Creative People Must Be Stopped (7 page)

Using the Results

Note the total number of statements that you rated as “Highly Descriptive.” If you have rated more than six of them this way, then working on your individual constraints will be a productive effort. Now that you have identified the specific constraints, you can take action. You may wish to turn back and reread the description of the problem and of the specific strategies for addressing that constraint. You may also find that strategies are obvious given the symptom you have identified. For detailed instructions on working with your assessment results, use the steps outlined in Appendix A, Using the Assessment Results, to determine whether individual constraints are a significant impediment for you in your organization and to develop strategies for overcoming them.

Later, after completing assessments for the other chapters, you will be able to compare constraints and see if one of the other levels poses a greater challenge for you overall than do these individual constraints. Of the six levels of constraints discussed in this book, you will find that the individual-level constraints are the easiest to fix, assuming of course that you want to fix them.

Summary

Creativity is not something magical, mystical, or built into our personalities. Spence Silver had nothing that every other chemist at 3M didn't have, except maybe curiosity, persistence, and an intense refusal to be hemmed in by everyone else's thinking. You too can enhance your ability to think in fresh ways by removing or mitigating the common constraints on individual creativity. The chart on page 55 offers a recap of the constraints discussed in this chapter, along with some strategies for overcoming or living with them.

Chapter Reflection: Individual Constraints

It can be helpful to reflect on your insights about individual-level constraints and the process of diagnosing them in yourself. You may wish to consider these questions:

• What evidence is there for the existence of the constraints you named?
  
• How important are these individual factors compared to the group, organizational, industry, societal, and technological constraints you identified?
  
• Are there any additional constraints you perceive that were not identified by the individual-level diagnostic?
  
• Would others agree that there is a need for you to fix these constraints?
  

CHAPTER 3

Why a Brainstorm Meeting Can Be Worse Than No Meeting at All

Innovation Constraints in Groups

Figure 3.1

The board of ShowArts, a midsize performance arts organization, asked Josephine, the executive director, to come up with a plan to attract a larger and more diverse audience to their venue. They named the project Think Big because they wanted some fresh new thinking in anticipation of a planned capital campaign.

Josephine pulled together a team of nine people who represented a diverse mix of functions and departments from inside ShowArts. She consciously picked a couple of people she knew to be big thinkers and a few others she thought of as being very pragmatic and operations focused. Because she also realized that there might be some rocky points, she included only people she knew well and had worked closely with before.

For their first kickoff meeting, Josephine decided to have them brainstorm ideas to start the team off on a positive note. They gathered around the conference room table, and she told them the mandate: “to enlarge and diversify ShowArts' audience base.” Without much further ado, they began to suggest ideas while she wrote them on a notepad. Heinz, the IT specialist and a generally soft-spoken person, wondered to himself what, exactly, the board had meant by
larger
? And what did they mean by
diversity
? Not sure whether to bring it up, he reasoned that because things were already well under way, it might embarrass Josephine if he brought it up now. Plus, she didn't seem concerned. After all, she was extremely competent and had far more experience doing this than he did; that's why she was chosen as the executive director of ShowArts just over a year ago.

Sonya from marketing offered a number of big radical ideas, among them doing a teaser show for the new production on “a stage on the back of a tractor-trailer that stops at various hip places throughout the city.” Todd, who managed subscriptions, began to suggest “buying Ad-Words from Google if the data showed it to be—” but he was interrupted by Mark from the business office, who insisted that they first “analyze current audiences, segment them by levels of giving, and then survey them for willingness to attend shows and support the coming capital campaign.” In an annoyed tone, Sonya reminded Mark that the problem was “increasing the audience, not bean-counting the capital campaign.” Mark retorted that at least his ideas “were not delusional fantasies.” The room became uncomfortably quiet, so Josephine called the meeting to an end, suggesting that they had “a couple of good ideas to work with.” Sonya, however, disagreed, saying she didn't think they had a really exciting idea, to which Mark mumbled something in reply about “moving on and getting some real work done.”

At the next meeting, Josephine had the Think Big team continue with their brainstorming, and said that she'd like by the end of the meeting to choose the idea they'd pursue. After some initial confusion about what the ideas were—Josephine had forgotten to bring the notepad from the last meeting, and none had been written down from this meeting—they resurrected most of the ideas from memory, writing them on the whiteboard. Then, just as the voting process was about to begin, Josephine's cell phone rang and she answered it. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to the team, “I've got to get this—go ahead and vote without me. I trust you and will go with whichever idea you choose,” and stepped out of the room.

Calling out each idea, Jason tallied the votes. After a bit of horsetrading, they finally came to a choice that seemed to be acceptable to everyone. Or, as Heinz commented later, “one that was not unacceptable to everyone.” When Josephine returned to the room, they told her the outcome of the vote. She was a little surprised and not fully convinced that it was the best option. But she decided to go along with their choice, reasoning that it had been hard enough to get them this far; any setback at this point would mean that all the time already spent would have been wasted.

The next meeting was intended for planning implementation. As Mark led the planning, Sonya lost interest; she couldn't get excited about the approach the team had decided on. She left halfway through the meeting, a pattern that persisted throughout the rest of the project. After six weeks of meetings, the team began closing in on their “opening day,” as they referred to the project launch date. Their idea was to record a short video of the preparations for ShowArts' new production along with a short teaser staged by the performers. This video was to be posted online and linked in a marketing email, and would begin playing when the recipient opened the email. The email was to be sent to several thousand people on a mailing list purchased exclusively for this purpose.

