Creativity, Innovation, and Thinking Into the Box With Michael Lee, Founder of the Innotivity Institute

Intro (00:09):
Welcome to innovations and breakthroughs with your host Ritz Goldstein, talking about the evolutionary, the revolutionary, the inspiration and the perspiration and those aha moments that change everything. And now here’s your host, Rich Goldstein,

Rich (00:33):
The host of the innovations and breakthroughs podcast, where I feature top leaders and the path they took to create change past guests included Ricks is Ari Bob Serling. And Stephen Key. This episode is brought to you by my company, Goldstein patent law, where we help you to protect your ideas and products. We’ve advised and obtained patents for thousands of companies over the past 26 years. So if you’re a company that has software, a product or a design, you want protected go to Goldstein patent law.com, where there are amazing free resources for learning about the patent process. And you could email my team@welcomeatgoldsteinpc.com to explore if it’s a match to work together. You could also check out the book I wrote for the American bar association that explains in plain English, how patents work it’s called the ABA consumer guide to obtaining a patent. I have here today.

Rich (01:18):
Michael Lee, Michael is a creativity and innovation expert after spending more than 25 years in the film industry, Michael now coaches consults and teaches others. The process of creativity and innovation. He founded the Academy of television and screen arts in Johannesburg, South Africa. You also found that the nativity Institute he speaks internationally and splits his time between New York city and South Africa. It’s my honor to welcome here today. Michael Lee. Welcome Michael.

Michael (01:44):
Thank you rich. It’s my honor to be welcomed. I really appreciate you having me on the show. My pleasure. And so you started out in film. What did you learn when notice in the film industry that led you to focus on the process of innovation and creativity? Well, you know what, actually nothing I, what really led me to focus on it is when you said I founded the ketamine screen arts in doing that, I, I have to consider how do you educate filmmakers and TV producers and so on.

Michael (02:17):
And we were looking for a way to do it differently than everybody else, because I was actually asked to do that job. I was brought into a school that already was probably the most successful sound engineering school in Africa, and they wanted to open up a video and film. So we wanted to make it relevant. We want to do something different than any other school was doing. And one of the elements of that was to create a stream of creativity, training as a separate thing from everything else. So, you know, aside from learning how to use a camera or how to write, how to be creative as a separate course, and that’s a time 10 years ago when we started that it was not, it was not something that was being taught in some schools, even international, definitely not South Africa. So that’s actually what got me into the, you know, study of creativity.

Michael (03:05):
And in short, I, after founding the school, a couple of years later, I started going to Nigeria on a yearly basis to reality TV shows. And it got more and more intense. I was brought there to open a new TV station, which didn’t last, the length it was supposed to do. But because of that, I, I, you know, stepped away from the school when I came back. It’s a bit of a funny story, but I won’t go too into depth about it, but basically my three-year contract ended up for six months because they stopped paying us and I left and then six months later, all the other people left after six months of living in a hotel with no salary. But basically when I got back, they wanted me to pick up the creativity class, but I had to do it on like two weeks notice and we didn’t have books and stuff.

Michael (03:51):
So I had to start designing it myself. And at that point is when I got interested in, you know, okay. So how does this work and really based on research through the books that, you know, that are the seminal books of creative thinking, and then talking to people, and then more research I’ve come across over the past five to six years, a structure that works to help people and organizations up their creativity relatively simply, and in a very step-by-step way, like a paint by numbers, way in a sense which people might think is not how you’re supposed to deal with creativity, but actually it is it’s, it’s a very logical process and has a very logical flow. And so it was really the film school, not the film industry that got me into this.

Rich (04:45):
Got it. And so you’ve created a process and you’ve extracted a process because I know you’ve said before that innovation is a natural process, but the thing is with natural processes is that it’s hard to understand or break it down often if it comes naturally, which then makes it hard to teach. So kind of, I guess, what was the path towards actually breaking it down into something? What did you discover that, that kind of took something which seems so nebulous as creativity and innovation and made it into something which could be taught?

