🎨 My chat (+transcript) with innovation expert Duncan Wardle on practical tips for corporate creativity

The future will be built on the big ideas we dare to conjure up today. We know that the most groundbreaking ideas often seemed ludicrous or simply impossible when first dreamed up, from the telephone, to human flight, to artificial intelligence. The key was a willingness to be creative and test the limits.

While many of us might not consider ourselves creative people, Duncan Wardle assures us that we can take our ideas and brainstorms to the next level, no matter who we are or what we do. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Wardle and I explore some concrete tools for breaking down our own barriers to innovation and accessing the genius within all of us.

Wardle is the former Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney and founder of ID8. He has delivered multipl eTED Talks and teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale,Harvard, and the University of Edinburgh. His interactive book, The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation has just been released.

In This Episode

* Creativity is learnable (1:37)

* Building a career of creativity (8:09)

* Tools for unlocking innovation (13:50)

* Expansionist vs. reductionist tools (18:39)

* Gamifying learning (25:20)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Creativity is learnable (1:37)

I believe we're all born creative with an imagination. We're all born curious. We're all born with intuition. We're all born with empathy. They may not have been the most employable skill of our entire careers. They are now.

Pethokoukis: One of my favorite economists, Paul Romer, loves to use recipes as a metaphor to explain how innovation works in an economy. Like cooking recipes, innovation and ideas can be used repeatedly without being used up, you can combine different ideas as ingredients and create something new. I love that idea, and I love the way you present the book as kind of a recipe book you can sort of dip in and out of to help you be more creative and innovative.

How should someone use this book, and who is it broadly for?

Wardle: Me. Seriously. When I say me, I mean the busy, normal, hardworking person who says 10 times a day, “I don't have time to think.” And often considered the number one barrier to innovation and creativity: “I don't have time to think.” And I thought, “Okay, when you walk into a business office and you will look around, where's the book?” It's on the bookshelf, it's on the coffee table — nobody reads them. I thought, “Well, that's a waste of their money.” So I thought, “What book have I ever read — nonfiction — that I could read one page, know exactly what I need to do, and don't have to read the rest of the book today?” I thought, “My mom's cookbook! You want shepherd's pie? You go to page 67.” So I've designed the contents page the same way. It says, “Have you ever been to a brainstorm where nothing ever happened? Go to page 14. Fed up with your boss, shooting your ideas down? Go to page 12.”

So it is designed to be hop in and hop out, but I also designed the principles around: take the intimidation out of innovation, make creativity tangible for people who are uncomfortable with ambiguity and gray, far more importantly, make it fun, give people tools they choose to use when you and I are not around. I also designed it around this principle and I'll see if this works: Close your eyes for me for a second. How many days are there in September?

31?

Well, we'll pretend it's 30.

Or 30! That's the one thing I always confuse, which is the 30 and the 31.

Close your eyes for a second. Just think about how you might have known there were 30 days in September. How might you have remembered? What might you have learned or what can you see with your eyes closed?

Well, if I was a more melodic, musical person, loved a good rhyme, I might've used that very famous rhyme, which apparently I don't know very

Well, that's okay, neither do I, but I'll attempt it. About 30 percent of people go, “30 days has September, blah, blah, blah, and November.” They've just told me they're an auditory learner. That's their preferred learning style. They probably read a lot. How do I know that? Because when they learned it, they were six. When I asked the question, they learned it because they'd heard it.

I'm sure you've seen somebody at some point in your life count their knuckles: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, et cetera. You may not remember this because you might not be a kinesthetic learner. Those are the people who learn by doing. Again, how do we know this? They learned it when they were six. How did they remember it? By doing it.

And then 40 percent of an audience would just go, “No, no, I could just see a calendar with a number 30.” They're your visual learners. So I've designed the book to appeal to all three learning styles. It has a QR code in each chapter with a Spotify playlist for the auditory learners, animated videos where Duncan is now an animated character (who knew?) who pops out with a bunch of characters to tell you how to use the tools. And then hopefully, as of next Tuesday, the QR code on the ba