The Stolarick Series

by Adil Dhalla (@CreativityKTR)
The Stolarick Series: A four part series based on my conversations with Dr. Kevin Stolarick, Research and Associate Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute.

Are Recessions a Good Thing for Creativity? April 20

I recommend that you not tell me that I’m predictable. I get so perturbed by the characterization that my ensuing behaviour is erratic and often regrettable as I attempt to prove that the only thing predictable about me is that I’m unpredictable. The good news is that the knee-jerk habit has begun to wane in age as I realize that being predictable can represent a good thing.  For example, it’s come to my attention that starting this group and having relative success, is pretty predictable. At least, that’s the conclusion I get from reading the Chopra of Creativity, Richard Florida, who asserts cities like Toronto that posses good levels of diversity, tolerance and a bohemian belly are most attractive to the creative class and ergo, prosperity.

When we started this group, a handful of my better-read friends suggested that I learn about Florida so I did some research and was pleasantly surprised to find out that he is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, which is located in Toronto. The Institute is “the world’s leading think-tank on the role of sub-national factors…in global economic prosperity”. Feeling rather fortunate to be so close to this creative hub, I jumped at the opportunity to set up a think-date with Florida. Unfortunately, my hopes were quickly dashed due to his scheduling demands and without anyone saying it, I suspect the predictability of our group’s existence meant that we didn’t scream “I deserve your time” quite yet.

Understanding, although disappointed, I asked if ‘anyone’ would meet me from MPI and two months later I had the good fortune to meet with Dr. Kevin Stolarick. As the Research Director and Associate Director at the Institute, Stolarick is the ying to Florida’s yang. Bonded by their shared interests, the two have crafted a successful partnership over the past 10 years with Florida as the story teller and Stolarick the data driver. Obviously, they don’t play those roles exclusively, which is good because I had a lot of questions for him which required a little bit of both.

Recessions are a great thing for Creativity.  Stolarick launched into this topic by quoting economic growth specialist Paul Romer who claimed that “a crisis is a horrible thing to waste”. To paint this point, Stolarick explained how in the aftermath of forest fires we are treated to an eclectic and diverse boom of new species in the area. Similarly, what we are seeing now is newer, smaller companies being given a chance that they were barely afforded before. This aligned well with our very first piece advocating the creation of a Canadian Car rather than funneling more money to the big three, which we’ve come to learn is textbook creative destruction (“out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises”).

Creativity, however, cannot be credited for everything. There is a more direct play than creativity, Stolarick pointed out. Often the increase in startups during recessions occurs simply because people are out of work or in need of supplementary income. This is interesting since creative destruction itself leads to layoffs as workers finds that their skill sets become obsolete with the emergence of something new and better. Sometimes this leads to even more innovation but creative destruction more often leads to severe negative repercussions for affected workers. It’s for this reason that creativity has a really tough time when things are good. If it isn’t broken why would you bother fixing it especially if the solution comes with unenviable repercussions like rendering people obsolete?

This is a classic example of where short term trumps long term thinking and the results aren’t pretty. A recent article about the 12 major brands that won’t be around by next year prophesizes the demise of some inudustry giants, who share key commonalities but perhaps none more important than how comfortable they became with the status quo. So where does that leave us? Will companies constantly just rise and fall during recessions if the pay-off for constant creativity is too great to do pro-actively?

The short answer is no. The companies that last will do what they do the best but constantly challenge themselves to do better. Google is a great example of this as they encourage their engineers to spend 20% of their time working on something that they’re passionate about that’s unrelated to their actual work. It’s not surprising, therefore, why it seems like Google Labs is shooting out new tools on a weekly basis and sure, they’re not all handy but this commitment to never be satisfied is critical to Google’s long term success. The beauty of a commitment to constant creativity is that workers develop along with it, rather than becoming victims to it. As Stolarick boldly stated, “the minute Google gets satisfied, it’ll be replaced.” Seems improbable now but companies like AIG, GAP and Ford seemed unbreakable at their peaks as well.

We’ll be talking  about this more in today’s Creative Club but next up in the Stolarick Series we’ll be looking at whether we turn to creative or conservative leaders during recessions.

Do we Turn to Creative Leaders? April 27

As an outsider looking in, it’s remarkable how much America has tried to distance itself from George W. Bush given that he was elected not once but twice. Subsequent generations will ask how the same mistake was repeated and while there is not just one answer, the finely crafted image of Bush as the macho cowboy was critical to influencing the vote in 2004 when America felt it was enduring a safety crisis. The correlation between crisis and cowboy got me wondering if there was a similar connection during times of economic hardship: do we turn to leaders who seem more creative or do we still prefer the cowboy?

To Kevin Stolarick, Associate Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, the answer is quite simple: at times of economic hardship, the cowboy vs. creator argument is secondary to whether the leader is considered to be visionary. The visionary is able to cross lines and ideology. He or she is able to overcome the fact that during hardship people turn to leaders who represent change as much as those who symbolize tradition by selling the idea that they have a plan

Creativity, interestingly enough, is not a good word to bring up in the political arena. Stolarick believes that the concept of creativity “scares the hell out of people” and Dr. Keith Sawyer confirmed this discord when he asserted that voters would rather that their candidates are the exact opposite of creative – they’d prefer them perfectly predictable. Granted, I’m a creativity enthusiast (and thus posses some bias), but I initially found this surprising. How could creativity be more of a liability than an asset?

