Creative Reaction

Some of our recent posts have discussed the importance of  exposing yourself and your team members to new ideas and experiences. Today, we’ll discuss a hurdle to this, namely, perfectionism.

It is a well-known fact that perfectionism can keep us from finishing projects that we work on. It wasn’t until I read How to Suck at Anything, that I realized perfectionism can also inhibit us from trying and learning new things. When perfectionism is coupled with competitiveness, as is the case with me, it can result in even more missed creative opportunities.

So learn to be comfortable with not having mastered something and/or not being the best at it.

“Sucking is absolutely necessary. There’s no way around it. In order to get better at anything, at some point or another you’re going to have to suck. That’s just the way it is.”

Encourage your teams to suck.

Last May, in Walt Disney Had Three Heads, we looked at a post discussing success in both creativity and commerce. This week I came across another such exploration where the whole “heads” analogy breaks down and where “personality traits” or “roles” is a better choice of words.

Take a few moments to read Deconstructing Creativity: The 4 Roles You Need to Play to be Fully Creative, where blogger Luicano Passuello takes a look at Roger von Oech’s theories.

A few days ago, in Surrounded by Inspiration, we offered some ideas to encourage managers to nurture the “Explorer” role in their team members. Deconstructing Creativity should help management and executives think in ways that ensure their businesses as a whole address all four personality traits.

Creativity and business success are not mutually exclusive.

Don the Idea Guy offers 10 Idea Inspiring Lightning Rods, a list of ways to constantly expose your creative self to potentially inspirational ideas.

Though this list is aimed at individuals, it works on a number of levels, and even more powerfully, for creative companies. Many of the ideas can be incorporated into the work environment; others could be used as social activities. Your company could:

• share magazines and paperback books
• arrange lunch hour or after-work museum field trips
• hold book discussions
• have show & tell once a week allowing team members to inspire one another
• play word games as teams
• have a variety of music on hand
• attend lectures
• participate in Pecha-Kucha
• create a Wiki of inspirational ideas and web sites
• take classes together (or even offer them on-site!)

Please add your own ideas in the comments!

It’s such a simple thing, yet we often allow ourselves to get “too busy” to take care of fundamentals such as feeding our souls. Managers, do your part to inspire those around you!

John Cleese gave an excellent presentation at the Creativity Worldforum in Belgium and excerpts of it are embedded here.

Cleese’s background as a scientist has allowed him to observe his own creative process and present some ground rules for creativity.

It’s encouraging to find that he is in 100% agreement with that we’ve been presenting here at Creative Reaction for the past three years. He speaks of the dangers of interruptions. He also speaks of creating the proper environment for creativity; creating boundaries in space (separation from distractions) and boundaries in time (setting a start time and a time to finish). Without these conditions, creative reaction will be inhibited.

Most importantly, for managers of creatives Cleese offers two profound insights. The first is “to know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing.” And the converse is true as well. ”If you are absolutely hopeless at something, you lack the exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely hopeless at it.”

In other words, we are all blind to any lack of expertise we may have. There’s no point in bluffing. Those who truly excel can call  you out.

The second insight describes a pandemic issue in many advertising agencies.

“If the people in charge are very egotistical, then 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.” I’ve seen this first-hand. The impact this makes on creative output as well as morale is devastating. (In fact, it explains some of the career choices I’ve made.)

Humility, a willingness to learn, and giving others credit are not only valuable lifelong skills, they are also the basis for collaboration and learning together as a team. Without them, everyone is working against everyone else. Managers beware!

Be sure to watch John Cleese’s presentation.

At Fast Company, an excellent article with a somewhat misleading title discusses the futility of overworking, especially within a creative environment.

In order to use your time and energy effectively (not efficiently) your brain needs some “breathing room”. This means a healthy lifestyle (exercise, rest, healthy eating habits), healthy relationships, as well as time to brainstorm, and have fun at work. (Click on the effectiveness tag below for related articles.) Without these activities, you are all but eliminating opportunities to “see patterns, make connections, and read what (your clients) want”.

Still unconvinced? Ask yourself, “how often do I have a great idea at work or at my desk?” If you come up with your best ideas in the shower or at home in bed, then there’s something wrong with your workplace.

It really bugs me when I see lists of how NOT to do things. Sure it’s an attention-getting device, but it is one with a completely negative undertone, requiring translation of all the negatives into positives. Besides, you can’t tell people to not do something negative. It doesn’t work. You can’t say to someone, “Whatever you do, don’t think about man-eating cows”; he is going to think about man-eating cows! Instruct people to do something positive, so they can do something positive!

So, I’m translating this otherwise excellent blog post into positives.

Ten Steps to Allow Creativity to Flourish:

1. Brainstorm constantly. Focus on one issue at a time for best results.
2. Praise new and unusual ideas. Even if they are incomplete or flawed, give them some breathing room.
3. Stress innovation, even with its inefficiencies. Innovation is supposed to be a little sloppy. (See below.)
4. Manage mistakes. Allow them to happen; in fact, encourage them. They are an inevitable part of pushing boundaries. Learn from them. Do not create rules to prevent them except in mission critical areas (or issues of public safety and medicine). Most importantly, teach mistake recovery.
5. Hold loosely onto plans. Better yet, build a prototype rapidly and cheaply, learn from its shortcomings. Reiterate, rinse & repeat.
6. Look to competitors, other industries, and academia for ideas. The buzzword for this is Open Innovation.
7. Find fresh brains! Recruit outsiders. People in an industry tend to think alike and to be blind in all the same ways.
8. Lead transparently. Share the business’ successes and problems. Work together to find solutions.
9. Stress health. Encourage breaks, adequate rest, exercise and socialization – both inside and outside of the workplace.
10. Train, train, train. Train people about your culture. Train them to lead. Train them to further your vision when you are gone.

