THE 6 MYTHS OF CREATIVITY
Creativity’s reputation as a mysterious, unknowable trait (something of a myth in itself) has led to some erroneous ideas about what it is and how it functions in organizations. Here, Professor Teresa Amabile quashes some of these long-held beliefs once and for all.
Creativity Comes from Creative Types. Field research shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells.
Money Is a Creativity Motivator. The experimental research that has been done on creativity suggests that money isn’t everything. In the diary study, we asked people, “To what extent were you motivated by rewards today?” Quite often they’d say that the question isn’t relevant — that they don’t think about pay on a day-to-day basis.
Time Pressure Fuels Creativity. People are least creative when they’re fighting the clock “on a treadmill,” having a fragmented day that doesn’t allow them to concentrate on a single important problem. In our research, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover — when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down on that day and the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem. Generally, creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up. We did find one rare kind of time pressure that does seem to help creativity: that of “being on a mission,” concentrating on a truly important problem for a defined period of time.
Fear Forces Breakthroughs. There’s this widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity. There’s even some psychological literature suggesting that the incidence of depression is higher in creative writers and artists — the depressed geniuses who are incredibly original in their thinking. But we found that when people are excited about their work, there’s a better chance that they’ll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day’s happiness often predicts the next day’s creativity.
Competition Beats Collaboration. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that’s destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization. We studied a 6,000-person division in a global electronics company during the entire course of a 25 percent downsizing. Every single one of the stimulants to creativity in the work environment went down significantly. Anticipation of the downsizing was even worse than the downsizing itself — people’s fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. Unfortunately, downsizing will remain a fact of life, which means that leaders need to focus on the things that get hit. Communication and collaboration decline significantly. So too does people’s sense of freedom and autonomy. Leaders will have to work hard and fast to stabilize the work environment so ideas can flourish.
—Adapted from Fast Company, December 2004.