Thinking about this question was initially not easy for me (had I got it all wrong?) but ultimately it proved to be a positive experience. We’re not wrong to see creativity as a solution but we should be cognizant that for some people, creativity represents something erratic, destructive and drastic (think the term “creative destruction” inspires much confidence?). The key, according to Stolarick, is recognizing your audience and consciously using language that they’re comfortable with.

This is an important lesson to remember as the Generation Y community, who represent the majority of the readers here, try to play a larger role and be heard during this time of need. Creativity might indeed kill the recession, but we just don’t need use those exact words to make it happen.

Defining Creativty Got us Nowhere. April 30

At this Monday’s Creative Club two entrepreneurs, a venture capital specialist, a writer/actor, an architect, a mobile media marketer and a molecular biology PHD candidate, somehow attempted to define creativity and who makes up the creative class. The accidental experiment was futile from the perspective of deriving an answer but it was fascinating to find that not one person could entirely agree with another. The eventual decision was that we were all right (as creativity is respective to an individual), which ultimately points to both the strength and weakness of intellectual debate about creativity.

Kevin Stolarick said that the one of the biggest fallacies people make is assume that the creative class is monolithic and our most recent creative club was a good example of this. While I didn’t make that assumption myself, I’d readily admit that I’ve been struggling with the fact that the creative club has so many different types of people. I asked Stolarick: how can I engage everyone if everyone is so unique? Doesn’t the fact that we identify as being creative mean that we’re harder to unify?

Stolarick quickly corrected my thinking: members of the creative class desire to work with other members of the creative class particularly because of these differences. The best one can do is connect them together because what might seem like the crashing of two paradigms often creates something incredible akin to when the mixing of blue and green make yellow. This might not sound profound but the connecting of a creative class member with a member of the labor class, for example, does not often produce the same results. I’m not saying it’s to be avoided (or saying anything bad about those from the labor class), but just that the clashing of ideas between creative types is more likely to lead to something positive whereas clashes between creative types and non creative types do not.

The key, according to Stolarick, is to find topics or problems that creative types have in common and most often these are societal topics like recessions, transportation and health care. Not surprisingly, probably the most successful topic we’ve discussed was what the Toronto Transit Commission can do stop their bleeding and provide a more respected service (everyone who attends the creative club does so using the TTC). It’s also worth mentioning that one club member mentioned that they much preferred topics of discussion similar to this opposed to this week’s ‘what is creativity debate’.

I assured this member then and will write this now, let’s get back to focusing on solutions and new inspirations. There’s one more piece in the Stolarik series which will discuss how to leverage a creative community and I think this a great launch pad to get us into something more phsyical and

Generation YES. May 4

At the book launch for “Rise of the Creative Class”, the usually verbose Richard Florida spent only a short amount of time speaking about the book and then opened the stage for anyone to speak about a cause, idea or opportunity that they were passionate about. It was an odd decision, since authors typically use their book launches to talk about their…books (go figure). Florida’s long time collaborator Kevin Stolarick justified this by explaining their belief that the creative class can never be organized and the best one can do is simply connect them with one another.

The story of the launch was Stolarick’s way of responding to my question as to how the Creative Club could be taken to the next level.  I had been thinking about this since an early critic asked if theCreative Club is just “a bunch of people [that] gather at a bar and talk?” Well yes, that’s what happens but over the last 10 weeks (we’ve never had the exact same group of people twice, which has been very cool) our conversations have connected strangers and stimulated different people to start thinking or acting upon areas of discussion that interested them.

Thus, on a micro level, our Club has had tremendous success since we can all provide individual evidence on how creativity is killing the recession but we’ve also reached a level of maturity now that we must consider our macro potential. We have an incredible opportunity to mesh various talented minds and deliver solutions that’s matter. Never have I felt the desire to do this more when this past weekend I saw the front page article of the Toronto Star - “Generation Why Me” – regarding how Generation Y is struggling and angered by the injustice incurred by the recession. In all due respect to those who are suffering, every generation can point to how they’re hurting (e.g.  seniors whose pensions have depreciated, baby boomers who can’t retire, Gen X who still feel under loved, etc) and I’m just not sure how our Generation has been labeled so defeatist (maybe it all stemmed from being a good play on the ‘Y’ in gen Y).

So here’s what I’m wondering: Why can’t the play on the term ‘Generation Y’ instead be ‘Generation Yes’?

This recession provides an incredible opportunity not just for Gen Y but for everyone to reset and return better than ever – or at least better than before. I’m not naïve to think the world can be perfect, but I’m optimistic the recession has afforded us the opportunity to turn over every stone and consider what’s underneath. I’m hopeful. For Gen Y, rather than lamenting how we were told to get educated and now we’re nowhere, why not talk about how we’re fortunate to be the best educated Generation and are leveraging this into being recession killers, world savers and changers. It should be, even simply from the perspective of continual improvement, our goal to become the greatest generation yet.

Tonight at the Creative Club I’ll have one question for the group: what’s important to us and what can we do about it beyond discussion, either as individuals, as a sub group, as several groups or as a large group. This is what I believe Stolarick was always driving me towards. After all, is there is one thing that is certain about the creative class is that the ability for us to collaborate has proven to be the true determiner of prosperity.

So let’s go Gen Yes.