HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creative Teams Collection (7 Books)
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About this ebook
Ignite the creative spark within your team.
For your company to stand out in today's competitive environment, you need to be original. You need to have fresh ideas, exciting products and offerings, and a willingness to experiment. And that starts at the team level. HBR's 10 Must Reads for Creative Teams Collection provides expert advice on how to foster curiosity, encourage better collaboration, and use design thinking to change the way you brainstorm, test, and execute new ideas. Included in this seven-book set are:
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creativity
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Collaboration
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People
- HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People, Vol. 2
The collection includes seventy articles selected by HBR's editors from renowned thought leaders including Marcus Buckingham, Adam Grant, Francesca Gino, and Indra Nooyi, plus the indispensable article "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity" by Ed Catmull. With HBR's 10 Must Reads for Creative Teams Collection, you can break free from the usual and capitalize on originality.
HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.
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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creative Teams Collection (7 Books) - Harvard Business Review
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creative Teams Collection
Contents
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Creativity
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Teams
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2)
Harvard Business Review Press
Boston, Massachusetts
eISBN: 9781647820213
HBR’s 10 Must Reads series is the definitive collection of ideas and best practices for aspiring and experienced leaders alike. These books offer essential reading selected from the pages of Harvard Business Review on topics critical to the success of every manager.
Titles include:
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2015
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2016
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2017
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2018
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2019
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2020
HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2021
HBR’s 10 Must Reads for CEOs
HBR’s 10 Must Reads for New Managers
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on AI, Analytics, and the New Machine Age
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Boards
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Business Model Innovation
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Change Management
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Communication
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Diversity
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Innovation
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Vol. 2)
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership for Healthcare
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing in a Downturn
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2)
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Risk
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Mental Toughness
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Negotiation
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Nonprofits and the Social Sectors
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Public Speaking and Presenting
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Reinventing HR
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Sales
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy (Vol. 2)
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy for Healthcare
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Teams
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Women and Leadership
HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Essentials
On
Creativity
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright
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First eBook Edition: Sep 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63369-995-3
eISBN: 978-1-63369-996-0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Reclaim Your Creative Confidence
by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
How to Kill Creativity
by Teresa M. Amabile
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
by Ed Catmull
Putting Your Company’s Whole Brain to Work
by Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Straus
Find Innovation Where You Least Expect It
by Tony McCaffrey and Jim Pearson
The Business Case for Curiosity
by Francesca Gino
Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life
by Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade
Collaborating with Creative Peers
by Kimberly D. Elsbach, Brooke Brown-Saracino, and Francis J. Flynn
Creativity Under the Gun
by Teresa M. Amabile, Constance N. Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer
Strategy Needs Creativity
by Adam Brandenburger
How to Build a Culture of Originality
by Adam Grant
About the Contributors
Index
Reclaim Your Creative Confidence
by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
MOST PEOPLE ARE BORN CREATIVE. As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs. But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses. We learn to be warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into creatives
and noncreatives,
and too many people consciously or unconsciously resign themselves to the latter category.
And yet we know that creativity is essential to success in any discipline or industry. According to a recent IBM survey of chief executives around the world, it’s the most sought-after trait in leaders today. No one can deny that creative thinking has enabled the rise and continued success of countless companies, from startups like Facebook and Google to stalwarts like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.
Students often come to Stanford University’s d.school
(which was founded by one of us—David Kelley—and is formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) to develop their creativity. Clients work with IDEO, our design and innovation consultancy, for the same reason. But along the way, we’ve learned that our job isn’t to teach them creativity. It’s to help them rediscover their creative confidence—the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.
Easier said than done, you might argue. But we know it’s possible for people to overcome even their most deep-seated fears. Consider the work of Albert Bandura, a world-renowned psychologist and Stanford professor. In one series of early experiments, he helped people conquer lifelong snake phobias by guiding them through a series of increasingly demanding interactions. They would start by watching a snake through a two-way mirror. Once comfortable with that, they’d progress to observing it through an open door, then to watching someone else touch the snake, then to touching it themselves through a heavy leather glove, and, finally, in a few hours, to touching it with their own bare hands. Bandura calls this process of experiencing one small success after another guided mastery.
The people who went through it weren’t just cured of a crippling fear they had assumed was untreatable. They also had less anxiety and more success in other parts of their lives, taking up new and potentially frightening activities like horseback riding and public speaking. They tried harder, persevered longer, and had more resilience in the face of failure. They had gained a new confidence in their ability to attain what they set out to do.
We’ve used much the same approach over the past 30 years to help people transcend the fears that block their creativity. You break challenges down into small steps and then build confidence by succeeding on one after another. Creativity is something you practice, not just a talent you’re born with. The process may feel a little uncomfortable at first, but—as the snake phobics learned—the discomfort quickly fades away and is replaced with new confidence and capabilities.
Fear of the Messy Unknown
Creative thinking in business begins with having empathy for your customers (whether they’re internal or external), and you can’t get that sitting behind a desk. Yes, we know it’s cozy in your office. Everything is reassuringly familiar; information comes from predictable sources; contradictory data are weeded out and ignored. Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights—and creative breakthroughs. Venturing forth in pursuit of learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and help you discover nonobvious needs. Otherwise, you risk simply reconfirming ideas you’ve already had or waiting for others—your customers, your boss, or even your competitors—to tell you what to do.
