Interview: Sir Ken Robinson

But successful is not how he began. Matt Groening began as a bored schoolkid. Bright but bored, getting through lessons by furiously pencilling cartoons.

His family wanted Matt to get a proper job, a solid profession but Matt said: “I saw grown-ups with briefcases going into office buildings and I thought – ‘I can’t do that. This is all I really wanna do’.�

As Sir Ken is keen to point out, not everyone can drop out, dream up a dysfunctional yellow family and re-write the history of television.

The Paul McCartneys or the Mick Fleetwoods or Gillian Lynnes or the other people Sir Ken cites as misfits who found their “element� are the banner-waving poster boys and girls of the importance of discovering the person you should be.

The message of Sir Ken’s book The Element is that it’s just as vital for the rest of us to find that ellipse where the circle of our talents overlaps the circle of our passions.

Like finding the right combination for a safe, when everything clicks into place, unexpected treasure pours out.

Sir Ken says: “One of the things that always struck me was that many adults were unaware of what their true talents might be – what they’re really capable of doing.

No particular relish

“A lot of people just get by, doing the thing they do with no particular relish – it’s something they may have wandered into or ended up doing and yet I also meet people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else and they are in their element and I was always interested in what the difference is.�

He gives another example. A woman, maybe of a certain age and a certain girth tells Sir Ken on a radio phone-in that she wants to be a ballet dancer.

Sir Ken is no snake oil salesmen or peddler of impossible dreams. His solutions are pragmatic.

The internationally acclaimed leader in creativity and innovation has worked with governments and blue-chip companies. Although a resident of LA, the 58-year-old was born in Liverpool and was knighted in 2003 for his contribution to education.

So he talks hard sense to the wannabe ballerina, drills down and discovers that she won’t make Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells but, because her love is fundamentally of music and movement, maybe she could take up salsa classes. And that might be enough to open up new opportunities.

But that’s just one side effect in exploring personal capacity.

He says: “One side is the potential for personal fulfilment where we’re doing things that we’re meant to do and, unless we do that, we don’t really know who we are – but secondly potential for the health and vitality of our communities.

“Lots of people congregate with no sense of purpose or cohesion and we know the price we pay for that.
“There’s also a hard-headed economic argument for the potential for growth and vitality and especially for innovation so it’s about an issue that is of wide significance.�

And this is why this book is selling well at a time of recession – when it would appear that dreams were playthings for better days.

The opposite is true. Doing what has always been done got us to this place. Doing something extra or different is needed to get us out.

“I make analogy with natural resources – there’s a crisis in human resources – people make partial use of themselves and corporations make very poor use of the talent within them. The other way this analogy applies is that natural resources, like human resources, are very often buried quite deep you have to go looking for them and sometimes it take someone else to notice it or to create an opportunity.

“If you’re working in business these days you simply can’t afford to have a linear view of the world, you need people who can roll with the punches and can help figure out new strategies and work collaboratively and who can think creatively.

He adds: “The world is littered with the corpses of organisations which tried to stand still.

“It’s about having a different view of the talent and capabilities of people in the organisation.

“Time and again, if you give people a different thing to do then you see a totally different side to them. And often people get locked into their job and their department.�

He cites examples of companies that help their employees explore other aspects of their creativity and potential.

This isn’t West Coast new age airy-fairy thinking suitable for the good times when there’s cash to splash. No, he argues, this is hard-headed business thinking – taking the fixed-cost available resources and deriving more value from them.

He challenges business to question what they’re doing and how it may dull creative thinking and innovation.
He says: “I think of it in two ways. One of it is habits – the habitual behaviour of the organisation, the hierarchies, the departmental divisions the way the information travels around the system. The business culture – the way things are done that people take for granted.

“The other is the habitat the actual physical environment which is often reinforcing the culture and, in some ways, the best shift is to change the physical environment so people are working together. There are things that make people think the way they do and as soon as you get to the bottom of that things will change.�

Redundancy

For some, who may lose their jobs in the upheaval, there is no choice but to question the status quo.

Sir Ken says: “People who are heading towards mid-career or they’ve found themselves outside of a job for a while it’s the perfect time to be taking stock.

“When many of the old avenues are closing down and many of the old expectations have been frustrated there’s no better time to back your own intuition about things you now might be good at and worth pursuing.

“There are examples in the book of people who have changed direction and changed track and who thought – ‘well, I’m going to try it now’. Someone said to me this is the worst time to be arguing these things but it’s the perfect time.�

So how do you go about that process. For Matt or Paul or Gillian, the passion became clear. How about the majority, whose potential has been buried beneath years of nine-to-five routine.

Sir Ken says: “It’s a two-way journey – it is a case of spending some time on personal reflection. If people look inwardly and spend some time thinking about the times they felt most engaged or things that they wished that they had done but didn’t or things they wished they had a go at but hadn’t and why that is.
“We tend to take our own interests and talents for granted – we think that if I can do that, anyone can do that and it’s not the case.

“The second thing is the more outward look – asking where I would try these things and make an attempt. Somewhere in that matrix people will start to discover things about themselves they hadn’t thought of before. It’s the old maxim: what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail.�

CASE STUDIES

Leader in innovative thinking Sir Ken Robinson gives examples of organisations which had devised schemes to explore the potential of their employees.

He says: “There is one design company I did some work with in New York. They had an internal ‘university’ – a series of on-site programmes, seminars and workshops.

“What it meant was that people on the staff were able to take courses in pretty much anything that was relevant to the company’s work – the finance department taking copywriting courses, people from copywriting doing finance programmes.

“There were people in the copywriting department or graphic design department who were hopeless with finance were suddenly getting their heads straight.

“They created an internal market for talent so people weren’t locked into their initial job descriptions.

“A friend of mine runs an architectural firm in New York – 50 people on the staff – and for years they’ve had this practice where every member of the staff each year got a $2,000 stipend and they can spend it on anything they like that would help with their personal or professional development.

“They can go hike up the Himalayas if they want, they can take a spa, it’s up to them. The only requirement is that they have to make a presentation to the company about what they got from it.

“The result of it is that firstly everybody in the company feels as though they’ve been given a gift to explore something that interests them. It enhances their sense of professional integrity and wellbeing but also it means the company itself is having a constant influx of fresh thinking.

“Every week people are sitting for a couple of hours listening what people went off to do and how it might help the company. So it’s a way of keeping the culture fresh and renewing it.

�Big corporations like Proctor and Gamble have innovation modules to recognise the old maxim that best resource of the company is the people and keeping their minds fresh and alert and engaged is essential to the health of your organisation.

“Companies are as prone to death as any other organism and we’ve seen a lot of that in the past few months.�

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica and published by Allen Lane, £16.99