The Art of Creativity 5: Creativity at Work (Part 5 of 5)

This is Part 5 of a 5 Part Series on Cre­ativ­ity. Click here to read Part 1.

“People will soon get tired of star­ing at a ply­wood box every night.”— Daryl F. Zanuck, head of 20^th Cen­tury Fox, com­ment­ing on tele­vi­sion in 1946.

The need for cre­ativ­ity is chang­ing how the work­place is orga­nized and what peo­ple do. These changes cen­ter on the use and inter­pre­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion: the basis for ideas. A company’s future depends upon how well it acquires, inter­prets, and acts upon infor­ma­tion. Today the spread of infor­ma­tion technologies—including com­put­ers and data bases—is bring­ing about a sea of change in the busi­ness world.

Yet how work­ers inter­pret that infor­ma­tion is as impor­tant as the infor­ma­tion itself. Inter­pre­ta­tion is, in fact, a cre­ative act. But the degree of cre­ativ­ity is influ­enced by our feel­ings: our belief that we can speak with­out fear of ret­ri­bu­tion, our feel­ing of being trusted by oth­ers, a con­fi­dence in our own intu­ition. All effect how we respond to the infor­ma­tion before us.

There are many ways in which the cre­ative spirit can find expres­sion in the work­place: inno­va­tions in man­age­ment, improve­ments in dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods, or new ideas for financ­ing a busi­ness. Cre­ative ideas can also be used to strengthen the orga­ni­za­tion itself by increas­ing the ini­tia­tive of work­ers. One such inno­va­tion is the elim­i­na­tion of restric­tive job descrip­tions that put work­ers in “boxes” and limit their per­for­mance. Another idea is to share all finan­cial infor­ma­tion with all of the employ­ees. Elim­i­na­tion of tra­di­tional cor­po­rate secrets helps work­ers to under­stand the larger real­ity of the busi­ness and encour­ages them to gen­er­ate ideas of their own to reduce costs and increase revenues.

Since cre­ative problem-solving requires the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mit­ment of the whole per­son, the mod­ern work­place must undergo vital changes. From the efforts of pio­neer­ing com­pa­nies around the world, a set of key ideas are emerg­ing that can change the psy­chol­ogy of the workplace.

Small is bet­ter: Size affects cre­ativ­ity in the work­place. Big­ness by its very nature appears anti­thet­i­cal to the effec­tive expres­sion of an individual’s ideas. The best unit for cre­ative work seems to be at the scale of the extended fam­ily, where peo­ple can get to know one another.

This sug­gests that large cor­po­ra­tions be bro­ken into smaller, semi­au­tonomous units. An advo­cate of this approach is Jim Collins, a lec­turer at Stan­ford University’s Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness. “As our soci­ety has evolved from small orga­ni­za­tions to large ones,” he says, “it has sti­fled inno­va­tion. Of course, there are economies in doing things on a mass scale. But you lose one thing: that cre­ative tip. Mas­sive­ness breeds conformity.”

Climb­ing together: A close-knit team, draw­ing on the par­tic­u­lar strengths and skills of each mem­ber of the group, may be smarter and more effec­tive than any indi­vid­ual mem­ber of that group. Yale psy­chol­o­gist Robert Stern­berg calls it “group IQ”—the sum total of all the tal­ents of each per­son in the group. When a team is har­mo­nious, the group IQ is high­est. That places a pre­mium on a leader who can cre­ate a smoothly work­ing team: a leader who knows the virtues of shar­ing, trust, and encouragement.

The value of col­lab­o­ra­tion is a hard les­son to learn in cul­tures like ours, where the trail­blaz­ing lone hero has long been idol­ized, and where the goals of the indi­vid­ual are so often placed over those of the group. But even those work­ing alone can learn the advan­tages of teamwork.

Van­quish­ing neg­a­tiv­ity: Apart from the struc­ture of a com­pany, the atti­tudes that per­vade its oper­a­tions can enhance or thwart cre­ativ­ity. One of the keys is build­ing feel­ings of trust and respect to the point that peo­ple feel secure enough to express new ideas with­out fear of cen­sure. This is because in the mar­ket­place, imag­i­na­tive thoughts have finan­cial value. But an unimag­i­na­tive, unre­cep­tive atti­tude destroys oppor­tu­nity. Some­one who judges your imag­i­na­tive thoughts, who refuses to lis­ten to a new way of think­ing or sim­ply crit­i­cizes it, is a cre­ativ­ity killer of the first order. Cyn­i­cism and neg­a­tiv­ity are ene­mies of the cre­ative spirit.

Valu­ing intu­ition: The capac­ity for mak­ing intu­itive deci­sions is a basic ingre­di­ent of cre­ativ­ity. Intu­ition is trust­ing the vision of the uncon­scious, let­ting go of the self-conscious con­trol of the think­ing mind. It is so often opposed in the work­place because it can’t be mea­sured or quan­ti­fied or ratio­nally jus­ti­fied. But it has the ring of truth because it is grounded in the abil­ity of the uncon­scious to orga­nize infor­ma­tion into unan­tic­i­pated new ideas.

Oper­at­ing a busi­ness in the global arena demands inno­v­a­tive ways of under­stand­ing and respond­ing to the needs of peo­ple. Busi­ness peo­ple who know how to lis­ten to their cus­tomers rather than just study fig­ures and sta­tis­tics will have a splen­did future, and those who are able to draw on their intu­ition will emerge as nat­ural lead­ers in this new busi­ness environment.

Many work­ers are no longer in search of a job that is sim­ply a source of wealth, sta­tus, and power, but rather one that—apart from assur­ing a decent living—offers a sense of mean­ing and a plat­form for indi­vid­ual cre­ativ­ity. Pro­duc­tion as an end itself sat­is­fies nei­ther of those desires.

But there is a grow­ing gap between what many busi­nesses see as their pur­pose and what more and more peo­ple want in their work. The larger that gap, the more alien­ated peo­ple feel from their work and the less of their cre­ative energy is avail­able. If a busi­ness fails to change the envi­ron­ment for its work­ers, it may find it dif­fi­cult to get or keep the best people.

Anita Rod­dick, founder and pres­i­dent of the Body Shop Inter­na­tional, puts it this way: “I don’t want our suc­cess to be mea­sured only by finan­cial yard­sticks. What I want to be cel­e­brated for is how good we are to our employ­ees and our com­mu­nity. It’s a dif­fer­ent bot­tom line.”

From the Cre­ative Spirit, by Daniel Gole­men, Paul Kauf­man, and Michael Ray, copy­right © 1992 (Dut­ton).