John Cleese on Creativity

And now for something completely different: Monty Python's Minister of Silly Walks gets serious about learning, growth, and how to generate new ideas.



Bursting onstage in an outlandish orange wig, assuming the persona of his no-nonsense twin brother, Colin, John Cleese interrupts his own speech at the TRAINING '99 conference in Chicago to announce the six sure ways to stamp out creativity in an organization.



1. Always behave as if there's a war on.



2. Strangle curiosity at birth, lest it spread.



3. Open all meetings by reciting the mantra, "The problem has not yet been born that cannot be cracked with more data and newer technology."



4. Defend your preconceptions with your life.



5. If you spot any colleagues engaging in unfamiliar activity such as wondering out loud or gazing thoughtfully into space, poke them with a sharp stick and accuse them of wasting time.



6. Make the questioning of deadlines a capital offense. If you're in a state that does not allow capital punishment, relocate to Texas.



The speech has to do with creativity, after all, and John Cleese, of all people, cannot be expected to play it completely straight.



Best known for his television and movie work with "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and as Basil Fawlty in the bbc series "Fawlty Towers," Cleese also is a founder of Video Arts Ltd., the London-based producer of corporate training videos. Since 1972, he has written and appeared in dozens of training films.



Cleese based his remarks at the February conference on the book "Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind" (Ecco Press, 1999) by British psychologist Guy Claxton. In Claxton's terminology, the hare brain is quick, analytical, logical—in a word, computerlike. The tortoise mind is slower, less articulate, more playful, and given to following whims and hunches. It isn't so much that the tortoise mind is "creative" while the hare brain isn't. It's more that you need both sides if you're going to come up with creative ideas or better solutions to problems. The trouble is, the business world generally behaves as if harebrained thinking is the only valuable kind.



"How many of you seriously believe that these statements are true?" Cleese asked the audience: That being decisive means making decisions quickly, that fast is always better, and that our minds are functioning well to the extent that they act like computers? (Nobody raised a hand to agree.)



Then he asked if anyone worked for an organization that doesn't behave as though those statements were true. (Again, no hands.)

TRAINING's editor Jack Gordon spoke with Cleese in his hotel suite following the speech.



TRAINING: What is creativity, exactly? How do you define it?



CLEESE: I don't know if you can define it. It's the ability to come up with new ideas, some of which are useful—or at least better than what you've got at the moment. I don't think you can say much more than that before you get into circular definitions. What you can discuss is the circumstances or the environments that encourage creativity: the value of giving yourself the time and space in which to think creatively; the need to feel safe, to get past the worry that you'll make a fool of yourself.



In the speech this morning, I mentioned some research that looked at a group of architects. The study found the most creative architects were those who would "play" with ideas, those who were curious about problems or challenges for their own sake. That sense of play seems to me to be absolutely at the heart of it. It's all to do with spontaneity.



TRAINING: But when managers say they want their people to be more creative, they generally mean something like, "We want you to come up with a way to shave 10 percent off our inventory costs."



CLEESE: Well, the uncreative bit about that is putting a figure on it—the 10 percent. What you'd have to do, I think, is say to people: "About this inventory business—how else could we do this? What strikes you as inefficient? What annoys you about the way we do it? Is there something stupid about it, something you've been pissed off about for years?" If they say, "Well, no, it seems all right to us," then you say, "Tell you what, you just think about it." And then you come back again on Wednesday and you say, "Have you had any chance to think about that?" And somebody says, "Well actually, it did strike me yesterday that if we did this or that...." And someone else might say, "That's funny, because...."



You see what I mean? Now you've got a process going by which people become more interested in what they're doing. I think the worst feeling people have in business is being powerless. If they feel that they've contributed even in a small way to the environment in which they work or to the processes they use, I think they feel better about it. But what you can't do is say, "Give me three creative ways to take 10 percent off the inventory cost."



TRAINING: Frederick Herzberg, the motivational theorist, once said that if we really want to motivate people to do their jobs better we should give them more interesting jobs to do. Can you legitimately ask someone to bring more creativity to the job regardless of how dreary the job is? Or, at some point, do you have to change the job?



CLEESE: I agree with what he says. I think what he's saying is a wonderful thing. But I'll tell you about a television program I saw several years ago. It absolutely astounded me. They took a camera into a factory where people were working on a conveyor belt. First they talked to the men, and the men said: "God, am I tired of this job. It's so boring. There are days when I feel like I'm going crazy, it's so dull."



Then they took the camera to a different room where some women were doing exactly the same job. And the women said: "Oh, we like it. We don't have to think about what we're doing, it's all automatic. So we can just talk to each other. We have the most wonderful conversations."



I came away from that program thinking, well, I suppose there are some jobs that just are intrinsically dull, but you can still say to people: "Look, you're bored. We accept that. So what are we going to do about it? Do you want to leave, or should we try to find you another job, or is there something else we can do? Is there a radio program we can play that you're really interested in? Should we play music all the time? Or, why don't you guys just talk to each other more, like the women do?" In other words, you go to them and you listen to what they have to say. I think you probably could find ways to make most routine jobs much more tolerable.



TRAINING: In your speech this morning, you suggested that there's a direct link between creativity and curiosity. If creative people are more fascinated by life in general than less creative people—if they simply take a greater interest in things—is that sense of curiosity innate to a person's personality or can it be developed?