Michael (05:20):
Well, you know, the funny thing is this, it’s, it’s a very simple structure. And what the first clue is to me is there’s a very famous study that was done beginning in the 19, late 1960s. And the person that did it was named George lands. He worked at NASA is the space agency. He was the creativity guru of NASA. So he would work with the scientists, the astronauts and engineers, and help them with their creative thinking skills. And he decided to find out when it is, we lose our creativity because he noticed that, you know, adults aren’t as creative as they should be. And he did a very thorough study, which showed that 98 of five-year-old children scored as creative geniuses. You want to take a crack if you don’t know this, what percent of adults score as creative geniuses in his survey?

Rich (06:07):
I would say 1% or something along those lines.

Michael (06:10):
Well, you’re a little bit of a cynic, but 2%.

Rich (06:14):
So it’s

Michael (06:17):
Not that far off. So 2%,

Rich (06:19):
Because I’m a new Yorker, you know, New Yorkers, are naturally cynical and skeptical.

Michael (06:23):
I understand I’m also a new Yorker half the time. So that’s why only half the time I try to use that other half to get rid of the right, the cynicism, but it’s basically, it’s, it’s obvious and logical. If children are extremely creative, then it must be natural because no one taught the five-year-old child, how to be creative. Nobody showed them a process, right. And as it turns out, I mean, there’s been a lot of research done. I didn’t discover this, but a lot of research done as guy named hi, cheat sent me hi, who wrote a book called creativity? It’s about that thick. It’s a very, very well-respected book. He’s still around. You are another book called flow, which is about the science of flow. And how you get into a flow state is kind of the grandfather flow. And the book creativity examined over a hundred famous artists lives and how they worked and where they got their creative thinking.

Michael (07:19):
And he, you know, he came up with, and this was again, based on previous research, but he came up with a six, I think it was six or five step process. That seems to be the way it works. And if you look at that process in a very simple way, it’s three steps. You perceive things. You think about those things and come up with new ideas and then you apply those ideas, right? That’s creativity. You face a problem. You think about the problem you have to manipulate the data you have, then something happens. And we don’t know what that thing is. It’s like a black box in an airplane, right. But if you do the work upfront properly, and then you stop putting pressure on yourself, the ideas will come.

Rich (08:05):
That’s so interesting because if you mentioned before that almost all children, five years old test is creative geniuses, and then, you know, 2% perhaps through of, of adults. And so it, and, and as you note also, it’s because it’s something that’s natural to us. So it almost feels like if that’s the flow of it, if it starts out that we, we can do it. And then we can’t, it seems like it’s all about inhibitions of some kind

Michael (08:39):
Very much so. And here’s the inhibitions. I mean, there’s two layers. I like to think of it this way. Most people think the inhibitions are taught to us in school, right. And, and that’s true. Other people add society itself, encourages school to be that way. But I also believe that the inhibitions that we have are part of the nature of the human beings, at least up until now, which is this. If you go, you know, I had a friend that used to say that if you take a group of people and stick them on a desert Island for long enough, you know, 10% will become radical leftist sooner. It’ll always work out that way. And I think that 2% number is kind of like the number that traditional societies needed to advance and be able to overcome obstacles. They needed to be like 2% of the people to be rebels, to be creative, to come up with different ways.

Michael (09:31):
These were the sham. And these are the, you know the artists, these are the chiefs as well as the leaders. So they needed that, but they also didn’t need the other 98% to be constantly coming up with new ways of doing things. Right? If you come across a lion in the jungle, you do not need to try a new method of getting away from the line. You want to use the one that all your ancestors used for thousands of years, because it works right. You don’t want to experiment with other techniques. And that’s kind of the way life was for human beings until very recently, even in the industrial age, we just wanted to do the things the way they were done. Right? And that’s why school was a rote learning situation. That’s why that’s why schools were set up the way they have, because the smartest survival strategy has always been until very recently do things the way they’re supposed to be done.

Michael (10:27):
Right? It’s a shift in what, what it means to be human. It’s a shift in, you know, it’s, again, not me things saying, this is the stuff that come in from Alvin Toffler and the futurist movement it’s been being set for 50 to 70 years, that human beings are going to fundamentally change in nature by now. And we’re late, you know, but it is really much about inhibitions because we’ve always taken on those inhibitions in order to survive in order to get by. And only a very special, tiny portion of people we’re supposed to be cruelest.

