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So as we’re thinking about building our creative capacity, we can actually develop something I call our CQ. You’ve heard of IQ or our capacity for our intelligence. You’ve also heard of EQ, our capacity for emotional empathic action. Well, I believe we also have a CQ, a creativity quotient. And this is really a shift in our mental models and our mindset. It’s the beginning of you actually becoming a systems designer.
The 5 Layers of Building CQ
So your CQ, your creativity quotient actually begins with gratitude. So an exercise I often encourage people to do is to take an ordinary object in your immediate surroundings. For example, it might be the shoes I’m wearing. It might be a pen on your desk. And think about all of the people, the thinking, the activity that made that particular object possible. And now you see that you are part of a much larger ecosystem.
We think about these as a series of concentric circles. After gratitude, we get to humility because when you realize that you are a smaller cog in a much larger system, it builds your capacity to be humble and to realize that there are so many other factors and variables at work that make yourself and your work possible. The third circle, after gratitude and after humility is curiosity. Because once we build our capacity for humility, we are not embarrassed anymore or ashamed to ask a question. We understand that we don’t have all the answers and that questions are inputs into a system. And if we want to get greater, more innovative output, we must be willing to ask new and different questions and we must encourage that from our team and others around us.
After curiosity, we then realize that curiosity is the precursor to empathy. Before you can empathize with a soul, you must be curious. You must have the ability to ask a new and different question, such as why do they do it that way and not our way? Why do they sit over there and not over here? If we can’t even ask the question, we actually can’t walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. And finally, after building gratitude, humility, curiosity, and empathy comes the final layer of building our CQ, action. We have a very activated and energized way to go about our work so that we are building fully, not just for ourselves but for the entire organization, a creativity quotient or CQ.
Scaling CQ
If you’re wondering how you could make CQ core to the way your organization works, I’m going to take a tip from my friend and colleague, Warren Berger, who says that he believes that instead of having a mission statement we should actually be having mission questions. What if you build into your mission every single layer of the CQ. If there is a way that you build into your mission the ways that you are grateful as an organization and who are the inputs that make your organization’s work possible.
After that gratitude statement, how are you now humbled in seeing yourself as part of this larger system? And build that out to the big burning question that your organization wants to answer. And that necessarily leads into empathy. Empathy for each other, as well as empathy for your clients. What’s the question that you’re trying to solve for your clients and for your customers that makes you want to do the work that you’re doing and then the final action that your organization is going to take? This is one example of the ways that you can activate CQ on a much larger scale in your organization.