creative collaboration, how they can work across and cross teams cross culturally as well. And with more middle management or employee levels, it’s just about teaching it a simple set of tools that anyone can use becomes a common language and the organization for better generating, developing and executing on new ideas. Now those new ideas could be it could be to launch new product or service to grow, you know, to grow revenues. But you can also use these tools to do things like reduce costs. You know, there’s there’s a lot you know about cost-avation, where, you know, often innovations always been focused on in the past about generating revenues. And I did a booking for a company the other day, Reckitt Benckiser who make a lot of very well known products in people’s homes and health and products, home household products. And what’s fascinating about them is they’re using creativity across the whole value chain of products, everything they’re thinking about, how can we in a more creative way, reduce the packaging, weight and costs for there, how more creatively can we get our customers to be buying in larger quantities or re-buying and then more frequent manner. How can we use creativity to reduce our environmental impact so we’re not using so many dyes in our printing, for example. These are just different examples of how you seeing and I mean, I, one of the great things that I know you’re the same as well when the great things about our jobs as speakers, and we get to go and we see so many different industries. So we have a kind of unique perspective, because it’s very few jobs, I would say, who get this type of view within organizations and many organizations I go into I sign NDAs, non disclosure agreements, I get to see inside of really what’s going on in those businesses. And it’s fascinating because you can see, just like I did one the other day with a bank in South America, and I just told him very simple technique, creative thinking technique. They took about 10 minutes they thought about a particular challenge they were having which had to do with loans, approvals for midsize companies. That was one thing that they learnt, they did something and they figured…. they came up with a plan at some to do something, which will probably save about $700,000 next year.

 

James Nathan 15:07 Goodness, that’s amazing

 

James Taylor 15:09 But you know, it was just a very simple just taking that time, because you already have in your organization, you already have the knowledge. And the sad thing is, most people when asked, like 60% of the population would describe themselves as not being creative. Yet we know that creativity is going to be in a top three job skills by next year by 2020. So there’s a big disconnect.

 

James Nathan 15:32 You mentioned that before about changing jobs, and I don’t remember what the quote I saw was that, you know, school aged children today, you know, half of them will be doing jobs that don’t exist yet. Is that part of the change that you’re talking about?

 

James Taylor 15:47 Yes, I mean, I think you know, let’s say a my, my parent’s generation, they would have worked at a company, one company and they would have gone through maybe multiple jobs. Within that company that was started as there and then you’ve got maybe to manager and you’ve gone that way. In my generation, we will have gone through, worked through multiple companies. But often, let’s say if I if I have a specialism in marketing, I’ll go and work over the course of 40 years in different marketing roles in different companies. But today it’s completely different. So you’re going to have, I think you’re going to be seeing this learning, unlearning, relearning thing, the pace of this is going to increase. So I think you’re going to start to see a lot more where someone will go and work with in a business or start their own business, they’ll develop a set of skills or learn about something they’ll really go into for maybe five, seven years, then they’ll be a period of time where they’re re-skilling because that job doesn’t exist anymore, or that that role doesn’t exist anymore. And they’re going to have to then move so you can see people going through not multiple companies, but completely different types of careers. And this is very interesting because then for example, in the world of insurance, and life insurance and things like that, where you’re going to see a lot more people taking what we call mini retirement. So rather than waiting to a 65 to retire and sit on a golf course, you’re going to see people working hard five, seven years, and then taking a year to three years off to completely re-skill, retrain, and then go back into that cycle again. Now to do that, requires obviously creativity. It requires ability to react, good understanding, learning, understanding how you learn, mental cognition, but actually, most important thing is it requires resilience. And this is the thing that some schools I see doing very well teaching their students now about how to be resilient in this world because things are changing at such a pace, such a clip, they’re going to have to become more resilient. And so that’s a key skill now.

