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.
