As my colleague Steve Denning writes, we all now work in a Creative Economy. Creative is surpassing traditional business and financial economies, with its innovation-seeking “ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment, discovery, and collaboration.”
It’s not just media, advertising, and movie studios. Every enterprise is trying to make, sell and do things more creatively. Leaders are hustling to become more creative too. Gone are the Mad Men days when the high pay-graders in suits simply cracked the whip and pushed bearded artists and quirky writers to come up with the ideas the company would sell. Now leaders have to develop their own creativity, and also cultivate the chemistry for innovation all around them.
So what does a Creative Economy leader do to create creativity?
To answer that, I got creative myself. Instead of benchmarking the usual corporate exemplars, I thought, why not learn from a leader of unambiguously creative experiences?
Enter, Stage Right
I found a willing subject in a brilliant theatrical director, Ethan McSweeny. Today internationally acclaimed, McSweeny has been a rising star since American Theatre hailed him in 2006 as a “wunderkind with a Midas touch.” Enjoying critical and commercial success on Broadway, regional and institutional theatres around the world, this 44 year-old- talent has directed some 75 plays (classics, musicals, new works), from Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Shaw to experimental off-Broadway productions. He’s now moving into film and opera too.
Last autumn I attended his production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. With its lyrical acting, imaginative staging, and awe-inspiring dream sequences, this rendition of the romance was hands-down best I had ever seen. When I later heard McSweeny talk about staging the play, I realized his creation was not just his own clever ideas; it was also the collaborative harvest of many talented contributors he had nurtured as a “creative leader.” I wanted to know more.
A Dialogue Begins
We began a dialogue about his craft and leadership. I saw a couple of his other productions and a rehearsal of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I interviewed members of that show about working with Ethan (Adam Green, who played Puck; Joe Smelser the Washington Shakespeare Theatre’s Resident Stage Manager; and Jenny Lord, McSweeny’s Assistant Director on the production).
Through it all, I was probing the mindset and practices McSweeny brings to “creative leadership”; and also gleaning more general lessons for leading talented people to develop innovative products or services.
The insights that emerged addressed two critical questions: First, “the what”: what makes for a great creative product or service? Second, “the how”: how should a leader work with different creative people to achieve that?
What follows summarizes my findings for question #1. Question #2 will be the subject of a future post.
What Makes For A Great Creative Product/Service?
Four principles emerged from our conversations. They’re applicable for any leader developing a creative product or service:
1. Creative Leaders situate their product in a broader and competitive context. In earlier times, live theatre was literally “the only show in town.” Today, multiple visual, auditory, and other entertainment experiences compete for attention of potential audiences—television, YouTube, video games, even texting with your friends: “No theatre director should ever forget,” Ethan noted, “that we now live in a multi-mediated age. You have to stage A Midsummer’s Night Dream as a worthy alternative to someone’s experience at home watching Downton Abbey or playing War of the Worlds with friends.”
McSweeny sees today’s richer (even intrusive) media environment as opportunity as much as challenge. He strives to fuse live performance and digital, technically-delivered content and effects, as part of his signature style. As he reflected, “I have a reputation for ‘visual, large-scale stagecraft’—because I bring powerful images, across-the-stage-movement and high impact design to my work. As a child of the digital revolution, I‘m comfortable integrating video and specialized sound and music with visually-inspiring settings. But it has to be done in a way that honors the text and story.”
His comments did faint justice to the gripping sensations I had watching his productions: an Elizabethan romance reinterpreted as lovers’ folly in a noisy and louche Havana sugarcane plantation of the 1930s; a fantasy wedding of The Tempest symbolically represented by luminous 40 feet-high puppets; fairies and spirits of Midsummer Night’s Dream cavorting on chandeliers, dressed like 19th century French cabaret players, rhythmically swaying to music blended of romantic and surreal electronic sounds.
