As individuals, we are creative, as managers, we are compliant innovators.
See video Full Screen.
We, in a way, are all farmers and hunters at heart. To survive (Darwin), we have to eat, defend ourselves from other species, and create and organise tribes.
We forgot all about this. The abundance generated by the industrial revolution detached ourselves from our basic survival instinct.
What is the price though, that we, as a species are paying for producing abundance?
In its role of turning us into doctors, professionals, managers, CEOs, etc. education had to kill the creative genius within us and replace it with rules, knowledge, and standardised procedures.
The emphasis here is on knowledge-duplication, and not creating understanding (forget about fostering creativity). Multiple-choice tests have pushed students (MBAs are no exception) to prepare for the test and not for building understanding.
In our engineering-driven, and efficiency-centred workplaces standardisation replaced creativity.
While making mass manufactures rich, compliance has killed our ability as individuals to diverge, to think differently and even worst to show and pursue our differences. We are living in a paradox - while pursuing the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - creating smart robots; we are giving up on our creative brain.
While striving to create a machine that can emphasise or even feel, we forget to do that ourselves; we are losing our basic human instinct.
As we all know though, we as human are resilient, and despite all the effort to kill creativity, this will never happen.
Can you recall the last creative moment you experienced? Was that in your private or working life?
