« Right Brain Workouts

John Cleese on Creativity

By Peter Lloyd

The brilliant creator, co-star, and co-author of Fawlty Towers and the front-and-center member of the Monty Python team appears in a video titled John Cleese WCF speaking to a Flemish audience about creativity. From his talk I‘ve gleaned three recommendations, plus an explanation of why bad leaders discourage creativity.

You’re just as welcome, of course, to get the gist of what John has to say in about two minutes from below.

1. Sleep On It
While writing Fawlty Towers Cleese discovered that when he went to bed with an unsolved script problem on his mind, he invariably would wake up with the solution. Not only that, he often could not remember what was the problem. For this reason, he recommends sleeping on your problems.

2. Don’t Stop Now
After losing a just-written script, Cleese was forced to rewrite it from memory. Later he found the original and compared it with the rewrite and judged the rewrite as remarkably better. He attributes the improvement to his unconscious mind continuing to work even after he had decided the work was finished.

Cleese doesn’t spell out a recommendation based on this event. So I’ve done my best to conclude what he might have recommended had he summed up what he learned from rewriting his script—Don’t Stop Now. Obviously if a work gets better after your unconscious has a chance to noodle it, why not try again?

3. Avoid Interruptions
The greatest danger to creative success, Cleese says, is interruption. He has found that when someone or something interrupts his creative work, it is very difficult to pick up the creative flow when he resumes. The more complex the work, the more difficult the resumption. He recommends working where you can create an oasis, a place where you can get into the creative mood that works for you and work uninterrupted. A place he calls your tortoise enclosure.

Why bad leaders discourage creativity
Finally, the master of comedy offers what he calls a profound insight. Namely that to know how good you are at something requires the same skills required to be good at it in the first place. This insight reveals its profundity more resolutely when reversed. Quoting Cleese:
People who have absolutely no idea of what they’re doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea of what they’re doing.
Cleese says this explains a lot about life. Let me add that this creative blind spot also explains why some bosses, teachers, and all sorts of people in positions of power stand in the way of creativity.

Regarding some teachers, Cleese suggests that they “do not realize that they themselves are not very creative and, therefore, they may not value creativity even if they could recognize it.”

As for certain other people at the top, “they want to take credit for everything that happens and they want to feel that they are in control of everything that happens, and that means, consciously or unconsciously, they will discourage creativity in other people.”

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
Next Workout »
Newsletter Sign Up

Join 40,000+ subscribers who receive our Open Innovation Newsletter every other week.

Subscribe