At the final coordination meeting, a week before the first round of recording was to begin, Anish, who was the ShowArts artists' representative on the board, told the team that he had gotten a concerned call from one of the artists. This prompted him to do a little research that quickly confirmed a fear he had been harboring all along. Recording and posting a digital video was a violation not only of the ShowArts labor contracts with artists and with stagehands but also of the licensing agreement with the creators of the production.

The story of ShowArts is a composite of tales I've been told scores of time by members of actual groups in businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The story brings to mind several questions about the difficulties of working in teams focused on innovation, even in a creativity-focused organization. For example, why does Heinz, who seems to know what's going on, just sit back and watch the team struggle? Why doesn't Anish do the critical research, or at least voice his suspicions, earlier? Why do Mark and Sonya not get along, and what effect do their behaviors have on the group? Why does the team fail at this relatively simple project despite succeeding at putting on hundreds of complex productions each year? And then there's the most important question of all: Why didn't Josephine see this coming?

Two Brains Are Better Than One—Except When They Aren't

Understanding the individual constraints discussed in Chapter Two can get you quite far in overcoming common innovation killers within individuals. But this story illustrates a different order of difficulty. Here the problem isn't that people aren't able to gather data, process the data, or express their ideas to others. In the ShowArts story, when the creative process stops, it's for reasons other than a lack of vocabulary or an inability to grasp the concept. It happens because the group members are afraid, in conflict, unsure of what they are doing, or just in a hurry to get things done, all of which can defeat the purpose of forming a group in the first place.

Before considering in detail the constraints that operate in groups, it may be worthwhile to remind ourselves of the advantages of group work, those that we want to maximize in the context of innovation. When a group is formed to address an innovation problem, the group members can be expected to perform the following activities: analyze the problem, generate a set of potential solutions to the problem, test those potential solutions against the constraints of the situation, and then execute the most optimal of the solutions. These tasks imply a “more is better”
information processing
function of the group.

Of course, one person can do all these things, including generating and testing a variety of ideas. But a group, by definition, can produce a larger number of perspectives on the problem, thus increasing the potential accuracy and scope of the diagnosis. And after the problem has been framed, the diversity of perspectives means that groups can produce a wider range of potential solutions than any one individual is likely to come up with. This divergent activity is what we call “brainstorming.” Apart from increasing the number of ideas—and hence the likelihood of generating a really good one—using a group to tackle an innovation challenge provides access to a wider diversity of problem-solving strategies and a wider base of experiences to draw upon. This access increases the chance of devising a realistic and implementable solution to the challenge at hand.

Finally, a group provides access to a wider range of those skills and capabilities that might be needed during the implementation phase of the innovation project. All of these considerations, by the way, argue not only for the advantages of groups but for the particular advantages of
diverse
groups, such as cross-functional teams and groups that include people with different levels of experience and responsibility.

However, as we all know from experience, groups don't often work optimally. This is especially true when groups are working on problems of innovation, which by definition challenge the group members to do something new, often in an atmosphere that is fraught with pressure. Social psychologists have studied a number of factors that affect group interaction, but in this chapter I will focus on four factors that can most damage—or foster—creativity and innovation:

• Emotion:
  the kinds of feelings we have simply by being with others
  
• Culture:
  the group members' shared but often unconscious understanding of how they will work together
  
• Environment:
  features of the group's physical and social surroundings that help or hurt productive interaction
  
• Group process:
  the way the group goes about its work
  

Whether you are creating or overseeing groups and teams, leading a group, or simply participating in one, this chapter will help you identify the common ways groups kill innovation and what you can do to help overcome these constraints.

Emotion Constraints: Ego and Social Status

The fact that humans are social animals explains some of the constraints on creativity we experience in groups. As social animals, we seek a legitimate and honorable place, and this is represented by our status in the groups we are part of. Whether or not we are conscious of it, the human need to gain status—or to avoid losing it—is a prime driver of our behavior in groups.

In fact, one way to think of meetings is as
status contests
in which the participants' behavior serves to drive their relative social status up or down. It's easy to see this in conspicuous behaviors like running the critical finite element analysis for the project without being asked. More subtly, status can be affected by body language, by the ways we dress, and by what we say, how we say it, and to whom. Research has shown that people in groups watch behaviors like touching, interruption, and members' unconscious reactions to ideas as clues for assessing relative status (e.g., Knapp, 1978). Being the one who is touched, who is interrupted, or whose ideas are ignored (for example, by not being written on the board) are all signs of low or decreasing status. In contrast, status can increase if members contribute insightful thoughts, show how connected they are to powerful outsiders, or bring important resources to the group.

These dynamics often lead group members to adopt counterproductive attitudes and behaviors. Here are three of them.

Fearing Criticism

If being perceived as smart has a positive effect on our status, being perceived as
not smart
has the opposite effect. A common problem in group interactions is members' openly criticizing the ideas of others, particularly during brainstorm activities. Although such criticism can be motivated by an individual's desire to help the group—for example, by pointing out dead-end paths or showing why ideas won't work—it probably doesn't hurt that it also displays the person's critical analytic abilities and his or her knowledge of the problem to the group. In other words, delivering such criticism can make one seem smart and valued to a group, so why not do it?

Although it can be an advantage for a group to have members who are smart and analytical, criticism delivered at the wrong time or in the wrong way can have an inhibiting effect on the sharing of creative ideas. Teresa Amabile's research (1979) has shown that even the expectation that others will critically evaluate our ideas or evaluate them in a way that threatens our self-esteem will lead us to generate fewer and less creative ideas.