Idea in Brief
Most people are born creative. But over time, a lot of us learn to stifle those impulses. We become warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into creatives
and noncreatives,
and too many people resign themselves to the latter category. And yet we know that creativity is essential to success in any discipline or industry.
The good news is that we all can rediscover our creative confidence. The trick is to overcome the four big fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of judgment, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.
This chapter describes an approach based on the work of psychologist Albert Bandura in helping patients get over their snake phobias: You break challenges down into small steps and then build confidence by succeeding on one after another. Creativity is something you practice, not just a talent you are born with.
At the d.school, we routinely assign students to do this sort of anthropological fieldwork—to get out of their comfort zones and into the world—until, suddenly, they start doing it on their own. Consider a computer scientist, two engineers, and an MBA student, all of whom took the Extreme Affordability class taught by Stanford business school professor Jim Patell. They eventually realized that they couldn’t complete their group project—to research and design a low-cost incubator for newborn babies in the developing world—while living in safe, suburban California. So they gathered their courage and visited rural Nepal. Talking with families and doctors firsthand, they learned that the babies in gravest danger were those born prematurely in areas far from hospitals. Nepalese villagers didn’t need a cheaper incubator at the hospital—they needed a fail-safe way to keep babies warm when they were away from doctors who could do so effectively. Those insights led the team to design a miniature sleeping bag
with a pouch containing a special heat-storing wax. The Embrace Infant Warmer costs 99% less than a traditional incubator and can maintain the right temperature for up to six hours without an external power source. The innovation has the potential to save millions of low-birth-weight and premature babies every year, and it came about only because the team members were willing to throw themselves into unfamiliar territory.
Tackling the Mess, One Step at a Time
by Caroline O’Connor and Sarah Stein Greenberg
YOU CAN WORK UP the confidence to tackle the big fears that hold most of us back by starting small. Here are a few ways to get comfortable with venturing into the messy unknown. The list gets increasingly challenging, but you can follow the first two suggestions without even leaving your desk.
Lurk in Online Forums
Listen in as potential customers share information, air grievances, and ask questions—it’s the virtual equivalent of hanging around a popular café. You’re not looking for evaluations of features or cost; you’re searching for clues about their concerns and desires.
Pick Up the Phone and Call Your Own Company’s Customer Service Line
Walk through the experience as if you were a customer, noting how your problem is handled and how you’re feeling along the way.
Seek Out an Unexpected Expert
What does the receptionist in your building know about your firm’s customer experience? If you use a car service for work travel, what insights do the drivers have about your firm? If you’re in health care, talk to a medical assistant, not a doctor. If you make a physical product, ask a repair person to tell you about common failure areas.
Act Like a Spy
Take a magazine and a pair of headphones to a store or an industry conference (or, if your customers are internal, a break room or lunch area). Pretend to read while you observe. Watch as if you were a kid, trying to understand what is going on. How are people interacting with your offering? What can you glean from their body language?
Casually Interview a Customer or Potential Customer
After you’ve gotten more comfortable venturing out, try this: Write down a few open-ended questions about your product or service. Go to a place where your customers tend to gather, find someone you’d be comfortable approaching, and say you’d like to ask a few questions. If the person refuses? No problem, just try someone else. Eventually you’ll find someone who’s dying to talk to you. Press for more detail with every question. Even if you think you understand, ask Why is that?
or Can you tell me more about that?
Get people to dig into their own underlying assumptions.
Another example comes from two students, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, who took the d.school’s Launchpad course. The class required them to start a company from scratch by the end of the 10-week academic quarter. Both were self-described geeks
—technically brilliant, deeply analytical, and definitely shy. But they opted to work on their project—an elegant news reader for the then-newly released iPad—off-campus in a Palo Alto café where they’d be surrounded by potential users. Getting over the awkwardness of approaching strangers, Akshay gathered feedback by asking café patrons to experiment with his prototypes. Ankit coded hundreds of small variations to be tested each day—changing everything from interaction patterns to the size of a button. In a matter of weeks they rapidly iterated their way to a successful product. We went from people saying, ‘This is crap,’
says Akshay, to ‘Is this app preloaded on every iPad?’
The result—Pulse News—received public praise from Steve Jobs at a worldwide developer’s conference only a few months later, has been downloaded by 15 million people, and is one of the original 50 apps in Apple’s App Store Hall of Fame.
It’s not just entrepreneurs and product developers who should get into the mess.
Senior managers also must hear directly from anyone affected by their decisions. For instance, midway through a management off-site IDEO held for ConAgra Foods, the executives broke away from their upscale conference rooms to explore gritty Detroit neighborhoods, where you can go miles without seeing a grocery store. They personally observed how inner-city residents reacted to food products and spoke with an urban farmer who hopes to turn abandoned lots into community gardens. Now, according to Al Bolles, ConAgra’s executive vice president of research, quality, and innovation, such behavior is common at the company. A few years ago, it was hard to pry my executive team away from the office,
he says, but now we venture out and get onto our customers’ home turf to get insights about what they really need.
Fear of Being Judged
If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression, the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares—deeply—about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers. Most of us accept that when we are learning, say, to ski, others will see us fall down until practice pays off. But we can’t risk our business-world ego in the same way. As a result, we self-edit, killing potentially creative ideas because we’re afraid our bosses or peers will see us fail. We stick to safe
solutions or suggestions. We hang back, allowing others to take risks. But you can’t be creative if you are constantly censoring yourself.
