エピソードの概要
This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reinamoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo.
Is creativity nature or nurture is one of the consistent topics that I come back to
time and time and again on this podcast, as well as in my own profession.
Having been a designer for over two decades and having been a manager in various creative
organizations leading teams of creatives and others, how to create an environment that
fosters creativity is a topic that interests me deeply.
Through trial and error and through close to two decades of experience, I've developed my
own methods and theories. But have I really studied how to teach creativity? Not really.
I met today's guest, Joel Podolny, only recently through a mutual acquaintance of
ours. And I have to say he's one of the most academically and professionally accomplished
people that I have ever met. Yet, he's one of the most down-to-earth individuals.
After one lunch, which, by the way, he paid for, so thank you, Joel, I asked him if he'd
be my guest on this podcast. He's gotten an undergraduate degree and PhD from Harvard,
taught at Stanford and Harvard Business School, and was the dean at Yale School of Management.
He says that he thought he would be an academic for the rest of his life. But one day in 2008,
he got a phone call from none other than Steve Jobs that asked from Steve Jobs was to start
a university at Apple and train existing and new employees. For over 12 years, he spent
time at Apple as the dean of Apple University, where he led the creation of programs at the
world's most valuable company and arguably one of the most creative companies in the world.
Since 2021, he ventured into his own startup, Honor Education, which helps universities and
corporations with their educational endeavors. There couldn't be a more perfect person to ask
about how one can nurture creativity. So let's get started. You were in the academia world for
a long time, and then you switched your career into a corporate setting, a little company called
Apple. And you were there for a long time as well. And then a few years ago, you started your
創造性の育成
own company around education. I wanted to start off with, is creativity nurture or nature? And
in the context of education, how do you promote creativity? I think it's definitely nature,
or sorry, it's definitely nurture. If I answered nature, this would be a very short podcast,
right? And it kind of defeats your academic background as well.
Right, right, right. Exactly. And in part, we know that there's a lot that unfortunately,
you can do in a context to suppress creativity. And we see a lot of examples of that oftentimes
in our lives. And so I think it obviously follows that there's, of course, a lot you can do if
you're intentional about it to create a context that actually elevates and nurtures creativity.
And by the way, the word creativity is one of those words that somebody called it,
it's a suitcase word in that you can pack a lot of different meanings into it. And there's no
one perfect definition for that word. Now, having said that, I think there are two layers to
creativity. One is similar to what you said about original thought, an ability to come up with an
idea or an original thought from, I mean, it's very difficult to say you can come up from nothing
to something, just because these days, nothing is, there's no nothing, right? There's always something
there. Yeah. But an ability to come up with an original thought or original thing. And then the
other layer I would say is to the ability to make that happen or to make it. Yeah, right. There's
got to be, that's why I think it's original thought and skillful action that both of those
components need to be there. And so, given that, and then if we shift to the educational context,
創造性を育む教育の設計
what we're then thinking about is what type of educational context really elevates that,
elevates original thought, elevates skillful action based on that thought. And I think oftentimes what
we're trying to find for those of us who are designing these educational settings for our
students is we're trying to find this middle place between a highly prescriptive context,
where it's about like memorization and imitation on the one hand, because we know that's going to
suppress creativity. But we also know on the other hand, what's going to suppress
creativity is, you know, what we could call like the terror of the blank page, right? Like if
there's too much sort of freedom of possibility, that can be as inhibiting of creativity
as can the over prescription. You know, when I started my PhD, I always sort of think back to
this moment. When I started my PhD and that for anybody who goes to get a PhD, that is kind of a
moment that is going to require creativity, exactly the way we're talking about it. By
definition, it has to be an original idea. And then you've got to produce this document on the
basis of this original idea. And the first time that I sort of was like, I'm going to come up
with a proposal. I just, you know, and I'm confronted with the terror of the blank page.
I was like, I'm just going to go for it. I'm just going to start writing and keep writing.
And it was awful. It was just awful what I came up with, because there was just no
structure at all to kind of guide what I was doing. The second time after I got the feedback
from my advisors as to how awful the first one was, the second time I decided I'm going to create
the bibliography. I'm going to create all the readings that I want to cite before I even get
アイデアと文献リストへの考え方
to the idea. Like what would be the ideal set of readings that I would love, whatever I produce,
to have to cite in order to get to that idea. And at least for me, that created like enough
structure and enough anchoring and enough inspiration that it was like possible to
proceed without that terror of the blank page. And I would give this advice to my doctoral
students from then on, like, you know, don't worry about the idea, worry about the bibliography.
If you get a bibliography that you love, the idea will come, right? Like, because you've created
that space, the set of associations that your mind can start playing in.
