Singing the praises of creativity

Tania de Jong runs events management and production company, Music Theatre Australia and recently started Creativity Australia, which encourages employees in companies to be more creative.

Tania is a social entrepreneur who has won awards for her work with a charity she founded, The Song Room, which took performing arts programs to 100,000 disadvantaged children.

She’s going to talk to us today about how the word ‘innovation’ is, I suppose, very difficult to do in these tough times, and how we might be looking at more of a creative mindset to boost productivity and engagement in the workplace.

Amanda Gome: What do you think is happening with that word ‘innovation’ and what does it mean?

Tania de Jong: Look, I think the word innovation is bandied around by every man and his dog. We all aspire to be innovative, but actually what many people don’t recognise is that innovation can only occur when a creative process is in place. So many organisations who claim to be innovative don’t actually have creative processes in place.

Plus, there’s some confusion around the use of the word innovation because in Australia we tend to often put innovation as R&R. And innovation occurs in so many other facets in our workplace and in our lives. For example, the way that we do our systems at work, the way we manage our human resources and our human capital and connect with one another is also about innovation.

Are you saying then that creativity is more to do with research and innovation in the development side?

Yes. For some reason we haven’t called research “creativity” in Australia. We see creativity as ballet dancing, singing, writing, sculpture, whatever. But actually creativity is something that we all have access to, no matter what our job, whether it’s a GP, a CEO, a head of a board or an accountant.

There is a 15 country study that showed that three to five year olds exhibit 98% creative behaviour and then by the time we get to 25 we’ve been educated out of our creative behaviour and it’s measured at 2%. But it’s still sitting there, we’re just not really nurturing that.

So how does creativity help your business?

If you’re only focussed on results and the left side of the brain, you’re going to miss out on a huge amount of potential that your people can bring to you.

Furthermore, people who are not feeling like their creative side is being nurtured, that their voice is not being heard, that all their talents are not being brought to the table, don’t contribute as much and they don’t feel good.

So by having creative processes and creativity in the workplace, you engage better with your employees, they feel better, they are more likely to be innovative and your business is going to be a lot more productive.

So you can’t have innovation without creativity?

That’s right. You have to adopt some creative processes, and I don’t mean that all employees have to sing and dance, but people need to be encouraged to think creatively and perhaps there needs to be catalysts and ambassadors so that creative ideas are brought forward and come from the bottom up to the top.

And also from the top down because I think there’s plenty of people in boardrooms that are actually very creative but feel stifled by the strict governance processes that take place in a boardroom.

What are the problems these companies are facing?

The lack of engagement by employees. They’re not being connected and they feel their ideas don’t matter.

Secondly, because companies are back at level one thinking, now with the GFC everyone’s just in survival mode. We’re getting rid of people, so we can’t be thinking about creativity now. But this is the exact time that people need to be thinking: “how are we going to survive this crisis, how are we going to create our future?”. Because it’s about being creative, we can’t go back to where we came from.

So what do you advise them to do?

People need to be given tools to develop creative and innovative thinking within the workplace and we do that through a range of programs. Sometimes we do literally get groups of senior of executives singing in harmony together, but they never know that’s going to happen. So I call that session ‘Finding your Voice’ but for them I call it ‘Creating the Future’, because it is about going outside of your comfort zone. It’s about going outside the paradigm of ‘this is me and this is who I am and I do this job and that’s all I’m ever going to be’. It’s about ‘what else could I be, what potential is there?’

What happens when you encourage the employee’s potential and they realise that they can’t fulfill it within that company?

I don’t think that’s a huge risk, I think that the opportunity is you’re going to engage your people and you’re going to connect with your people. And you know one of the really strong ways of connecting with people, is for people to feel how important the work of that company is and how the purpose and mission of that company really does matter. Part of that is about being able to tell stories about your work in a passionate way so that when you go home to your family and friends at night, you go “I did this today and that helped all these people do X or Y”.

Once you push people outside their comfort zone through some activity what happens?

It depends on the company but there is a way of nurturing people’s ideas from the ground up that can be as simple as having simple feedback systems. And some funding from the company that goes into actually putting those ideas into, let’s say a melting pot, where they get marinated and see if they are actually good ideas and how they might go forward. That could be to create a new product or it could be to create a new system or some way of employing people.

Can you see in a session the right side turning on?

Yes, definitely. And it’s exciting for the participants. It doesn’t even necessarily click. I think it happens once people let go of their self-consciousness. Sometimes you just get people to close their eyes so they’re not looking at their colleague and you just start saying “think about who you were as a child”. We were all very creative beings. You sort of go back to a feeling of who you could be and that’s very exciting for people. They start thinking “wow I’ve forgotten I could write like this”, or “oh my gosh, I have all these ideas”. And sometimes you just have to get in a place of stillness, as we’re all rushing around at a thousand miles a day.

