If someone were to be asked how creative he or she is, the answer could range from a feeble ‘I don’t know’ to ‘How dare you ask?’ In all fairness, the question itself is pretty uncreative, except when a person takes a test to measure her/his creativity for her/his own understanding followed by subsequent action.
Another deadly question: “Why can you not be creative, John?” An even more snide approach would be a performance appraisal form with statements like “Though Sam is quite dependable and robust handling day to day issues that aren’t too complex, he lacks creativity.” This is followed by a counseling session where the boss says, “Sam, you must try and be more creative.” Just think about it, is it enough to tell Sally that she isn’t creative?
Here’s another scenario. You come up with a great idea, and your boss buys it. Wow! It is then tried out in a small way and it works. You have saved the company thousands of dollars and are rewarded.
Now comes promotion time. All of a sudden, your boss who normally puts Shakespeare to shame when giving negative feedback, gets terribly tongue tied, and fumbles for words. A feeble “well done” escapes his quivering lips and his quivering quill. Hey, but wait a minute, you say, I have done a great job, and I think I should be considered for promotion to Area Manager. “There, there”, says the boss, “you are an ideas man, Mike. What we’re looking for is someone sound and solid, someone who can be relied upon.” Does he mean someone who tows the party line, who doesn’t rock the boat, in short, someone who is as boring and dull as the boss himself.
Another great approach to killing creativity is for the boss to proclaim after a creative idea has been implemented successfully, “Hey, but this is sheer common sense. There’s nothing special or great about it. Let’s get on with it, guys.” Yeah, well, no one required wheels before they were invented. Sure, the lowly wheel is no great shakes, though humanity can’t survive without it today.
How can such behavior and policies foster any creativity? Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t seem to be the fate of such organizations. Well, the human mind is designed to be brilliantly uncreative, as Edward de Bono teaches us. If that were not true, we couldn’t survive. Most tasks are repetitive and mundane - driving, tying one’s shoelaces, recognizing words and pictures, names and faces ---- the list is endless. But it is this very property of the human mind that renders it incapable of being naturally creative.
Tragically enough, the human mind becomes more and more uncreative with age. Which led Sigmund Freud to say: “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
Here’s some more evidence. Listen to Victor Palmieri, the corporate turnaround specialist: “Strategies are okayed in boardrooms that even a child would say are bound to fail. The problem is there is never a child in the boardroom.”
Incidentally, creativity does not come without curiosity. How many human resource managers make an attempt to get curious people into the portals of their corporations? How can they when they are browbeaten by boring CEOs who want boring policy manuals so that the staff can put in Herculean efforts to peddle their boring wares in even more boring ways in the crowded and increasingly competitive marketplace?
No, no, no. The answer doesn’t lie in more insulting controls and stifling behavior patterns. LET GO ought to be the mantra to enter the market.
How about rewarding three people from your organization who did very well last year, go off on a six-week paid sabbatical every year? Their job would be to wander around the world, observing and watching, maybe learning some new skills in some far-off distant land. Canon’s initiative to go into the personal copier business was born far away from corporate offices in Japan.
How about having a head office like Berkshire Hathaway? This behemoth boasts of a market cap of $700B and houses 25 people at corporate headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is 1200 miles away from Wall Street! Enough said about overpopulated headquarters!
How about a “Think Park” at work? Why not set aside a nice little room where people can remove their throat blocking ties and smelly shoes, wander around, and think freely? Leave an IDEA JOURNAL there so that people can write down whatever wild ideas they get whenever they get them? Then put together a company IDEARNAL [IDEA JOURNAL] every quarter by compiling all the ideas that hit the journal. Next on, get ten member groups to work on the IDEARNAL to weave through the ideas and tame wild ones, to make them worthy of further consideration. Let small teams of three to five persons then take these away, work on them for a couple of months, and report back their findings. It is easier to tame a wild idea than to invigorate a timid one.
All of this is common sense. But we all know that common sense is fairly uncommon!
If you'd like to explore this theme in more detail, here's a video I put together on this very topic. Hope you enjoy.