Right, right, right, right. Yeah. So when you were, especially in your academia career,
yeah? And when you were, I guess you were in a way teaching, teaching, because your expertise,
your area of expertise was education, right? What would you say was, say, the key
learnings that you had about teaching somebody?
You can think about like a business case. So I taught a lot of cases in business schools.
That's an artifact, right? You've got a lot of people who are bringing their own perspectives,
their own views, their own background to this common learning object. And the insights that
emerge are from the conversation around that learning artifact. And there obviously are a
lot of different kinds of learning artifacts. As I would move from teaching at business schools
to teaching at Apple, there would be products that would be learning artifacts.
Obviously, for those who are in the world of design, this is a very familiar methodology
for learning, like design critique. You bring a lot of people around a common work,
and you create conversation and different views. And that's what drives the insight and the
creative thinking forward. But at least for me, it was a new insight that almost regardless of
what you teach, you should be thinking about what do we want to put in front of people as the basis
for discussion, whether or not it's an image, whether or not it's a video, whether or not it's
an interesting piece of text, whether or not it's a business case. And then it's Socratic
conversation around that. It's a lot of questioning. It's a lot of pushing people
on their thinking. It's finding the different views in the room and trying to
get them to work against one another. That, at least for me, became the way in which I would
think about transformational educational experiences, and where we feel we walk out
of the room different than when we went in. We have different views, different perspectives,
different ability, different insight. That's how I think about it.
Yeah. So just to dig deeper into the idea of having a learning artifact, something tangible,
right, whether it's a piece of text or a thing or something, a piece of music could be,
and the conversation around that. Can you think of a scenario, like if you were teaching something,
you know, pick a topic that whatever you like, right? And what would be a scenario where,
and the types of artifact that you would choose to teach a certain subject matter?
画期的なイノベーションについての考察
One of the favorite classes that I taught when I was at Apple was a class called Innovation and
Amplification, which was essentially around what makes innovations really revolutionary.
And I co-taught this class with Greg Christie, who headed up Apple's human interface team for
over 15 years. So, you know, Mac OS and iOS, that was Greg and his team. And he retired from
Apple in 2014, except for this class that he and I would teach together. And in order to get people
to really reflect on what makes an innovation really revolutionary, rather than just, you know,
kind of hype or, you know, we said like, let's pick, you know, just great innovations. So we'd
look at the printing press, we would look at, you know, the Apollo rocket, we would look at radio,
we would look at like SX-70, the automobile. And so to take, you know, one of those examples,
like the printing press, which I think anybody will regard as one of the most significant
innovations in history. In fact, it's kind of the innovation, you know, so when people are talking
about, you know, AI, they're talking about it is, is it as revolutionary as the printing press,
right? So everybody knows this is the benchmark. And yet, if you take a copy of Gutenberg's Bible,
and like you take a page, and you compare it to the page of a scribe's Bible at the same time,
and you put the two pages right next to each other, it takes a while to even start seeing
any difference at all. And so you put this in front of people, and you say, like, this is
arguably, you know, as revolutionary and innovation as has occurred in the last thousand years.
And yet there's hardly a difference to at first view between a page from Gutenberg's Bible,
and a page from the Bible that a scribe wrote at the same time. And then you get people to reflect
on what does this tell us about innovation? What does this tell us about, you know, how we should
be evaluating what's important, and what's significant in an innovation being truly
revolutionary? And that would be one example, because you'll get people sharing different
views. You'll get people saying, like, wow, I thought like really revolutionary had to be
like way out there. It had to be this crazy. It's like, no, it doesn't have to be way out there.
It's got to be based on a new set of fundamentals. It's got to drive a new logic. It's got to enable
new possibilities. But it may not on the surface, originally appear that different from what went
before. But until you've got people looking at it and really seeing them side by side, you just
イノベーションの教え方
don't get that insight. Interesting, interesting. So in that example that you just mentioned,
printing press is such a famous example that people can understand quite easily. And the
question is, how do you become innovative? How do you create innovation? And we would teach about
Central Park at Apple University. Central Park was motivated by a very big idea,
which was that democracies could sustain great public spaces. Because prior to Central Park,
there was this view that democracies could destroy beautiful public places. Because
if everybody could come in, you just couldn't sort of sustain the number of people.
But Vox and Olmstead, the landscape architects behind Central Park, they believed really
strongly that this powerful idea that if you designed it right, you could create this sublime
feeling in the senses that would allow for this very peaceful commingling of the classes.
