The Various-Minded Leader

Jeff DeGraff has long considered The Odyssey — Homer's ancient epic of the hero Odysseus's long voyage home from the Trojan War — “the greatest work written on innovation leadership,” a view the business school professor and innovation author renews in a Fortune commentary prompted by Christopher Nolan's recent film adaptation of the poem. The movie, he writes, recalled another time when the world was awash in ambiguity and leaders had to navigate a perilous voyage across unfamiliar territory.

Over 30 years ago, before DeGraff had published any of his books on innovation, he was asked to present at the Aspen Institute as part of a summit on “Tomorrow's Corporation.” The speaker lineup included an Oxford don, a Harvard strategy professor and a New York Times reporter — along with DeGraff, then the lone representative of the young and technologically adept, unencumbered by conventional wisdom. The implied theme was the disruptive effect of the rapidly emerging internet and the imminent dislocation of the familiar commercial landscape.

He called his talk “How Far to Ithaca?” — the island home Odysseus spends years trying to reach — and opened with a simple proposition: there is no data on the future, that is where innovation happens. The greatest obstacle to genuine transformation, he argued, is getting stuck in the planning cycle — the meeting about the meeting, the report about the report. The better and the new are seldom found in the safe harbor of the planning meeting. They are discovered well beyond the bounds of the strategic map, where the winds shift, the old answers sink and the pilot must find the way by dead reckoning.

DeGraff then advanced his central thesis: Odysseus as the archetype of the modern leader, driven off course by outrageous fortune and forced to adjust his plan as he went along. To describe this form of active and adaptive creative thinking, he coined a term — “creativizing.” The Aspen presentation, he admits, “was a shipwreck, but somehow the term made it to shore.”

In the decades since, DeGraff has studied the problem as a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, written books about it and worked with organizations trying to innovate when the old answers no longer work. Along the way, he has come to understand creativity as more than something people possess — a noun. It is something they practice. Creativizing frames the act of creation as generative: a verb. People “Martinize” cocktail attire, “winterize” vehicles and “modernize” organizations; the suffix transforms a condition into an action. Creativity in action becomes creativizing.

Like many of his generation, DeGraff first met the intrepid hero Odysseus in tenth-grade English, where culture was poured on thick alongside Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. His teacher, Mr. Johnson, declared that “The Bible and The Odyssey are the cornerstones of Western civilization” — perhaps a slight overstatement, DeGraff allows, but pointing in the right direction. Johnson read the class the invocation that opens the epic, asking the Muse to tell the tale of the “various-minded man.” When the students struggled with the phrase, the teacher suggested that Odysseus was a “clever man” — a small word, DeGraff notes, for such a large character. Creative, quick and devious come to mind. Clever people figure things out: they move around obstacles, sometimes following the rules, sometimes working around them, and sometimes inventing new rules.

Different Monsters Require Different Minds

That brings the story to today. Many leaders believed they knew the way to their own Ithaca: earnings, market share, sustainability. But there be monsters along the routes once taken — forces, many of them with us since antiquity, that are seldom factored into the course: plagues, wars, calamities. Nothing goes according to plan.

The Cyclops Polyphemus renders the strength of Odysseus' crew insufficient, much as expertise that took a company decades to develop can suddenly be commoditized. AI appeared faster and bigger than most anticipated, even in its nascent form: the ten years spent perfecting a proprietary process can now be replicated by an upstart with an AI algorithm — “and they can do it before lunch,” DeGraff writes. Old maneuvers are no match for it. Business models and strategies have a shelf life and go sour like milk left out too long. When more of the same will not work, look at what is at hand with new eyes and act in novel ways the monster could not imagine. “You don't defeat the Cyclops by becoming a bigger Cyclops,” he argues. “You beat him by seeing what he can't.” That is creativizing.

The Sirens seduce Odysseus' men with their sensuous song, much as synthetic intelligence tells people exactly what they want to hear. Certainty is an aphrodisiac: it attracts with plausible opportunities, plays to preferences, and delivers what is desired — even if it means coming undone on the jagged shore of misfortune. Ask a favorite AI engine about an acquisition that seems to make sense, DeGraff notes, and it returns a cogent, persuasive case for why the choice is right — a personal echo chamber “supporting all the nonsense you already believe.” Odysseus, understanding the real danger, had his crew plug their ears with wax and had himself lashed to the mast, ordering his men to ignore his pleas to be freed. The most dangerous voice is the one telling you what you most want to hear. “Before you can outsmart the monster, you must outsmart yourself.” That, too, is creativizing.

Then there is the most dangerous monster — the one that does not appear to be a monster at all: alluring and enchanting, like the nymph Calypso, who offers the hero comfort, sanctuary and the possibility of immortality. In modern terms, she is a legacy business, a dominant market position, a prestigious institution — the very expertise that made an organization successful. As one lingers, motivation wanes until the company fades into Kodak, Blockbuster or Nokia and becomes a story of the past. Like Odysseus, leaders lose themselves in the ease of where they are until they choose to leave before circumstances make the choice for them. That is creativizing.

Yet the greatest of these monsters is Poseidon himself — the great disruptor, the earth-shaker and master of the stormy seas. He is change itself, arriving in forceful shifts: geopolitics, competitors, regulations and, sometimes, technologies like AI. It is foolish to provoke him, DeGraff writes, and more foolish still to ignore him, for he is constantly changing the conditions of the voyage. Odysseus survives them all not because he is prescient, but because he can actively adjust his thinking to meet the circumstances. That is creativizing.

What Would Odysseus Do?

Odysseus was making it up as he went along, DeGraff observes, and rarely knew exactly what he was doing — as the winds of fate will do to any leader. What makes him the epic's great hero is that he knows how to proceed when he doesn't know: the practical discipline of moving ever onward in the face of ambiguity. That is creativizing.

So what does the various-minded leader do when the map runs out? DeGraff points to four questions:

1. Where is my Ithaca? Have a clear sense of what you are trying to achieve, but don't confuse the destination with the route to it. Persist toward Ithaca, but be prepared to correct your course as the winds and circumstances change.
2. What monster am I facing? Every monster has unique strengths and weaknesses, and each demands a different response. Diagnose the monster before deciding which mind and which move are required to outwit it.
3. What can I do with what I have? Inventory your assets before asking for more resources: people, networks, information, capabilities and technologies. Recombine what you already have in new and unexpected ways, then make the next intelligent move.
4. What is the voyage teaching me? Every maneuver reveals something the map cannot: a hidden challenge, an unforeseen opportunity, an unexpected detour. Pay attention, learn from what happens, and let what you discover guide your next move. The point of the experiment is not just to produce a better result — it is to develop better judgment about what to do next.

That is the deeper meaning of creativizing: what we create creates us. The entrepreneur creates the business, but the business creates the entrepreneur. The leader changes the organization, but the organization changes the leader. The technologies we create to extend our capabilities can either enlarge our judgment or diminish it.

Odysseus creates his way home, but along the way, the voyage creates Odysseus.

The opinions expressed in Fortune commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This article was originally published on Fortune.com.