Half the battle is to resist judging yourself. If you can listen to your own intuition and embrace more of your ideas (good and bad), you’re already partway to overcoming this fear. So take baby steps, as Bandura’s clients did. Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook. Keep a whiteboard and marker in the shower. Schedule daily white space
in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream. When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10. Defer your own judgment and you’ll be surprised at how many ideas you have—and like—by the end of the week.
Also, try using new language when you give feedback, and encourage your collaborators to do the same. At the d.school, our feedback typically starts with I like …
and moves on to I wish …
instead of just passing judgment with put-downs like That will never work.
Opening with the positives and then using the first person for suggestions signals that This is just my opinion and I want to help,
which makes listeners more receptive to your ideas.
We recently worked with Air New Zealand to reinvent the customer experience for its long-distance flights. As a highly regulated industry, airlines tend toward conservatism. To overcome the cultural norm of skepticism and caution, we started with a workshop aimed at generating crazy ideas. Executives brainstormed and prototyped a dozen unconventional (and some seemingly impractical) concepts, including harnesses that hold people standing up, groups of seats facing one another around a table, and even hammocks and bunk beds. Everyone was doing it, so no one was scared he or she would be judged. This willingness to consider wild notions and defer judgment eventually led the Air New Zealand team to a creative breakthrough: the Skycouch, a lie-flat seat for economy class. At first, it seemed impossible that such a seat could be made without enlarging its footprint (seats in business and first-class cabins take up much more space), but the new design does just that: A heavily padded section swings up like a footrest to transform an airline row into a futonlike platform that a couple can lie down on together. The Skycouch is now featured on a number of Air New Zealand’s international flights, and the company has won several industry awards as a result.
Fear of the First Step
Even when we want to embrace our creative ideas, acting on them presents its own challenges. Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning. The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project. In a broader sense, we’re also talking about fear of charting a new path or breaking out of your predictable workflow. To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started—and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.
Bestselling writer Anne Lamott expertly captures this idea in a story from her childhood. Her brother had been assigned a school report about birds, but he waited to start on it until the night before it was due. He was near tears, overwhelmed by the task ahead, until his father gave him some wise advice: Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
In a business context, you can push yourself to take the first step by asking: What is the low-cost experiment? What’s the quickest, cheapest way to make progress toward the larger goal?
Or give yourself a crazy deadline, as John Keefe, a d.school alum and a senior editor at radio station WNYC, did after a colleague complained that her mom had to wait at city bus stops never knowing when the next bus would come. If you worked for New York City Transit and your boss asked you to solve that problem, how soon would you promise to get a system up and running? Six weeks? Ten? John, who doesn’t work for the transit authority, said, Give me till the end of the day.
He bought an 800 number, figured out how to access real-time bus data, and linked it to text-to-speech technology. Within 24 hours, he had set up a service that allowed bus riders to call in, input their bus stop number, and hear the location of the approaching bus. John applies the same fearless attitude to his work at WNYC. The most effective way I’ve found to practice design thinking is by showing, not telling,
he explains.
Another example of the start simple
strategy comes from an IDEO project to develop a new dashboard feature for a European luxury car. To test their ideas, designers videotaped an existing car and then used digital effects to layer on proposed features. The rapid prototyping process took less than a week. When the team showed the video to our client, he laughed. Last time we did something like this,
he said, we built a prototype car, which took almost a year and cost over a million dollars. Then we took a video of it. You skipped the car and went straight to the video.
Our mantra is Don’t get ready, get started!
The first step will seem much less daunting if you make it a tiny one and you force yourself to do it right now. Rather than stalling and allowing your anxiety to build, just start inching toward the snake.
Fear of Losing Control
Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good. It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people. When you abandon the status quo and work collaboratively, you sacrifice control over your product, your team, and your business. But the creative gains can more than compensate. Again, you can start small. If you’re facing a tough challenge, try calling a meeting with people fresh to the topic. Or break the routine of a weekly meeting by letting the most junior person in the room set the agenda and lead it. Look for opportunities to cede control and leverage different perspectives.
That’s exactly what Bonny Simi, director of airport planning at JetBlue Airways, did after an ice storm closed JFK International Airport for a six-hour stretch in 2007—and disrupted the airline’s flight service for the next six days. Everyone knew there were operational problems to be fixed, but no one knew exactly what to do. Fresh from a d.school course, Bonny suggested that JetBlue brainstorm solutions from the bottom up rather than the top down. First, she gathered a team of 120 frontline employees together for just one day—pilots, flight attendants, dispatchers, ramp workers, crew schedulers, and other staff members. Then she mapped out their disruption recovery actions (using yellow Post-it notes) and the challenges they faced (using pink ones). By the end of the day, Bonny’s grassroots task force had reached new insights—and resolve. The distributed team then spent the next few months working through more than a thousand pink Post-its to creatively solve each problem. By admitting that the answers lay in the collective, Bonny did more than she could ever have done alone. And JetBlue now recovers from major disruptions significantly faster than it did before.