 

James Nathan 17:51 When you talk about those mini breaks and that re-skilling thing, the big flag that flies in my mind is what happens to experience. Because, you know, having spent majority of my life, you know, helping recruitment businesses and being a recruitment consultant, and running them and all that sort of stuff…. You look at it and a lot of the time, you’re recruiting for the background and experience or breadth of experience of people within an area. How does that then change in the environment you described?

 

James Taylor 18:19 Well, I think the kind of a mixture, you’ll have….. in Japan, they have an expression Takumis. So in the West, we have this idea of the 10,000 hours made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. Which you know, whether you believe in that or not, is obviously got it’s got a lot of traction. In Japan, they have a concept called Takumi, which is the equivalent someone doing like 30,000 hours. And if you go to the Lexus factory, a car factory in Tokyo, in Japan, there’s a number of these people they call Takumis, they stand at the very end of the production line, and literally what they’re doing is they’re running their hands along the car. They’re feeling the car they’re looking for these minute thing I see okay, that wing mirror is off by two millimeters or this thing here is just not doesn’t quite feel like it has it feels like essentially a little bit lower. So that kind of level like that 1% of people that are really super skilled, I think there’s there’s going to be even greater demand for them. However, what we think, you know, we put down to experience just by the sheer fact…. I used to live in Napa in California and have these winemakers I spoke to one winemaker, we’ve been in business for 30 years. And he said, you know, it sounds really impressive. That you’ve been in business for 30 years and you have lots of experience. But really, you’ve just had 30 seasons. Not really, you know, to me like 100 times every every year is you basically just have that, so you’re seeing companies for example, like Ray Dalio as a famous hedge fund. And what they do is every single meeting now in the organization with the exception of HR meetings, pay review things. They’re all being videotaped, recorded, there’s a camera up in the corner of the rooms. It’s all being fed into an artificial intelligence. That means that first of all means anyone can type it out keyword it will pull up any meeting that’s had, that things be discussed because it’s automatically been transcribed. But really what they’re doing is they’re training an artificial intelligence to understand how these great fund managers make decisions. Now, you would say that’s experience, institutional knowledge management, for example, but a machine thing to know that a lot more, so it’s like one of the strange things where I actually think, for example, in the world of the doctor is much, much greater chance of disappearing than the role of the nurse because the role of the doctor is someone presents the have this thing and you say, okay, we I believe it to be this and then you give them this medicine. Now, that’s perfect for machine to do, frankly. And if you suddenly get a new piece of data comes in, rather than having to train 5 million doctors, you just press the button, every single AI around the world knows that information now, knows that issue and knows what the causes are knows what the prognosis would be. A nurse, however, is having to do some of that. But they’re also having to physically lift a patient. They’re having to have a huge levels, empathy, spending a lot of bedside manner, there’s a whole bunch of other tasks around it as well, and what you’ll see is those jobs that are required to have not just experience, but they’re doing lots of different types of tasks, that’s much harder for an artificial intelligence to do. So it’s going to be a strange thing. We’re going to start with some those jobs you think will disappear might not necessarily disappear, those ones you think are really safe and not necessarily that safe.

 

James Nathan 21:45 The doctor thing’s being talked about a lot over years and years. I take a great interest in it, my Dad was a GP but during his life and you know, he always said no, no, no, because a doctor’s a different thing. I think that’s changed. Certainly with the pressure on GPs to, to see you in and out in such a period of time and the consultative part seems to have disappeared. How do we help our new employees learn that empathy or tune into the empathy and tune into the creative side of their roles? What can employers think about when they’re bringing people on?

 

