Before attending a recent learning session, I knew nothing about the speaker, Erik Wahl. Thus, I had very little expectation as to what was going to happen. In other words, I had to “unthink” before joining the session, which coincidentally was the main topic Wahl focused on that day.
During his inspirational performance and speech, I learned that he was once a corporate employee who lost his job and essentially lost his way, until one day he picked up a blank canvas and a set of the paintbrushes. He knew nothing about art or painting, but he did not look back at all. Today, Wahl has become internationally recognised as a thought-provoking graffiti artist who helps artists and corporations to rekindle their creative fire.
According to Wahl, 100% of kindergartners can draw but the ability decreases as we get older. If every child is an artist, when do we lose our imagination? When do we stop trusting our intuition and allow just knowledge and statistics to rule our lives? And most importantly, how can we remain a child when we grow up?
Essentially, on the day that Wahl first picked up his paintbrushes, he wasn’t just taking up a new hobby; rather, he found his breakthrough moment by overcoming his fear. For him, fear is “false evidence appearing real”. In other words, fear is just something your mind makes up. Once you can defeat your fear, you can conquer anything, or you can unleash the hidden potential that you never you existed.
Now, let’s put his idea into the learning and development context. The picture is clear: we were traditionally taught to be risk-averse, always required to find the one “right” answer. This thinking prohibits us from getting out of our comfort zone. An organisation filled with such people will have a disengaged workforce.
The prevailing systems in which we live and work are fundamentally unquestioned. It is more or less like an assembly line within which people are given a job, a list of responsibilities, and a manual on how to carry them out. We end up executing by way of a “traditional” or “we’ve always done it this way” approach. We embrace the system, get bored, and after a while we learn to accept this unsatisfactory existence as a necessary evil.
In a nutshell, we lose our dreams, our passion and our inner creativity as time goes by.
So, how can we tap into creativity and innovation for learning and development and prevent fear from paralysing our creativity?
Erik Wahl’s advice for us all is a simple call to action: Unthink! He asks us to be provocative and to keep learning and trying without thinking too much. Don’t fall into the trap of classroom training, studying predetermined, off-the-shelf modules that end up irrelevant to you. Instead, learning and development sessions should be carried out in a way that can ignite our inner childhood creativity.
Wahl’s advice to people who want to learn in a way that helps them keep growing and developing is simple: “Fail fast, fail often, and fail forward is a must.” In other words, we need to be willing to fail. If we are not failing, it means that we are not willing to take risks. If we are not willing to take risks, we will never get to experience success.
At this point in the presentation, I was so inspired by his “unthink” concept that I had to seek more information about it online. I found that Wahl himself purposely coined the term “unthink” simply to raise people’s curiosity as well as to urge them to open their minds. This is because once you say the word, people instantly ask “What is unthink? What does it mean?” Here, I think what he’s trying to do is to make people travel to the space between critical thinking and creative thinking.
Last but not least, he further emphasised that creativity is a powerful tool when it comes to building emotional engagement, particularly in terms of employee and workforce retention. “[T]he more employees are emotionally invested in the why and mission of the brand, the more they give, the more they're willing to overcome adversity, the more they're willing to not just be an average employee as they've become emotionally engaged. That's what makes good organisations great.”
All in all, creativity is a key differentiator, not only for only organisational success but also for individual achievement. It is creativity that allows us to think outside the box and it is creativity that leads us to exploration or lifelong learning. Isn’t it time for us to unthink or unlearn what’s not working anymore in order to be able to relearn something else a little more meaningful?
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, e-mail arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th. For daily updates, visit https://www.facebook.com/apmgroupthai