Our own experience with the open innovation platform OpenIDEO is another case in point. Its launch was scary in two ways: First, we were starting a public conversation that could quickly get out of hand; second, we were admitting that we don’t have all the answers. But we were ready, like Bandura’s phobics, to take a bigger leap—to touch the snake. And we soon discovered the benefits. Today, the OpenIDEO community includes about 30,000 people from 170 countries. They may never meet in person, but together they’ve already made a difference on dozens of initiatives—from helping revitalize cities in economic decline to prototyping ultrasound services for expectant mothers in Colombia. We’ve learned that no matter what group you’re in or where you work, there are always more ideas outside than inside.
For people with backgrounds as diverse as those of Akshay, Ankit, John, and Bonny, fear—of the messy unknown, of judgment, of taking the first step, or of letting go—could have blocked the path to innovation. But instead, they worked to overcome their fears, rediscovered their creative confidence, and made a difference. As Hungarian essayist György Konrád once said, Courage is only the accumulation of small steps.
So don’t wait at the starting line. Let go of your fears and begin practicing creative confidence today.
Originally published in December 2012. Reprint R1212K
How to Kill Creativity
by Teresa M. Amabile
WHEN I CONSIDER all the organizations I have studied and worked with over the past 22 years, there can be no doubt: Creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. For the most part, this isn’t because managers have a vendetta against creativity. On the contrary, most believe in the value of new and useful ideas. However, creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established—for entirely good reasons—to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and control.
Managers cannot be expected to ignore business imperatives, of course. But in working toward these imperatives, they may be inadvertently designing organizations that systematically crush creativity. My research shows that it is possible to develop the best of both worlds: organizations in which business imperatives are attended to and creativity flourishes. Building such organizations, however, requires us to understand precisely what kinds of managerial practices foster creativity—and which kill it.
What Is Business Creativity?
We tend to associate creativity with the arts and to think of it as the expression of highly original ideas. Think of how Pablo Picasso reinvented the conventions of painting or how William Faulkner redefined fiction. In business, originality isn’t enough. To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate—useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done—by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process.
The associations made between creativity and artistic originality often lead to confusion about the appropriate place of creativity in business organizations. In seminars, I’ve asked managers if there is any place they don’t want creativity in their companies. About 80% of the time, they answer, Accounting.
Creativity, they seem to believe, belongs just in marketing and R&D. But creativity can benefit every function of an organization. Think of activity-based accounting. It was an invention—an accounting invention—and its impact on business has been positive and profound.
Along with fearing creativity in the accounting department—or really, in any unit that involves systematic processes or legal regulations—many managers also hold a rather narrow view of the creative process. To them, creativity refers to the way people think—how inventively they approach problems, for instance. Indeed, thinking imaginatively is one part of creativity, but two others are also essential: expertise and motivation.
Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work. Take, for example, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company who is charged with developing a blood-clotting drug for hemophiliacs. Her expertise includes her basic talent for thinking scientifically as well as all the knowledge and technical abilities that she has in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. It doesn’t matter how she acquired this expertise, whether through formal education, practical experience, or interaction with other professionals. Regardless, her expertise constitutes what the Nobel laureate, economist, and psychologist Herb Simon calls her network of possible wanderings,
the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.
Creative thinking, as noted above, refers to how people approach problems and solutions—their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself depends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works. The pharmaceutical scientist, for example, will be more creative if her personality is such that she feels comfortable disagreeing with others—that is, if she naturally tries out solutions that depart from the status quo. Her creativity will be enhanced further if she habitually turns problems upside down and combines knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. For example, she might look to botany to help find solutions to the hemophilia problem, using lessons from the vascular systems of plants to spark insights about bleeding in humans.
Idea in Brief
If the mantra for the current business climate is Innovate or die, why do so many companies seem to be choosing the latter option?
Creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. The problem is not that managers smother creativity intentionally—the business need for coordination and control can inadvertently undermine employees’ ability to put existing ideas together in new and useful ways.
To foster an innovative workplace, you need to pay attention to employees’ expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. Of these three, employees’ motivation—specifically, their intrinsic motivation, or passion for a certain kind of challenge—is the most potent lever a manager can use to boost creativity and his company’s future success.
As for work style, the scientist will be more likely to achieve creative success if she perseveres through a difficult problem. Indeed, plodding through long dry spells of tedious experimentation increases the probability of truly creative breakthroughs. So, too, does a work style that uses incubation,
the ability to set aside difficult problems temporarily, work on something else, and then return later with a fresh perspective.
Expertise and creative thinking are an individual’s raw materials—his or her natural resources, if you will. But a third factor—motivation—determines what people will actually do. The scientist can have outstanding educational credentials and a great facility in generating new perspectives to old problems. But if she lacks the motivation to do a particular job, she simply won’t do it; her expertise and creative thinking will either go untapped or be applied to something else.
Idea in Practice
In business, it isn’t enough for an idea to be original—the idea must also be useful, appropriate, and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done—for example, by significantly improving a product or service.
Within every individual, creativity exists as a function of three components:
Expertise (technical, procedural, and intellectual knowledge). The broader the expertise, the larger the intellectual space a person has to explore and solve problems.
Creative-thinking skills. These aptitudes, shaped by an individual’s personality, determine how flexibly and imaginatively someone approaches problems.
Motivation. Expertise and creative-thinking skills provide an individual’s natural resources for creativity; motivation determines what a person will actually do.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside the individual—whether it’s the offer of a bonus or the threat of firing. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t prevent people from being creative, but in many situations it doesn’t boost their creativity either. On its own, it can’t prompt people to be passionate about their work; in fact, it can lead them to feel bribed or controlled.