Rich (11:02):
Then we somehow find out role in the community as being the top innovator or not

Michael (11:08):
Say that again,

Rich (11:10):
We somehow find out role in in our community of being the, the 2% of innovators of, of the ones with the creative ideas, or we find our place among those that, that I guess, listen to the other 2%.

Michael (11:26):
Right. And not even that, because I mean, if you look historically right, we wouldn’t listen to those 2% and they would just do their thing. We would listen to the people who tell us what not to innovate. The 98% would be listening to the ruler is saying, this is how you do things or to their grandparents. They’d be listening to the ancestors. They’d be listening to the folklore of how you live. But what’s interesting. Rich is this is not something that has disappeared. You know, a long time ago, the word entrepreneur was only getting really used in business about a hundred years ago for the first time, 110 years ago. And entrepreneurs at first were not innovators, right? They were people who followed along to the, to the pathway that was led before them, by other entrepreneurs. You know, only a very, again, select tiny portion of people like Henry Ford.

Michael (12:22):
You know, those kinds of people that we know as breakthrough thinkers were innovators. They were the people that came up with new ways of doing things. But most people to be an entrepreneur simply meant to break away from a certain thing, but to still try to do things the way that entrepreneurs do them. Right. So, so what’s interesting about today. What’s wonderful about tonight is we’re living in a world where innovation is demanded of us. In fact, people will start losing their job. If they’re not innovative, people will start not, you know, not having a chance to succeed in their work. If they’re not innovative, it’s, it’s completely shifting. Right. And it’s scary for a lot of people, but the people who come on your show, I’m sure it’s not that scary because that’s what they do.

Rich (13:08):
Well, no, actually it’s scary for a lot of the people that come on my show, because a lot of the people that I interview are not necessarily working for corporation, they’re, they’re being an entrepreneur looking to be an entrepreneur surrounding some idea that they have some notion of, of, of something they created that they like to bring out into the world. So, so there’s a good amount of risk taking right there.

Michael (13:36):
Oh, for sure. I mean entrepreneurs, even the ones I’m talking about a long time ago, that kind of followed the path, it’s still a risk, right? Because the whole idea of stepping away from a societal structure and then just doing your own thing is a massive risk used to be ridiculous masters. Right now it’s become more and more common, but there used to be crazy almost to not be working for somebody or be the one that people work for. But this is the thing rich that’s important is when, you know, for the kind of people listening to this, we have shifted our demand for innovation a lot faster than we’ve shifted our ability to change the way we think as humans. And that’s why, you know, I’m doing what I do because there is a need for people to let go of our addiction, to ourselves who we, you know, who we’ve come up with our personality, right? Who is rich Goldstein, who is Michael Lee. We have this idea that somehow bad is so important. And that is exactly the inhibition you’re talking about. Ultimately, the biggest inhibition you have either we see ourselves as ego and just, just the whole notion of who we are, pins us into one way of thought our identity, bingo.

Rich (14:59):
Yeah. Like who, who we need to be seen as, or who we believe we need to be seen as in the world.

Michael (15:05):
Yeah. Or who we believe we are, you know, because rich Goldstein will only have the ideas which Goldstein has until rich goes deep is able to be flexible with rituals. And as soon as rich goes, he starts to become flexible with himself. Then he can broaden his ideas. Then you can add more ideas. Cause a five-year-old does not know who they are.

Rich (15:24):
Yup. I think rich goals, you know what to listen to that,

Michael (15:30):
Luckily you have headphones on, so it’s, shouldn’t be coming.

Rich (15:33):
I’m allowed to talk about myself in the third person when I’ve had phones on. So yeah. But okay. But a point is well taken and and so I know a lot of what you you talk about is combining innovation and creativity now among the two of them, which one must come first,

Michael (15:53):
The chicken or the egg, which look, I mean, obviously creativity, it comes before innovation in one way of thinking. Right. You have to have an idea before you can implement the idea.

Rich (16:08):
Right. But I know, I know, I guess one of the things leading to the question was you had said that people try to innovate without dealing with the lack of creativity. And that’s what, that’s what I’m pointing at. Right.