James Taylor 22:22 Well, so this might sound a little bit strange on the empathy thing. I think people should read more fiction. And it’s one of the challenges….. I find myself doing this as you go and do your MBA, you do your business and studies and you’re in business. And so a lot of business… the books that business people read are nonfiction, business books, maybe biographies. Those things don’t teach you empathy. Those books and I think is is is why art is very powerful. You know, reading books where you can actually feel, get inside the skin, of someone else who maybe comes from completely different background to you. That’s where it is very powerful, theatre is a power, poetry’s be powerful. So I think that’s the first thing you know, if you’ve been at maybe a little bit like me over the years, and I was very much in just like nonfiction, every business book that came out, I was reading it every biography of every great business person, great statesman, I was reading it. When I started to change, and really start to read different types of books and books about places I knew nothing about, people I knew nothing about. I think that increases levels of empathy. When it comes to creativity. I think it all goes back to asking questions and curiosity. It’s just something you can develop in yourself how to be more curious. And it’s a funny thing, you know, when we’re kids, you know, if you spend time with five year olds, they’re going to automatically do the Toyota 5 Why’s: Why, why why, why why? Automatically, but what happens when you go to school that curiosity starts getting knocked out of them. Then they have peer groups and it gets knocked out of them again. So one of the strange things, the more senior you become in an organization, you’re expected to have all the answers. And I think that needs to change down. I think that needs to change that those more senior people, they just have better questions as well

 

James Nathan 24:15 When you mentioned that before, you’ve mentioned about schools and learning. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast before but my boy’s now in year 8, I went from a local primary school where he was very happy into a into a bigger school in an independent school. And the style of learning with them is completely different. And it’s a lot more of a more questioning, asking the children to question. So for instance, one of the things he did they wanted him to talk about a great….. pick a historical figure to interview. And instead of saying, you know, learn about the historical figure, it was all about, you know, what would you like to ask them and what do you think they would like to tell you and there was a lot more thinking around the individual and what they’re done. And the business they are in, Ben chose Enzo Ferrari, which was a great delight for me. But it was a totally different way of learning. And when I look at that and look at how we work with people in businesses, a lot of the time we do just say to them, this is how you do it. This is how I’d do it. And I know when I mean, I mentor a lot of businesses, and that’s not my purpose, my purpose is to ask them and help them find good solutions that work for them. Do you think we could do a bit more of that? Do you think we could teach in a better way earlier? And are and our schools and businesses starting to to see the benefits?

 

James Taylor 25:36 Yes, I think that with them, I think, you know, they say the role of the manager. You go through those different phases with an employee, for example, where initially you’re having to very much show them kind of everything almost, you know, you’re having…… and then the role gradually changes and it changes into a little bit more like an advice. And then it can actually then actually really changes into a coach. Where, you know, the role of great coaches is to ask great questions. There was there was the great Voltaire quote, we should judge a person by their questions, not their answers. Or something Einstein always said, you know, if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend the first 55 minutes thinking about what the question should be, framing the question, then he’d be able to solve it in five minutes. So I think there’s a number of things in in both in schools, and I’ve done this with educators, public and private educators in South America. And I’ve also done it with companies. Well, it’s actually the same tools, which is about getting them to ask better questions. People like Hal Gregerson, as a great writer from MIT and in the States. He wrote a wonderful book recently all about asking better questions. So this is something you can you can just become better at frankly, and it is kind of odd because when you start doing this, you say why I not been doing this before. And, probably the reason is just as often be knocked out you. So, you know, just going into, you know, a very simple one is, I call it the 10 minute rule when I speak to companies or speak at conferences or train companies. We call it the 10 minute rule, which is basically to spend the first 10 minutes of any brainstorming ideation session, generating questions, not generating solutions. If you go and you spend the first 10 minutes generating questions, there’s questions after questions from all different angles, often you’ll find the problem the thought was the problem is not the real problem. And it will definitely push you to a more strategic level to think about it. And you may come at it from a very different perspective, than one you came before so just even just like they say, you know, you’re setting your goals for next year or you’re doing your planning session for the next quarter. Just start rather than coming up with like, okay, we should be doing this that we need to be focusing on this goal. These metrics, just start generating questions, questions, questions, questions, and I’ll take it in a slightly different direction.

 

James Nathan 28:09 I absolutely love that idea. You mentioned simple tools earlier that people can do I mean, obviously, that’s, that’s a great tip. What other simple things could they be doing in their businesses?