Intrinsic motivation, by contrast, comes from inside the individual. It’s a person’s abiding interest in certain activities or deep love of particular challenges. Employees are most creative when they are intrinsically motivated—in other words, when the work itself is motivating.
It can be time-consuming to try to influence an employee’s expertise or creative-thinking skills. It’s easier to affect someone’s intrinsic motivation—and the results are more immediate. Activities that enhance intrinsic motivation fall into a few general categories: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support. Some specific recommendations:
Match the right people with the right assignments, so employees are stretched but not stretched too thin. Work teams that have diverse perspectives will generate more creativity than homogenous groups.
Give people freedom within the company’s goals. Tell them which mountain to climb, but let them decide how to climb it. Keep the objectives stable for a meaningful period of time—it’s hard to reach the top of a moving mountain.
Allocate appropriate amounts of time and project resources. Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines—which cause distrust—and impossibly tight ones—which cause burnout.
Let employees know that what they do matters. This will help them sustain their passion for the work.
My research has repeatedly demonstrated, however, that all forms of motivation do not have the same impact on creativity. In fact, it shows that there are two types of motivation—extrinsic and intrinsic, the latter being far more essential for creativity. But let’s explore extrinsic first, because it is often at the root of creativity problems in business.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside a person—whether the motivation is a carrot or a stick. If the scientist’s boss promises to reward her financially should the blood-clotting project succeed, or if he threatens to fire her should it fail, she will certainly be motivated to find a solution. But this sort of motivation makes
the scientist do her job in order to get something desirable or avoid something painful.
Obviously, the most common extrinsic motivator managers use is money, which doesn’t necessarily stop people from being creative. But in many situations, it doesn’t help either, especially when it leads people to feel that they are being bribed or controlled. More important, money by itself doesn’t make employees passionate about their jobs. A cash reward can’t magically prompt people to find their work interesting if in their hearts they feel it is dull.
But passion and interest—a person’s internal desire to do something—are what intrinsic motivation is all about. For instance, the scientist in our example would be intrinsically motivated if her work on the blood-clotting drug was sparked by an intense interest in hemophilia, a personal sense of challenge, or a drive to crack a problem that no one else has been able to solve. When people are intrinsically motivated, they engage in their work for the challenge and enjoyment of it. The work itself is motivating. In fact, in our creativity research, my students, colleagues, and I have found so much evidence in favor of intrinsic motivation that we have articulated what we call the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity: People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—and not by external pressures. (For more on the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, see the sidebar The Creativity Maze.
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The Creativity Maze
TO UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCES between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, imagine a business problem as a maze.
One person might be motivated to make it through the maze as quickly and safely as possible in order to get a tangible reward, such as money—the same way a mouse would rush through for a piece of cheese. This person would look for the simplest, most straightforward path and then take it. In fact, if he is in a real rush to get that reward, he might just take the most beaten path and solve the problem exactly as it has been solved before.
That approach, based on extrinsic motivation, will indeed get him out of the maze. But the solution that arises from the process is likely to be unimaginative. It won’t provide new insights about the nature of the problem or reveal new ways of looking at it. The rote solution probably won’t move the business forward.
Another person might have a different approach to the maze. She might actually find the process of wandering around the different paths—the challenge and exploration itself—fun and intriguing. No doubt, this journey will take longer and include mistakes, because any maze—any truly complex problem—has many more dead ends than exits. But when the intrinsically motivated person finally does find a way out of the maze—a solution—it very likely will be more interesting than the rote algorithm. It will be more creative.
There is abundant evidence of strong intrinsic motivation in the stories of widely recognized creative people. When asked what makes the difference between creative scientists and those who are less creative, the Nobel prize–winning physicist Arthur Schawlow said, The labor-of-love aspect is important. The most successful scientists often are not the most talented, but the ones who are just impelled by curiosity. They’ve got to know what the answer is.
Albert Einstein talked about intrinsic motivation as the enjoyment of seeing and searching.
The novelist John Irving, in discussing the very long hours he put into his writing, said, The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
And Michael Jordan, perhaps the most creative basketball player ever, had a love of the game
clause inserted into his contract; he insisted that he be free to play pick-up basketball games any time he wished.
Creative people are rarely superstars like Michael Jordan. Indeed, most of the creative work done in the business world today gets done by people whose names will never be recorded in history books. They are people with expertise, good creative-thinking skills, and high levels of intrinsic motivation. And just as important, they work in organizations where managers consciously build environments that support these characteristics instead of destroying them.
Managing Creativity
Managers can influence all three components of creativity: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. But the fact is that the first two are more difficult and time-consuming to influence than motivation. Yes, regular scientific seminars and professional conferences will undoubtedly add to the scientist’s expertise in hemophilia and related fields. And training in brainstorming, problem solving, and so-called lateral thinking might give her some new tools to use in tackling the job. But the time and money involved in broadening her knowledge and expanding her creative-thinking skills would be great. By contrast, our research has shown that intrinsic motivation can be increased considerably by even subtle changes in an organization’s environment. That is not to say that managers should give up on improving expertise and creative-thinking skills. But when it comes to pulling levers, they should know that those that affect intrinsic motivation will yield more immediate results.