Michael (16:18):
I guess. Well, yeah, I just want to, I was about to get to that, but so basically for me, why I used the word intuitivity right. And it’s, you know, on one level, it’s not a big deal. It’s just taking in innovation, creativity and putting them into one word. What matters about it? The why I use it is that I see it as one process I see in a Tivity is the process, right? Innovation and creativity are two halves of that process. And people try to live like they’re to complete things. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m sure that as someone who talks to innovators all the time, you probably don’t find that those people are keen to have stupid ideas and implement them well. Right. And I’m sure that if you talk to creative people, you’re not funny. People who are interested in having lots of ideas and doing nothing about them, right?

Michael (17:10):
The PR the process of, of in activity is a simple thing. You start with a problem, you solve it. It involves creative thinking. It involves innovative thinking, right? It involves creativity, which is a state, a mindset, a thought process. And it involves innovation, which is an action, right? Those that’s a clear thing. People know that creativity is thinking and innovation is acting right. But somehow people have put those two things as if they don’t go together, right? It’s like, it’s like running a race where you start the race and stop halfway and go home. Well, that’s ridiculous, right? Like when you create, you need to innovate. And when you innovate, you have to start by creating before. And you know, a lot of the time when you’re innovating, you have to be creative during the innovation part of it, too. Right. You have to keep looping back to you get so, so the whole idea that innovation is its own thing and creativity is its own thing. And innovation is somehow like scientific and creativity is somehow foofy and artistic. You know, it’s absurd. They are one thing. Got it.

Rich (18:18):
And I guess maybe the previous conversation we had had about that, where you were saying that people trying to innovate without dealing with the lack of creativity, almost points that innovation under that. I’m sorry, that inhibition portion of it, the kind of maybe the part of the personality that needs to be distinguished with where someone who wants to innovate needs to deal with whatever blocks they have toward, toward creativity.

Michael (18:43):
Yeah. Absolutely. It looks mean it’s part of the identity questions, right? Rich it’s like some people see themselves as an implementer, but they don’t see themselves as a creative person and vice versa. Some people see themselves as a great thinker, but they don’t really know how to get stuff done. Well, I mean, again, it’s just elements along the path, right. It’s just steps along one process. Obviously we’re all better at some things than other things. Right. And that’s why there’s jobs who was NIAC jobs was better at vision and big picture stuff in Wazniak was better at dealing with getting the job done and, you know, getting ideas to get implemented. But, but you know, you ultimately want to be good at both, right? You want to be good at opening up your creative mind and you want to be good at figuring out how to, which things to implement, how to implement.

Michael (19:31):
And if you need to partner with other people. Well, that’s, that’s the world of, I mean, look, I’m from the film industry and the TV industry. You can’t do anything without working with people. It’s not like being a crazy you know, old gray hair inventor in a castle where you’re cackling and creating stuff with doc Brown. Well, yeah, I didn’t want to name names, but so you know what I’m saying? It’s all about collaborating. It’s all about finding the balance, but yeah. Ultimately, yes, you’re completely on point. You can’t innovate well, if you don’t have good ideas, right. Whether you get them from your partner or yourself, ultimately you need those ideas.

Rich (20:16):
Yes. And in terms of getting them from, from yourself, I mean, I know you had mentioned that when people often get stuck, it’s about shifting themselves into the needs of the situation. And you had talked about thinking into the

Michael (20:34):
Box. Yeah. Let’s say more about that. Sure. So we all know about the phrase thinking out of the box, we all hear that all the time. Here’s a question for both you and your listeners. If I say to you think out of the box now, how does that usually go?

Rich (20:54):
Not so well, I mean, I imagine the way it goes is like, well, think of something that you’ve never thought of before is what I hear when you think outside the box.

