Business and Creativity
There’s a lot of talk in business about creativity. Sadly, most of it is just talk. Creativity is a process that takes time. New ideas, new ventures, new ways of thinking don’t happen in a flash of inspiration, but they more readily surface after a period of incubation.
The life cycle of organizations, people, businesses, and products have predictable stages. Each stage is in conflict with other stages. This life-cycle model can be applied to a variety of situations from personal decisions to the rise and fall of empires. But let’s look at how this applies to an idea that turns into a business.
Our founder enters the slow zone. She conceives of a vague idea, a gut feeling, or intuition. Once the “half-baked” idea surfaces, she mulls it over. This stage is necessarily purposeless: it’s discovery, not goal orientation. The idea may even be forgotten, but there are underlying processes going on all the time. Guy Claxton, author of Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: How intelligence increases when you think less, coined the term Undermind for this intuitive way of slow knowing. He contrasts this with what he calls D-mode (deliberate-mode). Remember that sort of getting-to-the-right-answer-fast thinking you were praised for in school? Of course, D-mode is necessary, but not here, and not yet.
Incubating ideas is similar to how a writer might go through several drafts before really knowing what he wants to write about. An artist may make multiple sketches before deciding on which direction to take a painting. It’s the process that gives birth to the new.
Once the business is born, then management by the seat of the pants is the name of the game. Everything is in flux. Our founder may hire people who thrive in a chaotic environment. Roles have not yet been defined. Everything speeds up. New ideas are welcome. The business is still malleable.
As the business succeeds, professional managers get hired and systems are put in place. Now the focus is on speed, efficiency, and productivity. There is little tolerance for anything that can’t be measured.
Everything is results-driven. If time is not allotted to the “slow zone” then the company starts to look inward, and becomes a rigid rule-based organization detached from a dynamic marketplace. By now the creative talent needing a flexible environment has left. The company goes into decline and eventually dies.
Creativity doesn’t survive long in a hierarchical environment, and fear is a creativity killer. Creativity will flourish where people are allowed to be wrong. This is why most ideas don’t come from mature businesses. The focus of the mature business is productivity which is all fine and dandy when when the goal is defined and still relevant. But what about when things change?
Our world is dynamic. And as the financial pundits say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. We have all experienced technological products that have the shelf life of a cream puff.
Businesses need a method of generating new ideas. I’m sure there are valuable ideas that could be harvested from employees, but new ideas are almost always incomprehensible at first. And adopting something “unproven” is simply too threatening for businesses in the mature stage. The new is disruptive but essential to the survival of commercial organizations.
I don’t know much about business – at least not the running of one. But let’s not be too immodest here, I have worked in a few. And then there’s that li’l ole thing called intuition. Of the businesses I have worked in, I have so often seen that “rigid, rule based” structure, and if I allowed it to, it would frustrate the hell out of me. I try not to allow it to. Frustration seems such a fast emotion. And unless it’s properly channelled, it seems pretty useless. Nevertheless…
Why (I sometimes say to myself) can’t they see how wrong they’ve got it?! They (being the big generic “They” of most of the companies I have experience of) are so obsessed with employee control, that they seem to entirely miss the point of life – happiness – and business success – productivity… both of which require much greater degrees of creativity, flexibility and slowing down than is given credit for. There seems to be a few companies who are cottoning on to the need for these things – who are recognising that speed, speed, speed isn’t the only way to be… Let us hope we can usher in a future of Slow!