Creativity | Leis Network

This is the first of a series on Creativity. The articles briefly explore the biology of creativity and how to nurture it both in personal and organizational contexts.

Creativity, inertia and bureaucracy

Creativity must play a central role in organizations, especially in an age of globalization and technological advance. But creativity necessarily brings conflict to existent culture and annuity streams. Creativity is a natural enemy of inertia and current states. Larger organizations have larger masses (bureaucracy) and therefore more inertia. Therefore creativity and large organizations with traditional hierarchies are inherently antithetical.

Large organizations historically represented stability. In the future, they will be the most unstable places to work as they struggle to adjust to a shrinking, changing world. GM, bound by cultural tradition, static special interests of management bureaucracy, government regulation (structure, market position, delivery channels) and unions, is a timely example. All of them assume a static world and prevent realignment and adaptation to a changing world.

The following series explores personal and organizational creativity. It will discuss its nature, constructs, biology, and how it can be nurtured and repressed. It is difficult to separate personal and organizational creativity given their inter-connectedness. The articles demonstrate that creativity presents challenges to the spirit, hierarchy, and culture of organizations and suggest solutions.

Managing market share and brand annuity

Get out of the box

Only a small portion of the work in organizations is really very creative by anything approaching a ground breaking standard. To accuse much of today’s branded product management as creative is a disservice to the idea, and a profound unawareness of the capabilities of today’s technology.

Much of advertising and marketing is the execution and analysis of statistically closed feedback systems designed and vetted with a dash of practical common sense and an awareness of current management theory and technology, sprinkled with Sunday school ethics and a healthy dose of personal interaction.

To speak up for these feedback mechanisms, with technology driving cost towards zero it is entirely possible to plug them into external and internal spheres of influence and actually steer a well established company on its existent course without a great deal of management intervention or creativity at all. Market share, brand loyalty and marketing elasticity alone almost guarantee a hurtling inertia of sales barring fundamental landscape change. A natural search for safe harbor in an increasingly bewildering world actually reinforces market leaders in the short run.

It is actually the prevailing lack of existence of these feedback loops that often get organizations in trouble and make them less efficient. Most failing corporate board rooms are over-run with endless debate over anecdotal evidence while chasing the latest executive group think or management fad. If the first duty of executive management is to do no harm, they have spectacularly failed.

Linearity of Organizations

Organizations, especially businesses, appreciate straight lines. We can map incredibly intricate patterns and systems and investigatory processes in a linear methodology. And the drive for profit is hugely enhanced by beautiful renditions of logic from a varying host of disciplines. There is something attractive and alluring about the clean lines of synergistic product enhancements and process re-engineering reduced to something simpler and more effective.

Creativity is not Linear

But that’s not how creativity works. Creativity is emergent and wayward. It is the culmination of scraps of multidimensional thinking, many of which we do not know will be important when they burble up through the membrane of our conscience. Creativity turns us into note takers, journal writers, indexers, taggers and readers. Creativity does not conform to work hours or priorities or brainstorming or balanced lifestyles. And ideas can slip back under the surface of unconsciousness if we are not careful.

A creative mindset requires a suspension of our inner critic. Freer association and safe harbor is necessary in minds, board rooms and cultures. It must supersede an organism’s detestation of failure and its cultural affinity for guilt and blame when it occurs. The psychology of sports teams have much to teach organizations interested in developing creative groups; they often fail but can not dwell on it, and support each other midst individual failure.

Association, convergence, and divergence

Creativity is highly connective or associative. After all, a significant portion of our insights are re-categorization; behaviorists claim that is all it is. Technology gives us a further boost by facilitating the storage of thoughts in matrix patterns much more powerful than linear notebooks or digital flat files. Search engines are evolving semantically, but their quantum productive leap will occur as they begin to actively suggest connections to previously unconnected premises and concepts. Will that AI lead to their self-awareness?

But creativity is not just associative or convergent thinking; it is divergent thinking also. The ability to construct alternate solutions is part of the whole process. It is what we mean when we say we want to look at something through a different prism, or a new light. On the other hand, perhaps divergent thinking is just the ability to associate or categorize knowledge that for most people remains disparate. One person’s convergence is another’s divergence. It is the reason it is important to nurture personal feedback circles of disparate members along a variety of prisms; education, discipline, skepticism, culture, age, etc.

Creativity is not linear. It is a continual exploratory search. It is the story of emergence through trial and error and failure. It is the determined and directed search to successfully advance tomorrow despite the destruction it causes today. Creativity is adaptive. Creativity is non-linear. Creativity involves failure. Creativity is competition and evolution and conflict.