More specifically, then, what managerial practices affect creativity? They fall into six general categories: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support. These categories have emerged from more than two decades of research focused primarily on one question: What are the links between work environment and creativity? We have used three methodologies: experiments, interviews, and surveys. While controlled experiments allowed us to identify causal links, the interviews and surveys gave us insight into the richness and complexity of creativity within business organizations. We have studied dozens of companies and, within those, hundreds of individuals and teams. In each research initiative, our goal has been to identify which managerial practices are definitively linked to positive creative outcomes and which are not.
For instance, in one project, we interviewed dozens of employees from a wide variety of companies and industries and asked them to describe in detail the most and least creative events in their careers. We then closely studied the transcripts of those interviews, noting the managerial practices—or other patterns—that appeared repeatedly in the successful creativity stories and, conversely, in those that were unsuccessful. Our research has also been bolstered by a quantitative survey instrument called KEYS. Taken by employees at any level of an organization, KEYS consists of 78 questions used to assess various workplace conditions, such as the level of support for creativity from top-level managers or the organization’s approach to evaluation.
Taking the six categories that have emerged from our research in turn, let’s explore what managers can do to enhance creativity—and what often happens instead. Again, it is important to note that creativity-killing practices are seldom the work of lone managers. Such practices usually are systemic—so widespread that they are rarely questioned.
Challenge
Of all the things managers can do to stimulate creativity, perhaps the most efficacious is the deceptively simple task of matching people with the right assignments. Managers can match people with jobs that play to their expertise and their skills in creative thinking, and ignite intrinsic motivation. Perfect matches stretch employees’ abilities. The amount of stretch, however, is crucial: not so little that they feel bored but not so much that they feel overwhelmed and threatened by a loss of control.
Making a good match requires that managers possess rich and detailed information about their employees and the available assignments. Such information is often difficult and time-consuming to gather. Perhaps that’s why good matches are so rarely made. In fact, one of the most common ways managers kill creativity is by not trying to obtain the information necessary to make good connections between people and jobs. Instead, something of a shotgun wedding occurs. The most eligible employee is wed to the most eligible—that is, the most urgent and open—assignment. Often, the results are predictably unsatisfactory for all involved.
Freedom
When it comes to granting freedom, the key to creativity is giving people autonomy concerning the means—that is, concerning process—but not necessarily the ends. People will be more creative, in other words, if you give them freedom to decide how to climb a particular mountain. You needn’t let them choose which mountain to climb. In fact, clearly specified strategic goals often enhance people’s creativity.
I’m not making the case that managers should leave their subordinates entirely out of goal- or agenda-setting discussions. But they should understand that inclusion in those discussions will not necessarily enhance creative output and certainly will not be sufficient to do so. It is far more important that whoever sets the goals also makes them clear to the organization and that these goals remain stable for a meaningful period of time. It is difficult, if not impossible, to work creatively toward a target if it keeps moving.
Autonomy around process fosters creativity because giving people freedom in how they approach their work heightens their intrinsic motivation and sense of ownership. Freedom about process also allows people to approach problems in ways that make the most of their expertise and their creative-thinking skills. The task may end up being a stretch for them, but they can use their strengths to meet the challenge.
How do executives mismanage freedom? There are two common ways. First, managers tend to change goals frequently or fail to define them clearly. Employees may have freedom around process, but if they don’t know where they are headed, such freedom is pointless. And second, some managers fall short on this dimension by granting autonomy in name only. They claim that employees are empowered
to explore the maze as they search for solutions, but, in fact, the process is proscribed. Employees diverge at their own risk.
Resources
The two main resources that affect creativity are time and money. Managers need to allot these resources carefully. Like matching people with the right assignments, deciding how much time and money to give to a team or project is a sophisticated judgment call that can either support or kill creativity.
Consider time. Under some circumstances, time pressure can heighten creativity. Say, for instance, that a competitor is about to launch a great product at a lower price than your offering or that society faces a serious problem and desperately needs a solution—such as an AIDS vaccine. In such situations, both the time crunch and the importance of the work legitimately make people feel that they must rush. Indeed, cases like these would be apt to increase intrinsic motivation by increasing the sense of challenge.
Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. The former create distrust and the latter cause burnout. In either case, people feel overcontrolled and unfulfilled—which invariably damages motivation. Moreover, creativity often takes time. It can be slow going to explore new concepts, put together unique solutions, and wander through the maze. Managers who do not allow time for exploration or do not schedule in incubation periods are unwittingly standing in the way of the creative process.
When it comes to project resources, again managers must make a fit. They must determine the funding, people, and other resources that a team legitimately needs to complete an assignment—and they must know how much the organization can legitimately afford to allocate to the assignment. Then they must strike a compromise. Interestingly, adding more resources above a threshold of sufficiency
does not boost creativity. Below that threshold, however, a restriction of resources can dampen creativity. Unfortunately, many managers don’t realize this and therefore often make another mistake. They keep resources tight, which pushes people to channel their creativity into finding additional resources, not in actually developing new products or services.
Another resource that is misunderstood when it comes to creativity is physical space. It is almost conventional wisdom that creative teams need open, comfortable offices. Such an atmosphere won’t hurt creativity, and it may even help, but it is not nearly as important as other managerial initiatives that influence creativity. Indeed, a problem we have seen time and time again is managers paying attention to creating the right
physical space at the expense of more high-impact actions, such as matching people to the right assignments and granting freedom around work processes.
