My awareness was my creativity
A while back I watched Netflix’s sports documentary, In Search of Greatness. It’s a superb film that explores the question ‘what makes exceptional sportspeople exactly that in their chosen endeavours?’. There was of course lots of commentary on the similarities between these greats in terms of focus, encouraging/empowering parents, time in the saddle, a dislike of convention etc., but it was an outlier comment in the show that really made me pause — Ice Hockey great Wayne Gretsky’s throwaway line, “my awareness was my creativity”.
Coming from a design, strategy & systems background, the phrase really resonated with me. It made me reflect on the value of:
- recognising patterns and how/when to deviate from them
- identifying similar situations from different contexts and how they map to/differ from one another
- consciously considering the ramifications of making a challenge bigger or smaller to help reframe thinking
- challenging SMEs to acknowledge/identify perceived versus actual constraints
- identifying unspoken higher order goals (that are normally understood but not explicitly called out due to the fact that they’re tacitly assumed)
- articulating the broader system within which a problem or opportunity exists to stakeholders, to help recognise upstream causes and downstream ramifications…
…and how thinking/working in ways like this more effectively generates the creativity to solve problems.
Gretsky was an insane student of the game (as a kid, he’d draw the movement of the puck on the ice in real-time as he was watching a match on TV). As such he understood it’s patterns and behaviours to such a degree that whilst playing he could more easily see what was coming next, and then do something to consciously break or more effectively leverage the pattern that other ‘non-meta’ players were just subconsciously following during the flow of play.
…
I’d recently encountered a business challenge that was proving hard to crack. As such, I pressed ‘pause’ on trying to solve it head-on (at least I recognised that I wasn’t smart enough) and instead spent time on: (1) reading something that was intentionally adjacent to my question, (2) thinking hard about how other stakeholders were interpreting it and (3) talking with a few other people I respected that I was sure had encountered similar problems but in different contexts. New ideas and approaches then started to flow on account of the above, but I hadn’t quite cracked it. Then something lucky happened… whilst closing out these conversations I unintentionally messaged someone I was planning to talk with on the topic later — who came back to me immediately with critical touches to the approach that was starting to form in my head.
These additional layers of awareness and viewpoints were key to developing the creative/non-linear concept we came up with. Without it, I expect I’d still be trying (and failing) to come up with an answer on my own. As the 20th century American sociologist C. Wright Mills said:
“What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited”.
Gretsky’s awareness — his ability to see things unbounded from his own private orbit was central to his greatness as an ice hockey player.
The ability to consciously apply ‘creativity’ through heightened levels of awareness of the complex/dynamic situations you’re working in is, in my view a core leadership capability. Why? Because it enables senior team members to step back and ask challenging questions — the kinds that cause people to reflect on the foundational logic they’ve been using to solve a problem, then either revalidate (and carry on), pivot, or ask an even better question themselves. For me, that’s a skill worth shooting for.