CLEESE: I think it's true that there are just some people who are curious and some people who are not so curious. But it isn't all innate. One thing that alarms me about the younger people in America is that they seem to have a great lack of curiosity. I know a lecturer in England, an academic. He told me that the most depressing lectures he has to do all year are to some of the visiting American students—because it doesn't matter what he says to them, there's no reaction.



Now, this has nothing to do with intelligence. The Americans are quite clearly as intelligent as anyone. But there's something about the culture that doesn't encourage curiosity. If you go into an American shop and you say to the clerk something like, "Excuse me, is there a news agent nearby, somewhere where I can buy a newspaper?" A lot of them will just say, "Sorry, I don't know." It's as though it never occurred to them that it might actually be interesting to stand outside the shop where they work and think, "Oh, I see, there's such-and-such a shop across the street, and that other one is over there...." The same thing applies to walking through their own shop to look around at all the stock and just be curious about it.



I don't know where this lack of curiosity comes from. But it's a major recurring experience to find American young people, in particular, very uncurious even about their own surroundings, let alone about anything more formidable. I don't feel it's the same in Germany, say, or in other countries.



TRAINING: Does it have anything to do with trying to be cool?



CLEESE: Well, that's the excuse my teenage daughter would use. It's extraordinary: Almost anything the people in my generation would regard as genuinely worthwhile, it would be uncool to be interested in. But I'd love to examine this at a deeper level and find out what it's about, because it seems to be just accepted in the American culture that young people aren't interested in anything. Yet I know it doesn't have to be the case. It hasn't always been like that.



When I was growing up, there was a lot of curiosity. When I was in school—and, my God, this was not a citadel of intellectual activity—but still, I was interested in chess. I got interested in fencing. I used to listen to parliamentary debates because I was curious about the behavior. It wasn't systematic, it wasn't highly intelligent, but there was a bit of curiosity—a lot more than I observe at the moment.



But the feeling is, well, that's just the way they are. And I'm not so sure that it's good to take such a passive attitude toward it.



TRAINING: To what extent can we develop our capacity to be interested? What if I'm feeling stuck in a rut? What if I'm suffering from information overload? How do I rekindle my fundamental curiosity?



CLEESE: I knew a wonderful teacher once—a tutor. He tutored my stepsons and my elder daughter. He said to me, "Always start where the energy is."



People make an awful mistake by starting where the energy isn't. If you're feeling very world-weary—and sometimes we're all in that boat—you have to sit down with something that's going to engage you. That doesn't mean you just switch on the TV and watch a cartoon, but it does mean asking, What would be fun? Maybe take a piece of paper and a pencil and start drawing silly things. Go for a walk. Just sit very quietly watching your breathing. Anything. Just allow the whim to get you going.



Now, you can't do this all of the time; it's too disconnected. But I think in that particular frame of mind, when you run out of energy and motivation, I think you have to go right down to the instinct, right down to a whim.



I'm coming up on 60, and I'm wondering where my life will begin to go. I need to take a slightly different direction. I talked to a very wise man, and he said, "If you're trying to find a new direction, don't plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your life up to now. You can't plan something new with the same old apparatus." He said, "Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you."



It's like creativity. You have to follow it without knowing where you're going. If you try to control where you're going, you're back in the same process. It's like asking a piece of machinery that's broken to mend itself.



TRAINING: In your speech, you urged people to rely more on the creative "tortoise mind." But toward the end, you made a point of saying that the analytical "hare brain" is equally or even more important. "Soft" subjects like creativity or leadership or teamwork are inherently complex and multifaceted, but in a training session the trainer generally has to concentrate on some particular aspect of the subject. How important is it to remind people that you're stressing just one piece of what's really a more complicated story?



CLEESE: It's a very interesting question. I was talking with someone yesterday about the fact that so many management books are a bit like so many self-help books. And I found myself thinking of Willy Loman. You know that terrible scene in "Death of a Salesman" where Willy says to his boss [in a desperate whisper], "What's the secret?"



It's so terribly sad. Here's this man who thinks there's one big secret, and if you just know that secret, it explains everything. There's something quite painful about it, because he cares so desperately and yet his idea that there must be one big secret is so completely clueless.



Any kind of intelligence, or wisdom, is a cobbling together of many ideas and skills and bits of information. If you examine the ideas constantly and see how they fit together, every now and again another bit fits into place. You can talk about them individually, but the important thing is that they lock together in some coherent whole—including, as you say, all the paradoxes.



Now, I think it's entirely legitimate to emphasize just a few ideas at a time. When I was in school, every single term I was taught something slightly different about atomic theory or chemistry. They would always say, "Last term we told you this or that, and that was all right as far as it went, but now..." and then they would slightly modify the picture. I never had any problem with that, because I understood it was a matter of building information in blocks.



I think that, provided people realize they're building information in blocks—that they're building toward something which in due course will become a more coherent whole—then they're going to improve. But if they think there's one crucial, central bit of information that's going to be a quick fix and suddenly turn them miraculously into an effective manager, or a happier, better-functioning, more efficient human being, they're totally wrong. They're like Willy Loman.



Individual teachers and trainers can give you individual bits, but only you can fit them together. And you'll only do that by thinking it through for yourself. Ultimately, only a certain number of people are going to put the pieces together because a lot of people aren't sufficiently interested to make the effort. But if you think you only need one single bit of information, you'll never get there.



TRAINING: Part of that sounded like an argument for a structured curriculum of some sort. The trend today in American training is toward delivering ever-briefer "chunks" of information in no particular pattern—just what you need, just when you need it to deal with something that's come up on the job.



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