The professional lives of blood bankers are dedicated to the pursuit of a safe and adequate blood supply. The professional, and often the personal, lives of Cirque du Soleil artists are dedicated to the pursuit of passion. Both communities work in laboratories of creativity, according to Lyn Heward, former president and chief operations officer of creative content for the entertainment company, during her presentation at this year’s Annual Meeting.

“Blood for us is passion,” she said, explaining that the 4,000 artists, technicians and designers associated with Cirque du Soleil “all seek but one thing: to live and to contribute creatively to artistic works that evoke the imagination, provoke the senses and evoke the senses of people around the world. “We do the same thing as you,” Heward explained. “You do it inwardly and Cirque does it outwardly.”

Creativity and originality are essential to the success of any work place, whether it be in a blood establishment or a theatrical stage. The key is to promote, practice and harness creativity to the extent that it becomes a way of life. Heward said the growth and accomplishments of Cirque du Soleil during the more than two decades the company has been performing can be attributed largely to seven principles, which she illustrated with a variety of stories and anecdotes from traveling tours and shows around the world.

“First of all you must have great expectations,” Heward said. “My firm belief is that everyone has a wellspring of creativity you can tap into.” Much like exercise, practicing creativity every day enables one to become gradually strengthened by it. “We walk into a room like this one and we consider how we would redecorate it. We decide how to enter a conversation. We design a show or a business plan. We plan a dinner party or a garden. We’re all searching for something but we don’t know what that is,” she said.

Second, it is important to make certain our “creative antennae” are tuned so we can develop our intuitive senses. Heward said she infused herself in the sensorial wealth of the world when she visited China on a mission to recruit acrobats. “We visited a small village and I was overwhelmed. It was a change of centuries,” she said, describing the smell of dumplings cooking in pots over open fires on the street, the sweet music of giggling children at play, the sight of elderly women practicing Tai Chi and stout men pulling carts laden with goods.

She later was treated to a private performance of the entire symphony orchestra of the China Republic, music inspired by the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of the musicians’ homeland. “The message to me was what our senses absorb in our daily lives is processed and returned to us by creative gestures in the future,” Heward said. “I realized, intuitively, that designers at Cirque and creative ‘designers’ at your business are always stimulated. They’re like sponges.”

After developing the senses, at the heart of Cirque du Soleil’s activities is something the company calls treasure hunting and creative transformation. “We don’t do recruiting or talent identification in the traditional sense,” Heward said. “We scour the world in search of ideas and inspiration to serve as our driving force and we cast a long line to identify talented individuals who can ensure richness and longevity, seeking out the most precious of pearls.”

All potential employees at Cirque are put through a rigorous and exploratory hiring process, where candidates are evaluated not only on their level of talent but on their core human values applicable to the job at hand. “We look for the ability to work together in a team, the courage to take risks … for their willingness to share creative ideas among themselves,” she said. “They are not hired for who they are now, but for who they might become and how they could contribute to the work in progress.”

Heward’s advice for all managers is to foster the application of creativity to everyday tasks and problems. “By promoting the two notions of treasure hunting and creative transformation, you’ll be making a long-term investment in your team and in the growth and success of your company.”

Another guiding principle for Cirque du Soleil is the nurturing environment, one that enables staff to be carefully assessed for how they could contribute even more to the business. “Part of our responsibility is to nurture and build, to create an atmosphere that is conducive to productivity, creativity and personal growth,” Heward said. If you nurture someone, you give them a “strong sense of responsibility for the company’s successes or failures.”

Nurturing others is accomplished in part by helping team members stay connected. “All artists, before they move on from Cirque, must give a private performance for our 1,800 employees. It gives them an experience where they can thank the 1,800 people who supported their development, because a lot of people contribute to a person’s development, or to every discovery or every invention, and you keep them connected by keeping them close to the product,” she explained.

Despite the manpower Cirque employs, constraints, differences and changing consumer expectations have an impact on its activities. “But these things can become creative catalysts,” Heward offered, acknowledging that some of Cirque du Soleil’s best ideas have come out of moderate resources. Many years ago, Cirque was asked to create a water show for the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. After six months of work, the designers presented their proposed idea to the sponsors, with 30 drawings illustrating three minutes of a 90-minute water show depicting the relationship between men and water. When the sponsors found out the show as designed required a $60 million budget, they said it had to be done with a reduced budget of $25 million instead. “So we packed up and went back to the proverbial drawing board, but as someone said, there are always two solutions to a situation,” Heward said.

Rather than spending a lot of money on fancy lights for the water show, the company chose to use thousands of tea light candles instead. “Which of these two ideas most represents Cirque? Strangely, the answer was simple. The tea lights evoke the imagination and we always say that evocation is more powerful than actually creating the sensation,” she explained. The lesson learned from this experience, Heward noted, is that in the long run, defining some limits and setting guidelines can help spark a new level of creativity and define the playing field.

Trying new ideas also involves risk taking, one of Cirque’s guiding lights. Heward, who wrote about a book about the experiences of the company’s artists, said she didn’t fully understand the power of risk taking until an artist colleague of hers explained how an accident during rehearsal led him to new levels of creativity. The man, who performed martial arts with fire, was badly burned when the stage at the brand new Kodak Theatre was not properly treated before his performance, yet after the accident he adapted the show to enable him to continue with the scheduled performance. Later he told Heward that “you may make the odd mistake, but it will lead to new creativity.” As Heward explained, risk taking is defined as the balance of power between success and failure. “You forge ahead, make a few mistakes and learn from them. We call this research and development.”

At the end of the day, creativity is also about “keeping it fresh.” Success through creativity is as much about considering the evolution of the market and allowing new employees to contribute “a little bit of themselves” to the work. The most passionate creative leaders, Heward said, never lose sight of the vast human potential around them and encourage the fresh flow of ideas. “This is my challenge to each and every one of you,” she said, “because you, too, can make a creative difference in your own team and in your own life.”