How can that knowledge of remembering be turned into a contribution to the business?

You might do a right brained exercise to get that spark of creativity happening and then bang, you go into a strategic session.

I did one recently and we went into a killer innovation session with several marketing managers from Centro and their goal was that they had to increase the spend per customer by January 2010. We got them in groups and we actually got them saying “by 9am tomorrow morning we have to have increased that spend per customer and come up with campaigns”. And because they had got into that headspace, they were able to come up with profitable and new ideas straight away. By 3pm that afternoon, they were in a completely different headspace.

When you say you take them back to remembering how they could be creative as a child, is it also about that confidence? You’re taking them back to a confidence of a child?

Yes, when anything was possible and you could be all that you could be. The theme song of Creativity Australia is All That I Can Be. You know how people always want to say ‘no’ to things? “Oh, you can never achieve. No, that’s not going to work for this and this…” Actually yes, it can work and we are going to bounce back and we’re going to show that it’s also about resilience.

It’s about saying, “ok I’m going to keep going at this. Plenty of people have told me I’m not going to achieve this or that”.

At 14 I was told I should never bother having singing lessons by a girlfriend at school. It took me another two or three years to get my confidence back to audition for the school musical for the chorus and then I got the lead role. But isn’t that sad? So we get put off doing things because people say you can’t do them.

So when did you start Creativity Australia?

Creativity Australia was actually officially launched six months ago at the Sofitel, but I guess it’s been a life work. I’ve been leaning into doing this all my life. I’m a soprano, I sing all over the place, we do a lot of corporate events, so I’ve been speaking with CEOs and board members and HR consultants and marketing people for many, many years, so you start to get a sense of people’s concern, I suppose about their inability to engage as much with their employees as much as they could.

Why have you personally gone down this avenue instead of building a business around your singing?

I have a business around my singing as well and it’s going really well. I guess I like a challenge. But I have other people that work within Music Theatre Australia, and of course if I get asked to sing anywhere I do.

But I also find doing a lot of keynote speeches and then singing at the end of them is a really powerful way of transforming an audience, because you’re not just talking about being creative, you actually are.

I suppose I feel that I can make a powerful difference by just performing, but we don’t get to reach all audiences doing that. There’s certain messages you can’t do in an entertainment features spot.

You can’t start talking about people’s organisational culture, but you can put some subtle messages into bringing people together and give them goose bumps and make them feel that they’re in a great place and they’re working for great people.

How are you seeing social entrepreneurship changing in Australia, presumably you’ve travelled and been in contact with social entrepreneurs in other countries?

One of the really important things with social entrepreneurship is that it’s really looking at ways of bringing together the three sectors of government, community and business.

Sometimes social entrepreneurship can be seen as social welfare. But I think we need to look at it as ‘how can we all come together and partner with one another, to really look at the major problems that we’re tackling, not just in Australia but globally?’

Why do it as a not-for-profit?

I’ve been asked that a lot over these last six months.

Because you’re in business with some pretty heavyweight businesspeople.

And we’re doing business with some big companies. What we’ve decided to do is run one part of our organisation as a not-for-profit and social fund, which is called Creativity Australia.

This is to enable disadvantaged people and communities, particularly migrants, to engage with businesspeople in shared projects. For example, we have a project with the Sofitel Melbourne at the moment called Melbourne Sings Choir which has businesspeople, and quite senior businesspeople in many cases, meeting with migrants from the Fitzroy and Collingwood housing estates.

The idea is to bridge social capital, to improve everyone’s self-esteem, communications skills and give migrants a chance to actually increase their networks and potentially get jobs. It’s a really amazing project and last week they had their first performance at Fitzroy Town Hall and people were crying, it was powerful.

A lot of the employers and businesspeople in the choir are actually taking time out of their day to help the migrants do mock interviews and helping them sort out their CVs. So there’s a lot of casual mentoring that’s going on, which was my goal.

We’ve decided to move the commercial consulting side of what we’re doing, e.g. the creative transformation process into a start-up consulting business called Creative Universe.

So who’s on that board?

We have people like Peter Kronborg, who’s a fantastic executive, leadership strategist Kelly O’Dwyer from the National Australia Bank. Some of our patrons are Hugh Morgan, Allan Fels, Lady Southey, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, of course. Then we have people like Evan Thornley who are involved, Janine Kirk – just a huge range of people.

And what’s brought them all together?

I think everyone believes that we’re not really harnessing the creativity that we have in Australia and if we want to compete globally as an innovative nation, we need to do this.

I think people love the idea that there’s also the triple bottom-line with helping people get jobs and improving their employability. So our goal with Creative Universe is to hopefully be very profitable and disperse a percentage of our profits back to the fund.

So that’s the aim, to get a sort of a cash stream to help the fund?

Yes, to work with major corporations in their transformation processes, particularly at this time, in this crisis.