Work-group features
If you want to build teams that come up with creative ideas, you must pay careful attention to the design of such teams. That is, you must create mutually supportive groups with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. Why? Because when teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations and approaches to work—that is, different expertise and creative thinking styles—ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways.
Diversity, however, is only a starting point. Managers must also make sure that the teams they put together have three other features. First, the members must share excitement over the team’s goal. Second, members must display a willingness to help their teammates through difficult periods and setbacks. And third, every member must recognize the unique knowledge and perspective that other members bring to the table. These factors enhance not only intrinsic motivation but also expertise and creative-thinking skills.
Again, creating such teams requires managers to have a deep understanding of their people. They must be able to assess them not just for their knowledge but for their attitudes about potential fellow team members and the collaborative process, for their problem-solving styles, and for their motivational hot buttons. Putting together a team with just the right chemistry—just the right level of diversity and supportiveness—can be difficult, but our research shows how powerful it can be.
It follows, then, that one common way managers kill creativity is by assembling homogeneous teams. The lure to do so is great. Homogeneous teams often reach solutions
more quickly and with less friction along the way. These teams often report high morale, too. But homogeneous teams do little to enhance expertise and creative thinking. Everyone comes to the table with a similar mindset. They leave with the same.
Supervisory encouragement
Most managers are extremely busy. They are under pressure for results. It is therefore easy for them to let praise for creative efforts—not just creative successes but unsuccessful efforts, too—fall by the wayside. One very simple step managers can take to foster creativity is to not let that happen.
The connection to intrinsic motivation here is clear. Certainly, people can find their work interesting or exciting without a cheering section—for some period of time. But to sustain such passion, most people need to feel as if their work matters to the organization or to some important group of people. Otherwise, they might as well do their work at home and for their own personal gain.
Managers in successful, creative organizations rarely offer specific extrinsic rewards for particular outcomes. However, they freely and generously recognize creative work by individuals and teams—often before the ultimate commercial impact of those efforts is known. By contrast, managers who kill creativity do so either by failing to acknowledge innovative efforts or by greeting them with skepticism. In many companies, for instance, new ideas are met not with open minds but with time-consuming layers of evaluation—or even with harsh criticism. When someone suggests a new product or process, senior managers take weeks to respond. Or they put that person through an excruciating critique.
Not every new idea is worthy of consideration, of course, but in many organizations, managers habitually demonstrate a reaction that damages creativity. They look for reasons to not use a new idea instead of searching for reasons to explore it further. An interesting psychological dynamic underlies this phenomenon. Our research shows that people believe that they will appear smarter to their bosses if they are more critical—and it often works. In many organizations, it is professionally rewarding to react critically to new ideas.
Unfortunately, this sort of negativity bias can have severe consequences for the creativity of those being evaluated. How? First, a culture of evaluation leads people to focus on the external rewards and punishments associated with their output, thus increasing the presence of extrinsic motivation and its potentially negative effects on intrinsic motivation. Second, such a culture creates a climate of fear, which again undermines intrinsic motivation.
Finally, negativity also shows up in how managers treat people whose ideas don’t pan out: Often, they are terminated or otherwise warehoused within the organization. Of course, ultimately, ideas do need to work; remember that creative ideas in business must be new and useful. The dilemma is that you can’t possibly know beforehand which ideas will pan out. Furthermore, dead ends can sometimes be very enlightening. In many business situations, knowing what doesn’t work can be as useful as knowing what does. But if people do not perceive any failure value
for projects that ultimately do not achieve commercial success, they’ll become less and less likely to experiment, explore, and connect with their work on a personal level. Their intrinsic motivation will evaporate.
Supervisory encouragement comes in other forms besides rewards and punishment. Another way managers can support creativity is to serve as role models, persevering through tough problems as well as encouraging collaboration and communication within the team. Such behavior enhances all three components of the creative process, and it has the added virtue of being a high-impact practice that a single manager can take on his or her own. It is better still when all managers in an organization serve as role models for the attitudes and behaviors that encourage and nurture creativity.
Organizational support
Encouragement from supervisors certainly fosters creativity, but creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Such support is the job of an organization’s leaders, who must put in place appropriate systems or procedures and emphasize values that make it clear that creative efforts are a top priority. For example, creativity-supporting organizations consistently reward creativity, but they avoid using money to bribe
people to come up with innovative ideas. Because monetary rewards make people feel as if they are being controlled, such a tactic probably won’t work. At the same time, not providing sufficient recognition and rewards for creativity can spawn negative feelings within an organization. People can feel used, or at the least underappreciated, for their creative efforts. And it is rare to find the energy and passion of intrinsic motivation coupled with resentment.
Most important, an organization’s leaders can support creativity by mandating information sharing and collaboration and by ensuring that political problems do not fester. Information sharing and collaboration support all three components of creativity. Take expertise. The more often people exchange ideas and data by working together, the more knowledge they will have. The same dynamic can be said for creative thinking. In fact, one way to enhance the creative thinking of employees is to expose them to various approaches to problem solving. With the exception of hardened misanthropes, information sharing and collaboration heighten peoples’ enjoyment of work and thus their intrinsic motivation.
Whether or not you are seeking to enhance creativity, it is probably never a good idea to let political problems fester in an organizational setting. Infighting, politicking, and gossip are particularly damaging to creativity because they take peoples’ attention away from work. That sense of mutual purpose and excitement so central to intrinsic motivation invariably lessens when people are cliquish or at war with one another. Indeed, our research suggests that intrinsic motivation increases when people are aware that those around them are excited by their jobs. When political problems abound, people feel that their work is threatened by others’ agendas.