For McSweeny, visual stagecraft helps position live theatre against competitive offerings of cinema. “In a film, the director’s camera forces you to look at certain things moment by moment. In a theatre, the audience can—and does—look wherever it wants, seeing more than this or that actor talking. The theatre director can provide dramatic and visual engagement more richly, high, low and sideways across the stage picture.”
Creating Experience
2. Creative Leaders configure their products as an overall experience. The shift of businesses towards experience-driven products and services has been underway for some time. But what in fact is “a creative experience”? And how does a creative leader construct it?
When Ethan McSweeny directs live theatre, he builds an experience holistically, in often surprising ways: “I put a lot of attention into the ‘entire package,’” he commented. In fact, the “package” goes well beyond visual and auditory stagecraft. He pulls in multiple elements to support “the central premise of theatre: the actor speaking on the stage.” The play’s story, for McSweeny, is all important, and informs the auditory experience of live people speaking to one another.
But McSweeny mixes in still other ingredients, for example the contemporary conversations and narratives that people bring into the theatre with them. “They all are reading the same newspapers and watching the same events that I and the actors are. We look for opportunities to bring that wider world into each performance.”
And the timing of speech and action adds further to “the package.” Live theatre exists in time with its audience, Ethan explained, but what spectators sense and feel from performance must also “lift them ‘out of time,’ to a heightened, and exceptional realm.” The pacing and rhythm of the production are tools to create an experience both of the moment and beyond it.
Even the physical space of the theatre plays an experiential role. “We look at the shape of the stage, arrangement of seats, acoustics, how close people are sitting next to each other. We consider them all to create an intimate, group experience.”
Director Ethan McSweeny’s Cuban “Much Ado”
A Central “Theory of Value”
3. Creative Leaders build the overall experience on a central “theory of value.” To deliver a distinctive and emotionally meaningful experience, the creative leader must offer a specific “theory of value” (my phrase). For McSweeny, the actual text of the play, and the way the actors project and bring its multiple stories to life must be the center of everything. The experience should radiate out from that core.
That is perhaps not surprising. What gives his “theory of value” a special edge is the unusual constellation of ideas be believes (and trades on) to make great drama compelling. First, he explained, successful live drama must make vivid human behavior and emotions: “we attend a play to see a mirror held up to human nature itself.”
Second, what the mirror shows must be enhanced by story – but story that explores status-clarifying interactions among people. Ethan suggested that “great drama is not simply characters seeking wealth or power or similar. It’s a picture of human relationships in dynamic hierarchy, people struggling with each other to work out some pecking order, like the animal kingdom. It might be about wealth or power, but also about emotions, or romantic interest, or someone validating his intelligence relative to a foe or a friend. We’re fascinated to see that aspect of the human condition unfold in the language, gestures, and voices of actors.”
Bringing In The House
The theory of value extends beyond the edge of the stage. It rests also on portraying nature and status to touch the prejudices, anxieties and hopes of people watching. McSweeny directs his plays to enmesh both actors and spectators in the same moment of human emotion. “The actors and I always look for ways to spark laughter or other feelings collectively among people sitting together. Their joy or sorrow has to play off each other’s, and also that of the actors. The best experience is shared together.”
“Yet at the same time,” Ethan elaborated, “great theatre must also make members of the audience each feel as though they are being spoken to individually. Universal emotional truths are understood by any audience person’s specific circumstances. They become real for different people in different ways.”
Building Culture and Process
4. The Creative Leader builds the experience as an emergent process. Though McSweeny described clearly his goals and beliefs about great theatre, he was also adamant that realizing those is a team sport. Actors, stagehands, prop people, costumers, technical directors and many more all play a role in what the director facilitates. It is an iterative and collective process that the creative leader must cultivate. Through his or her guidance, all together discover a collaboration, and find a shared rhythm of group creativity. All must believe and behave so that the talents of many people sum to more than individuals working alone.
*****
This final proposition looks ahead to my next essay: about the “how” of Ethan McSweeny’s creative leadership. Please watch for it in a future post.
Originally published on Forbes.com