On Eran Gefen and “half an hour of inspiration”
Eran Gefen is the founder of G^Team, a strategic consulting company that helps managements and CEOs develop new growth engines. Has experience working with leading companies in Israel and around the world, including: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Kimberly Clark Strauss, Walt and Soda-Stream. A previous company he founded was bought on By Wix. Geffen runs the podcast “Half an Hour of Inspiration” and is the author of the book “Creating Growth – How to Turn Business Creativity into a Work Plan”. This list is based on a chapter from his book.
I stood in front of them, serious and important board members, and scolded them a bit: “Your creativity remains only in the upper layer of reality, you don’t undermine anything deeper, you take everything that exists for granted and as a given, and above all – you don’t ask enough why.” I had to reflect to them that a significant leap of thinking is required here so that we can come up with the next growth engine for their organization. “We must return together to first-class thinking, like a curious child who asks ‘why’ about everything and from there invents something new.”
When my son Orchuk was about two years old, I noticed that whenever I suggest that he play or imagine things, he is always very happy. I also noticed that he didn’t need anything real. I pointed to a certain point in the air and said to him: “There is a ladder here. Do you see it?” and he? see him I asked him: “Want to climb it?”. And he climbed with his fingers in the air, on the imaginary steps.
“We are born creative, it is what happens afterwards that prevents us from showing it,” Picasso said.
Indeed, when you look at children playing, you see creativity in its embodiment. They enter a world of their own making, where the usual rules don’t exist. They can play a fictional character, build towers in the air, tell themselves a story or chew on a dry leaf for minutes. This is their way of realizing their feelings and fantasies, and even processing experiences and overcoming difficulties.
What we lost along the way
And what about the adults? As we grow, our education and the external demands directed at us stand in the way of playfulness and creativity. I wish we could introduce more childishness into our everyday life, or at least learn a few things from our children. for example:
curiosity. The infrastructure for each creation – it allows us to collect the ingredients from which we bake our creative karambo. And creativity is all about connecting dots, making a mash-up of things we know to create something new. The more we know, the more points we will have for the friend. The average toddler asks about 400 questions a day, but as adults we are not even close to that. Maybe we are ashamed not to know? Or worse – think we know enough?
First class solutions. The greatest innovations in life are those that shake the foundation. They don’t try to renovate the top floor of the building but shake the foundations, question what a building is and don’t take anything for granted.
Children ask “Who said that…?”, while we as adults tend to accept the way the world works because “that’s the way it is”. Even when we are creative, we find it difficult to challenge fundamental concepts and tend to change only the shell.
Loving the problem and not the solution. Prof. Carol Dovek, author of the book “Mindset”, tested different groups of children and discovered that children who treat the problem like a puzzle, i.e. as a type of game where the difficulty is part of the fun, will do better. As adults, we prefer solutions to a coping process. But to really succeed you must fall in love with problems and enjoy trying to solve them.
Imagination and the blurring of reality. Children allow themselves to disconnect from reality into a playful world. They can imagine themselves somewhere else. Even the most brilliant entrepreneurs in the world retain the same ability. Steve Jobs was said to have a “disordered perception of reality”, and Elon Musk is known for being inspired by science fiction books.
Eran Gefen / Photo: Menachem Reiss
So how do you do it?
Psychotherapist Oliver James presented a method by which any adult can be as creative as a child. It sounded a bit strange at first, a kind of role-playing game: he suggested that everyone examine their different personas – the ones they present at work, at home, with friends or on social networks – and try to locate their childish persona, the one they no longer let out, and then to play pretend and to invite her to reveal herself.
You should try to remember creative situations from childhood – music you heard, games you played, dances you danced or adventures you experienced or invented for yourself. Then, after you’ve played with me and connected to your creative frequency, it’s time to sweep the rest of the team away. As managers, our main job is to create a creative climate, to enable the conditions in which creativity erupts. This is especially important in large organizations and successful brands. Large and successful organizations are like a 45-year-old person who is, at best, at the peak of his career, but far from childhood. Here are some ideas on how to do it:
Give room for spontaneous creativity. In a feedback conversation, next to the question of how much revenue you generated, you can ask: “How many times did you make a colleague smile this month? When was the last time you did something stupid at work?”.
to give confidence. When toddlers are left alone near unfamiliar adults, they become quiet and stop playing. Organizations that want to be creative must create a safe environment for play, allowing employees to play with new ideas, even if they seem irrelevant.
Find and recruit less likely people. We all make the same mistake and hire too many people who look like us. There are a great many people who seem boring, and it is surprising to discover what a rich imaginative world they have – if only they are given the confidence to reveal it.
listen to children When Volvo and Lego invited children to design the tractor of the future, much more than a new toy was created. The children thought of a completely autonomous vehicle, above which flies a drone called the “eye”, which gives another angle of vision, to increase safety and accuracy. The product became a concept model on which Volvo’s autonomous vehicle will be based.
Eran Gefen is the founder of G^Team, a strategic consulting company that helps companies develop new growth engines. He has experience working with CEOs and management of the leading companies in Israel and the world, including Coca Cola, Walt, Microsoft, Strauss and Kimberly Clark. A previous company he founded was purchased by WIX. Geffen runs the podcast “Half an hour of inspiration” and is the author of the book “Creating Growth” – This is how business creativity is turned into a work plan.”