Michael (21:03):
Yeah. Yeah. So when I say thinking to the box, again, it’s not an original thought of it’s, I’ve taken it from much studies and stuff, but basically here’s the thing we think in boxes, human beings. That’s how we survive. That’s how we work. That’s how we have an identity. We think into boxes. You think about how do we categorize every single experience we have right now whoever’s listening to this podcast has made judgment after judgment, after judgment about the stuff we’re talking about, they agree with it. Or they don’t, they think it’s smart or they think it’s silly. You know, whatever it is, walking down the street, you make judgment after judgment, after judgment, what you do is you put them into boxes, right? Is this good for me? Is it bad for me? Is this going to help me? Is this going to hurt?

Michael (21:42):
And is this relationship going to be healthy? Is this relationship unhealthy? Is this a good guest on my podcast? Is this a stupid person? Now? All of the time, this is what we do. We’re like machines of judgments, right? And so why would we want to go against what we’re good at, which is thinking into boxes because the best invention we’ve ever made is ourselves. And the boxes that we are most skilled at is the boxes that we’ve put ourselves into. So to think better, we have to start by getting clear on the boxes we are. And in getting clear on the boxes, we are, we can then start to look at what they’re really composed of, get present to the reality of what boxes we live inside. Once we do that, we can expand the boxes. We can change the boxes. We can mix the boxes.

Michael (22:31):
Now I’ll give you one business example, which is the best example I know of, you know, the company BIC the company that famously began as a pen pen company, right? So they began razors, et cetera. You just stole the story there. Rich, basically that the pen comes far into the box, but it’ll speed us up. So they made pens for something on like from the 1940s up until the 1970s, they, they did not invent the disposable plastic pen. They just took it and started making it right. And they were a marketing company essentially in the sense that they didn’t make a better pen, they just marketed a better pen. And they moved slowly from France throughout the world. They dominated the entire world market over 30 years when they finally did that, they had no more markets. Right? So there they are sitting there in the early 1970s going, wow, we’ve, you know, we’re the best pen company in the world, but now what? And so what they did was they sat down for a couple of years and who knows how long it took them. Exactly. But they did a lot of thinking, how can we expand our company now that we own entire world market for disposable pens? Well, they could have done a lot of things, right. They could have decided to make a stationary. They could have decided to do movies. I don’t know. But what they decided to do is

Rich (24:00):
I’m in lighters and and,

Michael (24:03):
And razors now are the lays are the right. Are the razors and lighters. Thank you. I thought I said lasers and writers, which also

Rich (24:11):
Say that five times fast

Michael (24:14):
Are the razors and lighters plastic. Yes they are. Are they disposable? Yes. Are they cheap? Yes. Okay. In fact, they’re one of the cheapest ones you can get, right? So they kept the same model of plastic, disposable, cheap, all they got rid of was pens. Right.

Rich (24:38):
What else we can make? What else could we make out of plastic? That’s disposable cheap and, and consumed on a mask.

Michael (24:46):
Exactly. So they took the same box they had and they thought, what could we put in the same box if we stopped thinking that it’s only for pens, what could go in there? So that’s an example of really like a practical example of how thinking into that box gave big and answer, which now they’re pretty balanced, evenly that pens, lighters, and razors are kind of one-third of their business. You know? So they’ve tripled the size of their company in a sense by, by simply thinking into the same box. Right?

Rich (25:17):
And so that’s a really easy framework for innovation. I imagine that if you did an exercise to discover items inside the box with a group of corporate executives or just a team in general, you would probably come up with some great solutions. And, and I imagine that’s what you do as a coach, as a consultant. And, and this is something though that you’re looking to expand to other coaches in terms of doing it. You’re doing a training of creativity and innovation coaching and your, your training coaches and you’re certifying them. So tell me a little bit more about that.

Michael (25:57):
Thank you so much for asking about that because it’s really important. Look, the 1970 Alvin Toffler future shock, I’m sure you’re familiar with that book in future shock. He predicted of course, that people would have to become radically adaptable in order to cope with the speed of change that was happening. He didn’t predict any exact dates, but he seemed to think that it was about 20 to 30 years out where everything would change. Now, here we are 50 years later and COVID is forcing us to change, but not really. And I think it’s probably another 20 to 30 years before adaptability really becomes, you know, a thing that people absolutely must live. So LinkedIn last wrote an article saying the most important skill in business is creativity, Forbes, culture, creativity, the skill of the future, the world economic forum has gone from five of the 10 top skills being creativity skills to six this year, bottom line.

