Tania Katan is an established thought leader who helps organizations bring creativity to the workplace, using her unique approach to assist all types of companies in generating innovative, imaginative breakthroughs. Tania’s new book, Creative Trespassing, came out this year and quickly became an acclaimed best-seller. A dynamic personality, Katan is also a highly sought keynote speaker who spreads her positive message to a wide range of audiences, ranging from major conferences to universities to Fortune 500 companies.
1) In your TEDx Talk It Was Never a Dress: The Power of a Poetic Leap of Faith! you discuss several opportunities that you’ve accepted throughout your career that have benefited from approaching problems in unexpected and liberating ways. For someone interested in benefiting from the approach you take to a new challenge, what’s a good warm-up exercise/trial run they can perform to get a taste?
There is an exercise that I included in Creative Trespassing, it’s something that I learned when I was taking a cultural anthropology class in college. On the first day of my cultural anthropology class, the professor was like, “Why don’t you describe one of your typical college rituals to someone as if they just landed on this planet?” And everybody was like, “Oh, so weird.” But what happened was it freed our minds up to come up with these outlandish ways of framing pretty typical college rituals. For example, we were like, “Okay, we hurl our bodies towards each other at 80 miles per hour from the inside of a pod made out of steel and aluminum.” That was how we described driving. This exercise totally shifted the way I went on to observe mundane customs and rituals. This new tool turned everyday experiences into weird and wonderful activities. I now advocate approaching your workplace in the same way—as if you are a cultural anthropologist in the field.
Go to work, bring a notebook or field guide, a pencil and fresh eyes. Walk into the space and approach your work rituals as an objective outsider who just landed on the planet. Role-playing in this way, see how you would describe and engage in these pretty mundane rituals. I guarantee you that it will shift your perspective that work is boring. Furthermore, it will challenge the idea that what we do can only be done in a certain way. Instead it will make common tasks seem wild and wonderful.
I was doing this exercise with Uber engineers at a retreat, and an employee said, “Oh, I want to share my experience,” and the observation went, “I wake up in the morning and I drain this container, and this brown sludge comes out of it slowly. I look at it with longing, and then I take the sludge and I pour it down my throat, and all a sudden I’m energized.” What a great way to describe coffee. I think that the weird and whimsy and wonderful things are already there, if we just look for them.
2) For those unfamiliar with your latest book, and/or the concept of Creative Trespassing, what does it mean to be a creative trespasser? How do you introduce the concept to someone for the first time?
First, it is so easy to be a creative trespasser. In fact, I’m certain that anyone reading this is probably already is a creative trespasser. The only thing necessary is that you break the rules that need to be broken in order to spark greater innovation, inclusion and joy—especially in uptight environments. I would add that a creative trespasser is somebody who sees (or learns to see) our flaws, our awkwardness and our scars as superpowers. These things are foundational to creative trespassing.
3) In your book, you have various rules that are helpful when mastering creative trespassing. I really like Rule 20, Pay Your Dues Attention, because I think in many instances where we perceive drudgery, the remedy is simply a mindset shift or some form of deliberate inspiration. Taking the rule a step further, what are some basic strategies you found useful to achieve this (instilling joy into otherwise dreary tasks)?
The chapter title is Pay Your Dues Attention, notice Your Dues is crossed out. When we’re approaching or perceiving tasks and jobs as drudgery or crappy, the first step is to see. To see obstacles and/or the drudgery as opportunities. I have a degree in theater with an emphasis on playwriting. Foundationally, when it comes to story, you don’t have a play, you don’t have a film, a book, you don’t have anything that’s interesting unless there are obstacles to overcome. We need obstacles; otherwise, there are no epiphanies, there’s no journey, no story to tell. Seeing obstacles as opportunities along the journey, that’s the first step to approaching drudgery in a more exciting way.
The foolproof way is to ask “what if” questions. It’s my special tool. It’s your tool now, too. It’s super easy to use. When you’re approaching a task that’s either difficult or maybe it’s something unengaging, ask a “what if” question. For instance, “what if” instead of my job being the worst job ever, “what if” it was the best? It’s a question I actually applied to a time when I was working in a cubicle, and I was brought into the organization actually to think outside of the box and then they stuck me inside of a box, the smallest box ever!
In that case, I thought, “What if instead of the cubicle being the crappiest place in the entire institution, what if it was the best place? In fact, what if I made that a performance space?” I kind of went on this inquiry of “what if” and ended up creating a really fantastic online series that was called Out of the Cubicle. This awesome thing stemmed from this seemingly shitty situation and applying “what if” to it.