But in order to create that feeling, there was more gunpowder used in the creation of
Central Park than the Battle of Gettysburg. And it was the largest pumping operation in North
America until its time. And among the things that had to be done was the suppression of those
roadways, the transverses that cut through Central Park. And if you've gone into Central Park and
you've compared the experience of walking through Central, you know exactly how Central Park creates
that feeling. Because you can be 20 feet away from one of those roadways, and it doesn't affect
your experience of nature. So to me, that's a really powerful example of one, by the way,
an artifact that we can sort of talk about and reflect on. Two, it's a powerful example of
this original idea of democracy can sustain great public spaces, but now it needs to be
skillfully executed. And part of that skillful execution is this massive volume of gunpowder
and pumping to create that particular space. And so that's certainly how we would
teach about innovation. And I believe that's how our students and our conversations
would start to unfold, which is, so you've got something you want to make better. You now need
個人の学生の創造性の向上
to approach it differently. You're going to let the idea be the guide. And now, what's the
technology? What are the resources? What are the tools that you have at your disposal to start to
deliver on that? That's thinking different, right? That's not being guided by
sort of tradition, convention. It's not assuming what has been, can be, and so on. Does that example
help? Yeah, very helpful. You were talking a little bit about how you would
teach innovation at a corporation like Apple, that way you work for a long time, but more on an
individual level, how do you get, and this may be going back to your teaching days at
universities, but say like when you are teaching a group of students, and it's not just about a
group of students, but you're also teaching individual students, right? How do you get them
to be better, not just better academically, so to speak, but better creatively as individual students?
What are things that you encourage them to do to get from point, you know, level A to level X?
At the end of the day, you know, I think probably the most important thing that you can do, and
frankly, this would be a classroom or a team, but probably the most important thing you can do
to really foster people's creativity is you bring them into contact with others who have
different views and are skillful enough in presenting those other views that they can
actually change minds. It's one thing for a class or a team to be diverse. It's another thing,
it's a higher thing for a class or a team to have diverse views where the members of that class
or the members of that team are skillful enough to change one another's minds through some
combination of rigorous thought, tact, emotional intelligence, and if you get a team where people
are capable of doing that, or a class that as a teacher you try to foster where people are
capable of doing that, that's a powerful experience for the people who are part of it.
In an academic setting versus like a corporate setting, right? I would assume in an academic
setting the dynamic among different people, say the professor or the instructor,
and then there are students. And at least among the students, I would assume the hierarchy is
less of an issue. Whereas in a corporate setting, I would also assume the hierarchy is more pronounced.
I would say how can people under the management, how can they do that to present a different
perspective? For the employees, I think there's probably two things, especially if it's in a
company with a strong sense of hierarchy. And if it's in a company, I often talk about this as
debate cultures across companies can differ a lot. And one of the ways in which they can differ is
what's the threshold in terms of the level of execution of the articulation of the new idea,
the case that needs to be made, how high does that have to be in order for somebody to propose it?
And one of the things about very high-level companies is the threshold is really high,
right? People feel it. You better have a lot of evidence. You better have a lot of data.
You better have fought this one through if you're going to make that case. So you practice.
I mean, you practice. The first time you have that debate, the first time you make that proposal,
the first time you challenge should not be when you're in the room with the senior leader.
You should test each other out. I mean, you should get a partner. You should get a group.
You should start working on it, practicing debating, right? There should be no challenge
that the senior leader makes that they haven't thought of and worked through and discussed.
And because the minute the senior leader comes up with something new,
that will be taken as evidence that they haven't thought about it enough, right?
So show you've thought this through thoroughly. Again, it's not going to solve all problems,
but I think that gets you a far way. Yeah. What I was going to ask was,
you switched from academia to a corporate setting at Apple. But hypothetically, and you start your
own company a couple of years ago with Honor Ad. But say hypothetically, if you get recruited by
another fairly major corporation, and perhaps not as successful or, quote unquote, creative as Apple.
And let's say this is a company that's been around for a couple of decades. They were
successful. Maybe they are sort of stagnant now. And if your remit was to introduce creative
thinking and to ignite innovation, what would be, hypothetically, the course that you might
design for that organization? So I would try to create a curriculum
that also gave people, again, that opportunity to practice debating, to practice challenging
one another. Corporate settings is sometimes you can have people individually who are hugely
creative in university, but they don't work together as much. And so what a corporation
can do, what a corporation can be, is it can be guided by a real strong sense of common purpose.
And if people find real meaning and passion and connection to that purpose,
that becomes the anchor. That becomes that bedrock of constraint on which we can all be creative.