Michael (26:59):
Most of the important thinkers and writers in business say creativity is the thing. And yet if you go out there, it’s very hard to get businesses to really think about that. And especially now with the crisis, innovation has dropped by about half in major companies. Companies were about 50% of companies had innovation as one of their top two priorities before COVID this year. And this is according to McKinsey study. This year it’s dropped to about 25% of companies that are the top two priorities. So literally half the companies that were focusing on innovation have given up on it for now, which is stupid because the same begins. The study points out the 2008 economic crisis companies that focused on innovation during the crisis performed better than companies that didn’t. And after the crisis, their performance went up by 30% over those companies on the standard and poor average that didn’t innovate during the crisis.

Michael (27:54):
Right? So innovation during a crisis is actually even better than innovation when it’s safe. Now I happen to have a, all this kind of knowledge and stuff that I’ve built up. And I happened to be certified as a master coach in creativity and innovation. And I happen to have a good relationship with a coach training company. And we did a pilot earlier this year in training and certifying creativity, coaches worked out well using my structured training, but then on top of it, you know, working with them to learn how to coach them from this perspective, most of them are certified coaches. Who’ve been coaching, but not from this perspective of innovation. And so now we have, well, we’re launching a, basically over the past when this is airing of you about a couple of months that we’ve been starting working through building a team of coaches that we’re going to certify and train as creativity, innovation coaches, some of them are already creativity or innovation coaches, and some of them are just other kinds of coaches, but it’s really, really important because it’s something we want to make it you know, make noise with it.

Michael (29:09):
We want people to understand that there’s support for innovation. That it’s, it’s a skill like any other skill in, like, if you’re an innovator, you don’t have to like do it on your own. You can have backup. You can have a coach, like everybody has there’s executive coaches all over the world, helping major CEOs, run their companies, right. Just supporting them and giving them some, some coaching and input and guidance. And yet most people who are entrepreneurs are innovating and thinking it has to all be from them. And that they have to know all this stuff about innovation. They’re going to have to know how innovation works. They don’t have to know their mind. Do they have to know how their company was neat? You know, as, as creativity, innovation coaches can actually guide those people and help them, you know, take the proper mental steps to innovate better.

Michael (29:54):
And so my aim is to, there are literally, and this is funny 1,592 creativity coaches on LinkedIn. People call themselves that. And there’s 300, I think it’s 300, 4,000, 3,483 innovation coaches. So when you add it up, it’s a little over 5,000 people calling themselves. Those two things on LinkedIn, there’s 5,000 of those people. All right. So I’d like to do 10,000. I’d like to be more so people can really get support. So you’re not just out there trying to innovate because you have a great idea, but you’re also out there trying to innovate because you have people who can guide you to actually be more adaptable, more flexible, more creative, because it’s a skill you need to work it. So that’s the goal, that’s the mission. That’s amazing. And so if people want to learn more about, you can touch with you, we’ll find out about your coach training program, how would they go about doing so look, there’s two ways.

Michael (30:54):
One just hit me on LinkedIn Michael Lee, and it’s actually Michael Lee creativity is the LinkedIn at the, after the slash. The other way is you can go to a page that we have up, which is got kind of every possible thing. We’ve got our Facebook group there that you can connect to. We’ve got our mailing list, we’ve got the coach training, we’ve got other free things, YouTube channels and stuff. It’s all on one page where you can kind of select what is useful to you. And that is a bit dot L Y you know, that little short thing, the bit dot L Y slash in activity. I double N O T I V I T Y. And I double N O T I V I T Y in nativity. It’s a bit dot L Y slash. Perfect. Well, Michael, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. Thanks so much for visiting. Thank you, man. Anytime I could be in New York because I physically can’t be there right now, but but anytime it could be in New York virtually, it’s a pleasure, blessing.

Rich (31:57):
My pleasure.

Outro (32:04):
Thanks for listening to innovations and breakthroughs with your host, rich Goldstein. Be sure to click, subscribe, check us out on the web@innovationsandbreakthroughs.com and we’ll see you next time.