4) In your work as a “disruptor” at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA), you share an anecdote about a colleague concerned about your work ethic during that period. This co-worker shared with your boss at the time, “She’s not working, she’s just having fun,” even though “fun” was exactly what was getting your employer such extraordinary results. Why do you think so many people believe that fun and work have to be mutually exclusive?
Well, first of all it wasn’t just one colleague. It was colleagues, plural. It was some folks on the board of directors and probably a few concerned citizens on the ground. I couldn’t understand why what I was doing in executing my job was so confrontational just because I was having fun while doing it. I had a sense of humor and joy about my work and for some those are not appropriate behaviors for the workplace. During that experience, I learned that joy is confrontational to people who are not choosing to bring it to work.
I blame the Puritans. I think about why people have such a difficult time understanding that work and fun can be connected as opposed to mutually exclusive. We are trained in this way; to stay in our lanes, silos, stuck in systems. So many of us are still stuck in that puritanical mindset emphasizing hard work, frugality and diligence. Does that sound like fun? Hell no! Do we get more work when we become human machines? Double hell no!
We’ve come a long way since the early 1900s. We have a choice of how to approach the work that we do, so we can leave out the fun or we can actually infuse it. In fact, it’s been proven that we’ll get more work done when we are functioning in a state of joy. As such, for those of us that want to be productive, it’s our duty to have more fun and find joy in the workplace. To all the Puritans reading this, sorry…now get back back to work!
There is a really beautiful study conducted by Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman that supports the idea we are all born creative geniuses. Land’s study was initially set up to find the best, most divergent creative thinkers for NASA. It was successful enough he applied some of the methodologies to study 5-year-olds. He gave a bunch of 5-year-old kids this test that had all these divergent thinking problems—basically asking these kids to come up with as many solutions and ideas as they could. At 5, 98% tested at genius; at 10, 30%; at 15, 12%; and adults, 2%. What Dr. Land concluded is that we are born creative geniuses, and we spend our entire life losing this superpower.
The study was actually the impetus for me to write Creative Trespassing. I’ve found myself working in organizations and companies that championed rigidity. As a result, they weren’t getting the best out of their employees, and they didn’t allow or invite a space for their best employees to bring their skills from outside of their job inside. It’s vital that we are thinking and engaging in creative ways as we move forward to counter the erosion of our creativity.
5) Your story from SMoCA also highlights that people have a ranging appetite for fun—especially when it comes to the workplace. Fun is also a subjective construct, meaning what is considered fun for one person could be drudgery for the next. What advice/considerations do you have on maximizing the co-creation of joy and fun with others in these types of environments that support inclusion?
I was working at a company where the CEO was like, “Let’s have lunch together. Let’s do this together. Let’s do that together. Let’s do everything together.” Even though I’m pretty extroverted, I need input and insights from outside of my environment in order to do my job properly. I don’t want to be around the same people all the time. My way of taking breaks is walking outside of the building and wandering or sometimes going to a coffee shop and having conversations with people who are not my colleagues—people I don’t see every single day. My boss got really upset, it was very passive-aggressive. I found out I wasn’t the only one in the company that wanted a cognitive break from the environment and I inadvertently started a walking revolution there. Slowly everybody who was tired of being stuck to their desk started asking me, “Tania, where do you go? Can I go with you?” And I’m like, “Yes, you can.” Years later, I would learn from my wife, the director of the Museum of Walking, that there’s a great study out of Stanford on the benefits of walking for your creativity. Walking can disrupt patterns and routines that are keeping us stuck. Taking a walking break has the potential to increase our creativity by about 60%.
When I was hired by a contemporary art museum to create promotional programs, I was given no budget, no team and some people were against the effort from the beginning. I had to assemble my own team to not only serve my role at the museum, but to survive. What I found was when you work in a museum, there are a lot of people who don’t have teams and who don’t have budgets and many who are volunteering. I started to talk with the docents who are generally volunteers but serve as the backbone of most museums. Through having fun and developing relationships, I built my team by making friends with an AV guy who worked at the theater across the street and then I recruited an intern. It was a good team. That’s what I’ve done to co-create is assemble my own team. Building your team is omething that anybody can do. We don’t need permission or a budget. In my professional life, I have a team of people that are my friends. I’ve assembled a group of friends who are diverse in every single direction. They challenge me, keep me accountable and cheer me on. I show up and do the same for groups of people, too.