Finally, politicking also undermines expertise. The reason? Politics get in the way of open communication, obstructing the flow of information from point A to point B. Knowledge stays put and expertise suffers.
From the Individual to the Organization
Can executives build entire organizations that support creativity? The answer is yes. Consider the results of an intensive research project we recently completed called the Team Events Study. Over the course of two years, we studied more than two dozen teams in seven companies across three industries: high tech, consumer products, and chemicals. By following each team every day through the entire course of a creative project, we had a window into the details of what happened as the project progressed—or failed to progress, as the case may be. We did this through daily confidential email reports from every person on each of the teams. At the end of each project, and at several points along the way, we used confidential reports from company experts and from team members to assess the level of creativity used in problem solving as well as the overall success of the project.
As might be expected, the teams and the companies varied widely in how successful they were at producing creative work. One organization, which I will call Chemical Central Research, seemed to be a veritable hotbed of creativity. Chemical Central supplied its parent organization with new formulations for a wide variety of industrial and consumer products. In many respects, however, members of Chemical Central’s development teams were unremarkable. They were well educated, but no more so than people in many other companies we had studied. The company was doing well financially, but not enormously better than most other companies. What seemed to distinguish this organization was the quality of leadership at both the top-management level and the team level. The way managers formed teams, communicated with them, and supported their work enabled them to establish an organization in which creativity was continually stimulated.
The three components of creativity
Within every individual, creativity is a function of three components: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. Can managers influence these components? The answer is an emphatic yes—for better or for worse—through workplace practices and conditions.
Expertise is, in a word, knowledge—technical, procedural, and intellectual.
Creative-thinking skills determine how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems. Do their solutions upend the status quo? Do they persevere through dry spells?
Not all motivation is created equal. An inner passion to solve the problem at hand leads to solutions far more creative than do external rewards, such as money. This component—called intrinsic motivation—is the one that can be most immediately influenced by the work environment.
We saw managers making excellent matches between people and assignments again and again at Chemical Central. On occasion, team members were initially unsure of whether they were up to the challenge they were given. Almost invariably, though, they found their passion and interest growing through a deep involvement in the work. Their managers knew to match them with jobs that had them working at the top of their competency levels, pushing the frontiers of their skills, and developing new competencies. But managers were careful not to allow too big a gap between employees’ assignments and their abilities.
Moreover, managers at Chemical Central collaborated with the teams from the outset of a project to clarify goals. The final goals, however, were set by the managers. Then, at the day-to-day operational level, the teams were given a great deal of autonomy to make their own decisions about product development. Throughout the project, the teams’ leaders and top-level managers periodically checked to see that work was directed toward the overall goals. But people were given real freedom around the implementation of the goals.
As for work-group design, every Chemical Central team, though relatively small (between four and nine members), included members of diverse professional and ethnic backgrounds. Occasionally, that diversity led to communication difficulties. But more often, it sparked new insights and allowed the teams to come up with a wider variety of ways to accomplish their goals.
One team, for example, was responsible for devising a new way to make a major ingredient for one of the company’s most important products. Because managers at Chemical Central had worked consciously to create a diverse team, it happened that one member had both a legal and a technical background. This person realized that the team might well be able to patent its core idea, giving the company a clear advantage in a new market. Because team members were mutually supportive, that member was willing and eager to work closely with the inventor. Together, these individuals helped the team navigate its way through the patent application process. The team was successful and had fun along the way.
Supervisory encouragement and organizational support were also widespread at Chemical Central. For instance, a member of one team received a company award as an outstanding scientist even though, along the way, he had experienced many failures as well as successes. At one point, after spending a great deal of time on one experiment, he told us, All I came up with was a pot of junk.
Still, the company did not punish or warehouse him because of a creative effort that had failed. Instead, he was publicly lauded for his consistently creative work.
Finally, Chemical Central’s leaders did much to encourage teams to seek support from all units within their divisions and to encourage collaboration across all quarters. The general manager of the research unit himself set an example, offering both strategic and technical ideas whenever teams approached him for help. Indeed, he explicitly made cross-team support a priority among top scientists in the organization. As a result, such support was expected and recognized.
For example, one team was about to test a new formulation for one of the company’s major products. Because the team was small, it had to rely on a materials-analysis group within the organization to help conduct the tests. The analysis group not only helped out but also set aside generous blocks of time during the week before testing to help the team understand the nature and limits of the information the group would provide, when they would have it, and what they would need from the team to support them effectively. Members of the team were confident that they could rely on the materials-analysis group throughout the process, and the trials went well—despite the usual technical difficulties encountered in such testing.
By contrast, consider what we observed at another company in our study, a consumer products company we’ll call National Houseware Products. For years, National had been well known for its innovation. But recently, the company had been restructured to accommodate a major growth spurt, and many senior managers had been fired or transferred. National’s work environment had undergone drastic changes. At the same time, new product successes and new business ideas seemed to be slowing to a trickle. Interestingly, the daily reports of the Team Events Study revealed that virtually all creativity killers were present.
Managers undermined autonomy by continually changing goals and interfering with processes. At one quarterly review meeting, for example, four priorities that had been defined by management at the previous quarterly review meeting were not even mentioned.