Elaine Rumboll

Noticing is a skill which is seen as central to creative literacy. Could it also be that it is a practice which is critical to business success? I think that it is. The problem though with the rate of change happening faster than our ability to respond to it is that many of us just seem to want knuckle down and get on with it, using the well worn filters and models which worked in the past and pray they serve us well in the future. The challenge is that we are living in a world where “time sickness” (the belief that there is not enought time and that it running out for us) is a real anxiety generator and thus any extra time required to practice a way of seeing things differently is viewed by many as just too overwhelming.

In an informal poll done with delegates on our executive education courses at UCT GSB, many stated that they were working longer hours, taking shorter breaks and multi tasking just to try and keep up with the sheer volume of information they were confronted with daily. As many of you will know, I am working on the notion of Curiosity as an enabler of learning and as a filter for our attention. But what of the art of noticing? What has become clear for me is that conscious noticing is not easy. It requires energy and practise. In it’s own right, noticing is an act of attention. Noticing, like Curiosity, is an appreciating asset. What I am particularly interested in is the way in which how we notice things differently will start informing our own leadership practices.

It is my belief that other discplines often provide extraordinary insight for crafting and understanding questions we might not have fully birthed. In the current world of augmented reality, designers craft avatars and characters that live not in the full focus of one’s vision but to the side – at a glance (Slavin, 2009; Cerveny, 2009). This can be much more efficient than fully parallel approaches to pattern recognition. The art of the glance is a useful exercise to practice when attempting to notice things outside of one’s normal area of perception. In fact, according to Schmidhuber (1991), humans and other biological systems use sequential gaze shifts to detect and also recognise patterns. This peripheral vision gives rise to residual objects which exist alongside of us but which are seldom noticed. Simply put, what are you noticing from the corner of your eye that you would usually filter out, but could possibly give opportunities for seeing differently? How can this way of seeing improve your capacity as a leader - when so much of the literature tells us to have a clear and uninterrupted focus.

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I am priviliged to be working with Dave Bond, who is the Director of the Leadership Centre at Ashridge Business School in the UK on a new three day programme entitled The Art of Noticing - Fresh Eyes for New Opportunities which will be run in October at the GSB and explore some of these challenges. 

I am genuinely excited by the possibilities this can generate for more effective leadership and the opportunities it can help us as leaders  generate in our own businesses and practices.

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When you leave South Africa
I will sit in the fruit-laden streets
in the brightly painted cafés
in the maze-like bookshops
and play once more
with the stories we created

I will throw your laughter
high into the pine trees
as I drive the same roads without you

I will send you postcards of Sunday morning Africa
with its Gospel voices
and street-corner gossip
through richly patterned curtains

But I know
that all these are scenes
you may well find
in other cities

And so
I will wish
with other things

The energy of men
dipping and soaring
with outstretched arms
down Lily Avenue
as children drum their laughter
on municipal dustbins
and hope chants
from flat windows and balconies
after each World Cup soccer qualifier

And perhaps these images
of pride and love
and strength
will draw you back 

————————-

I wrote this poem in 1996, fourteen years ago. Halcyon days.

(This poem is from a volume of poetry entitled the The Child Machine)

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I have always held the belief that a more creative workforce can change the world. This view was challenged in the best possible way by one of the most extraordinary thinkers that I have yet to come across at the Design Indaba. Alejandro Aravena is creating the impossible in the low cost housing environment by challenging assumptions about what it means to build architectural structures for the poor. It is worthwhile to have a look at some of the work that he has been doing on this in Chile. It is inspiring and perhaps the solution we are looking for in addressing our own low cost housing challenges in South Africa.

The ‘dotank’ work he is doing is exceptional but the tenet which underlies his thinking is for me even more hard hitting. He has to my mind reconstituted the notion of creativity and the kind of work it can do for us in multiple disciplines.  Here is how some of that thinking goes:

It is not because ideas have not been developed that people are galvanised to action, but rather that what has been proposed does not seem to be sufficient. This is what inspires and drives people to creativity. Therefore it is not that creativity changes the world but that the world changes and we therefore need to be creative.  Creativity, according to Alejandro Aravena, is what emerges when there is not enough available knowledge to provide a solution. If there were sufficient knowledge there would be no need to be creative. Creativity can’t change the world. It’s because the world changes that we need to be creative. Creative is thus not a goal but a consequence.  And for it to be an elegantly crafted consequence, the key elements must be constructed around the three key elements of relevance, precision and irreducibility.

It is for this very same reason that creativity should not be propounded as a drive for solutions but rather as a place to craft incisive questions and provocative possibilities in a world where the rate of change is happening faster than our ability to respond to it. And it is this reality which demands an ongoing construction of the possible.  

After all, answers never change the world but questions certainly do. And it is creativity with its muse of curiosity which does this so very well.

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