Just in time for the weekend, designer Stefan Sagmeister describes how he leverages year-long sabbaticals to boost his creative thinking. Check out this great TED video.

Supposedly it’s “common sense” that critical thinking suffocates creativity. Mark McGuinness has a great essay over at Lateral Action explaining how and when critical thinking plays a role in the creative process. Most importantly, he defines “creativity”, “creative thinking”, “critical thinking”, “criticism”, and “negative criticism”.

He also touches on a hugely important issue – that of corporate culture. Sadly, there are organizations that punish for mistakes, “wrong answers” and even attempts to innovate. (Click here for related articles.)

One company that successfully combines creativity and critical thinking is Pixar Animation Studios, in its extremely iterative process, where each animator’s work is screened in front of the entire department and all are encouraged to comment. (Now, you must first understand that a core value at Pixar is creating an atmosphere of trust, and people at all levels help one another.) According to Pixar President Ed Catmull these screenings offer many benefits:

1. Once people get over the awkwardness of showing their unfinished work, they become more creative
2. The director or creative leads can communicate important objectives to the group as a whole
3. creatives learn from and inspire one another to do their best

So Mark McGuinness is clearly on to something here; “the function of critical thinking is to make something better. Used wisely, your critical faculty is one of the most powerful creative tools at your disposal”

Great post over at Zen Habits explaining how simplifying, constraining, and focusing are tools to boost creativity. Many of the tips can be used by creatives for brainstorming and day-to-day creative work. Others should be noted by managers to make sure they are creating the proper conditions for creative reaction to happen.

The research of Harvard University’s Teresa Amabile on the effects of management, and especially time pressure, upon creativity has been cited a number of times here at CR, so it’s good to come across additional research which both confirms it and refines some of the findings.

Keith Sawyer’s Creativity & Innovation blog summarizes (but does not link to) a 2006 study entitled “The Curvilinear Relation Between Experienced Creative Time Pressure and Creativity: Moderating Effects of Openness to Experience and Support for Creativity” . (An 8-page .pdf)

Without giving too much away, The ability to handle time pressure depends upon how open creatives are to experience, and even then there’s a “sweet spot” for the optimal amount of time pressure. Sawyer does a great job summarizing the research. Check it out.

I came across this zeldman.com post via Daring Fireball, and while it’s from the perspective of a writer and web designer, it applies to any creative-for-pay endeavor. It makes a powerful case for results-based work (the opposite of presenteeism). A must read for any manager of creative sorts.

For a metaphorical approach to this very topic, take a look at Coffee and Creativity.

And  since we’re kind of on a “you can’t rush art” theme here, take a look at Pixar’s “How We Do It“.

Lately I’ve been running into the research of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the more I look into it, the more fascinated I am. Much of it validates the values expressed here at Creative Reaction.

So, what better way to introduce him, than by letting him speak for himself? Click here to see his 2004 TED Talk.

As you’ll see, Csikszentmihalyi’s big thing is “flow”, which I find to be more descriptive than “being in the zone” (uh, where’s that, exactly?) or having a “creative streak” which could be either something in your hair or your state of dress/undress. Of course, we all realize that what’s being articulated is more commonly known as “Creative Reaction”. We expect that academia will eventually catch on. 

Nomenclature aside (wink), an intriguing video!

Lateral Action has an article detailing Walt Disney’s three “personalities”, which allowed him to be successful in both art and commerce:

• The Dreamer - the visionary who dreamt up ideas for films and business ventures.
• The Realist - the pragmatic producer who made things happen.
• The Critic - the eagle-eyed evaluator who refined what the Dreamer and Realist produced.

The article draws upon a book by Robert Dilts, who studies “Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) (which) explores the way people sequence and use fundamental mental abilities such as sight, hearing and feeling in order to organize and perform in the world around them.”

Quoting Dilts, “Walt Disney’s ability to connect his innovative creativity with successful business strategy and popular appeal certainly qualifies him as a genius in the field of entertainment. In a way, Disney’s chosen medium of expression, the animated film, characterizes the fundamental process of all genius: the ability to take something that exists in the imagination only and forge it into a physical existence that directly influences the experience of others in a positive way.”

So my only question is, which one of the heads got frozen?

Idea Connection has an interesting, yet long and wonkish interview with Keith Sawyer, author of “Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation”.

Sawyer uses an inter-disciplinary approach as a means to scientifically study something as elusive as creativity and de-bunks of handful of creativity myths.

Quoting Sawyer, “The creativity myths are not just wrong, they’re dangerous because they make us all believe we have no hope of being creative. If we’re not playful and childlike, if we’re not a bit schizophrenic or depressed or alcoholic, if we’re not always having flashes of brilliant insight, then we don’t seem to fit the mythical image of the creator.

The good news is that these beliefs aren’t true. Successful creators are stable, happy people; after all, being creative is just about the most fulfilling activity a person can engage in. ”

Another interesting tidbit, especially in this Web 2.0 age:
“My own research shows that creativity, more often than not, emerges from interactions of lots of people who come together in “collaborative webs.” This has been true throughout history; but now, the Internet makes the process happen so much faster.”

Despite the length of the interview, which I’m having trouble plowing through due to a late afternoon energy slump, Sawyer’s research seems both solid and fascinating. I just put his book on my Amazon Wish List. Now for some fresh air.

(Find out more about Sawyer  and his book.)

Seth Godin has an excellent post on the Art v. Commerce debate. What’s great is that it isn’t polarized. Some things are truly difficult to monetize and some are easier. Sometimes monetizing what you do ends up corrupting it. Sometimes you can try to make money in the same business as something you love, and you can still end up being miserable. Ultimately, there has to be a market for what you love do and you have to execute it in a way that is profitable. Read the post here.