 

James Taylor 28:20 Well, here’s here’s a strange one. But this is just backed up by science is that the colors that you have around you can affect your levels of creativity. I was reading actually, I’ve just been reading a John le Carree book and I thought I’d be interested in that it, he writes a lot about kind of espionage and things like that, wonderful writer. And, and I was I’d be interested like, what is his daily practice, what are his rituals for writing and that in his case, he gets up very early. He can write starts writing in the morning, and in the afternoon, he goes for a walk and then, long walk comes back, has some dinner, has a glass of whisky, and after dinner, he’ll sit look maybe for 30 minutes, what’s been written during the day and then you’ll kind of go good to sleep on it. Everything you just did there is making some of the best uses of what we know about creativity, you know, the brain works. So the first one is colour. There was a fascinating study done by the University of British Columbia and also by the University of Berlin, where they found that different levels of different colours will affect your levels of creativity and what you do in different ways. So for example, the colour red is the best colour to have around you if you’re doing work, which requires high attention to detail. So if you’re doing your tax returns, you won’t have that colour red around you. But what they found is the best colour to have around you if you’re looking to generate ideas is the colour green. Is one of the reasons we get often our best ideas when we’re out walking in nature and that colour green is all around you. So if someone’s listening to this just now know that they’re seeing that their workspace. Do you have that colour green? Are you looking out and windows to green? Do you have plants around you that are green, they’re activating that part of the brain. Which is about being expansive, thinking. So that’s a very simple little creativity hack as well. So that I mean that that’s one there. The other one that that someone like John le Carre used, there was what we would call pre loading. And they teach you a military school at West Point in America, which is asking yourself a simple, powerful question about two hours before you go to sleep at night, and then essentially sleeping on it. What your brain does is it basically starts to look and solve this, your subconscious can start to work on this. And then when you wake up in the morning, what’s going on is your your brain is fuzzy it’s unwound, and you’re open to unconventional thoughts. So alpha waves are rippling through your brain, directing your attention inwards to remote association to emanate from the right hemisphere. So that’s why often you’ll get some of your best ideas in the shower in the morning, because you’ll be incubating overnight. So very simple thing just two hours before you go to sleep at night. If you’re thinking about challenge or problem, put it in the form of a question. Thinking about that question and then just kind of forget about it and the other one is are you getting, are you seeing that colour green. Is that colour green around you activating that part of your brain?

 

James Nathan 31:09 Do you know when you mentioned that I started to smirk, I take….. I try to get out into the countryside every day if I’m if I’m you know if I’m not working away and take the dog out and it there is absolutely no doubt that the best ideas come when you are in an area where you can just allow your mind to wander but also one thing that I’ve started to do James, you know some people think I’m a bit nuts as I’ve got a pad of paper in my bedroom and as soon as I come out of the shower I write down everything I’ve thought because I know I’m gonna forget those brilliant thoughts.

 

James Taylor 31:42 Yes, then you kind of forget it

 

James Nathan 31:45 Well, you get back into the routine of life and the kids need getting out the door and all that sort of stuff and it all gets away. It’s been lovely talking to you. We haven’t even really touched on AI and I know we could do another half an hour on that without a shadow of a doubt James but could you Leave us and the listeners with just one big thought one big idea, one golden nugget, something that they could do today, and in the years to come to make their businesses so much better. What would that be?

 

James Taylor 32:10 I would going back to what we mentioned a bit earlier, which was just getting better at asking questions, questions, questions, questions. And even if you’re the next time you have to sit down, solve a problem, solve a challenge with your team or on your own, spend that first 10 minutes just generating questions. So those could be the Toyota 5 Whys. Why, why, why? Or the what if? Or how, or who? Just generating a series of questions, pushes you to one level back up, it will start to train your brain as well to always be in that questioning that curious mindset. And then that will have impact on you outside of work. You’ll actually probably find you have a slightly richer life because you’re going into the world in a slightly more curious way like a child.

 

James Nathan 32:56 James, thank you so, so much. That’s awesome. And it’s been really great chatting to you. Thanks for your time.

 

James Taylor 33:02 My pleasure James.