Because we're always going to go back to that common purpose as the check for, is this idea
driving that forward, or is this idea just different? And so maybe that's a roundabout
way to come back to your question. I think one of the most important things you'd want
in that curriculum is reinforcing that deep sense of common purpose. And then if you can get that,
and then you can foster that skill in collective engagement and debate and changing of mind,
then you've really created the foundation for that cultural transfer. But I think you need
both pieces. I think without the common purpose, then you've got a debate society.
You need that common purpose, right?
Debate society, yeah. Okay. So what I took away is purpose, debate, or cultural debate,
or the platform for debate. What will be the next thing?
専門知識への尊敬
I think you also want a real reverence for expertise. To me, reverence for expertise
is different than hierarchy. Reverence for expertise is we're trying to give essentially
the airtime to individuals based on the degree to which they're capable of making a contribution.
And over time, people's ability to do that changes. In the beginning of my career,
I can make a contribution within a relatively small area, and I can get better, and I can learn,
and I can get better. And then I can make a contribution on a bigger stage.
But I think one of the things that sometimes happens, I don't know if it happens in Japanese
companies, it certainly happens in US companies, is you can go too far in thinking that every
individual is equally poised to make sort of a great contribution. And then what happens is you
kind of miss out on those moments of just really brilliant insight that can only come from
experience, expertise, and having been through a lot of debates and challenges over time.
And again, it's a fine balance to walk, right? You can go too far in either direction. Does that
make sense? Yeah. This is giving me a lot of thoughts in terms of how I design my own company
as well, and how I approach the clients that I work with. That was part one of my conversation
with Joe Polanyi, the founder and the CEO of Owner Education. In this conversation, he talks
very crisply about very abstract concepts. He uses examples, what he calls artifacts, to make his
point clearer. But still, the topic that he was talking about was very high level, and at times
very abstract. And it took me a while to digest and really understand what he was talking about.
Usually, when I summarize my conversation with a guest, I try to boil down to three takeaways.
Instead, today, I decided to boil this conversation down to three steps of making a company more
creative. The question that I asked him during the conversation was, if you were to be hired by
another company that has, say, many years or many decades of history, but that may be struggling,
and your job was to teach that company to be more creative, what's the course that you would design?
What are the steps that you would go through? And he gave me, as he was thinking out loud,
what came to be fairly crisp steps of teaching creativity. Number one, common purpose. Number
共通の目的
two, culture of debate. And step three, reverence for expertise. Common purpose, he used an example of
the design and the build of Central Park as an example or an analogy of how an individual
created something that is so big, but also that has lasted many, many, many decades. And I live
in New York City, so I get to see the current existence and current incarnation of Central Park,
but the purpose that this landscape architect had wasn't so much designing a park, but the challenge
of creating a public space where democracy can sustain the public space over time. If it's a
public space and it has democratic access to anybody and everybody, it's usually the case that
the order and the beauty of that public space, it's very difficult to maintain it. However, his purpose
was to create this great public space where democracy can help sustain that over time.
The public space itself was just a means to test and prove that democracy can work in that regard.
So having a common purpose. And you have heard in this episode as well as the next episode,
Joel repeating the phrase common purpose. So that's number one. Step number two is to create
a culture of debate. I got a sense that even before he got to Apple, when he taught at multiple
universities among students, he encouraged this culture of debate. He also mentions the difference
between diversity for the sake of diversity, having different individuals from different backgrounds,
but also diversity of thoughts. It's more important to have diversity of thoughts than just having
diversity of people as it stands. Because different thoughts working against each other and pushing
each other to challenge and debate, not necessarily argue, but debate to make it better. So creating
that culture of debate is step number two. Step number three, what he calls reverence for
expertise. What he means by this is having different people play different roles in the
context of an organization, having experts to do task A or this role B or another responsibility,
having different individuals with different expertise really be accountable and own
that expertise and for other people to have reverence and respect for that expertise.
So number one, common purpose. Number two, culture of debate. And step three, reverence for expertise.
These three steps, common purpose, culture of debate, reverence for expertise, when you hear
these, they might sound quite obvious. But as I was listening to him talk about, hey, how would you
create a program in an organization in order to foster creativity, these three steps make a lot
of sense. And they might sound somewhat obvious to many of you, but it was the first time that
somebody articulated very clearly, you know, such a high abstract concept in a very crisp and clear
terms. And I was able to take away these three steps of making a company more creative as
something that I could do in my organization, as well as clients and organizations that I work with
in order to foster and encourage creativity. This was part one of my conversation with
Joel Polony, the founder and the CEO of Honor Education, and a very accomplished educator in
academia and at Apple. In part two, we go into what he learned at Apple, including specific episodes,
what the difference between debating and arguing is, and what makes a company good at what he
calls collective creativity. So stay tuned. I am Reina Moto, and this is The Creative Mindset.
See you next time.
