Creativity - something new and useful
Who cares about creativity? You should. Get creative to address the complex problems coming your way, do more with less. exceed customer expectations, respond to changing environmental conditions. But how?
Isn’t being smart good enough?
Creativity and intelligence aren’t the same brain process, according to.Dr. Rex Jung, a neuroscientist who’s studied intelligence and creativity. He defines creativity as something that is both novel and useful, in a recent podcast from On Being.
In brain function metaphor, Jung explains that while intelligence is a superhighway from point A to point B, creativity is “a meander through the dirt roads” allowing a free interplay of different networks of the brain. In creativity, you want to avoid the ruts.
Play and Mistakes: Individually, to be creative, you need free space, down time. You need to get playful. Look for “wrong” answers. Jung has found that humor is a core quality or indicator of creativity. Conformity is not.
Forget Group Brainstorms: In groups or teams, conformity doesn’t help creativity, either. Decades of research have debunked the effectiveness of traditional brainstorming where no criticism is allowed.
Apparently, lack of criticism or too similar a perspective limits creativity; dissent and differences encourage creativity, according to an article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker.
Stimulating office creativity: Our typical office layouts by functional groups come to mind as stifling to creativity and innovation. Just like needing to connect different parts of the brain, creativity increases when you connect different perspectives and disciplines. Working too hard to conform, to be “right,” or being too careful or polite depresses creativity.
Building 20 - Functional, not pretty
One effective stimulator of creativity is getting enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways. Pixar studios was designed by Steve Jobs to have an atrium where people from different divisions would have to gather because it housed the cafeteria, the mailboxes, the coffee bar, and even the bathrooms.
The article also describes Building 20 at MIT that was a catch-all of scientists who didn’t have any regular office space. The errant discussions in the hall led to amazing scientific and business advances (Bose came from there.)
Chance meetings in the hall
Mix up the seating plan:
Too often our companies are arranged in silos, or stovepipes. Accounting sits with accounting. Marketing sits with marketing, etc. We send emails back and forth. This encourages conformity, rather than creativity. Too often our individual departmental views are reinforced by others in our department, not challenged. If we went visiting more, exposure to unfamiliar perspectives and challenges would foster creativity. This happens both vertically and horizontally in organizations. Think of the boss going to the front lines.
Next time you have a business problem to solve, try bringing in people from outside your discipline. Mix it up a bit. If you’re really experimental, change some seats around. Crack some jokes. Get playful. Challenge one another. See what happens.