Why creativity is suck

Since I worked on the Weird Ideas that Work book, I carefully monitor different aspects of how creative people suffer compared to their deprived imagination colleagues. I mainly studied the difference between creative and routine work (see the post about why innovation and creativity are sucks ). Many theories and research suggest, in particular, that: 1. Creativity suggests that most of the time you suffer defeat; The routine work seduces that most of the time you are achieving success. A creative approach means that you can constantly shut down somewhere, and with routine work you usually have everything in order. As Diego and I wrote, failure is a sloppy, but informative . 2. Creative approach involves constant disputes about ideas. And although it can be fun, if you do it right, even in the most prosperous groups it is very difficult to avoid very personal and very unpleasant conflicts about which idea is better. 3. Creative work is confusing, frightening and ineffective. The routine work is clear, comfortable and effective. 4. If you do creative work correctly, then you have to generate many bad ideas, and in addition, most of your successful ideas are also cut . I can continue endlessly. But the best formulation of the probabilities and emotions related to creative work was given by James March , perhaps the most authoritative organizational theorist of the living. There are rumors that he almost won the Nobel Prize for Economics once or two. The wording is this: “Unfortunately, the imagination is not given for free. Protection from imagination acts inaudible: it covers both bad ideas and good ones - and the first are much more than the latter. Most fantasies make us nowhere, and in most cases the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are catastrophic. Most of the anomalies find themselves in the landfill of unsuccessful mutations, and are not ranked to outstanding organizational transformations ... As a result, there is a lot of unfair in the system that stimulates the imagination of individuals and individual organizations, so that the system can generally choose between the results of alternative experiments. Having glorified the imagination, we seduce the innocent, pushing them to involuntary self -destruction (or, if you want, altruism). ” I would not want to inspire you even more pessimism, but a study containing the next bad news for lovers of a creative approach has just been released. This is the work of Jennifer Müller from the University of Pennsylvania, which is called : "Identification of creative leadership: can an expression of creative ideas negatively affect the perception of leadership potential?" The conclusion is this: people who are considered more creative have, according to others, they have less leadership potential than their colleagues deprived of their imagination - except in cases where these people are also considered charismatic. This prejudice against creative people can be seen, firstly, from the analysis of the experience of one Indian company, where employees were supposed to be engaged in creative work. Then these results were re -obtained in the conditions of a controlled experiment: half of two hundred students were “appointed” by the generators of ideas, and the second half - appraisers of these ideas. Then the generators of ideas were divided into two groups. They were asked to prepare 1) creative (new and constructive) or 2) just a useful (but not new) solution to the following problem: how to get more income from their passengers? The results are disturbed. On the one hand, the “judges” did not see the significant differences in terms of usefulness of put forward ideas and noticed that the participants who were instructed to nominate creative ideas really invented more creative solutions than those who did not receive such instructions. But on the other hand, the judges also systematically believed that more creative participants have the potential of leadership below if they measure it on three scales: “How much leadership does the participant have?”; “How much would the participant control the activities of the team?”; "I believe that the candidate is an effective leader." The light side, or maybe a warning can be found in the third experiment, where the prototype of the charismatic leader was "activated." In these cases, participants evaluated a candidate who came up with creative ideas as a more potentially successful leader than a candidate, whose task was to put forward useful ideas. And vice versa. Müller believes that leaders must formulate common goals so that their teams achieve the result. And the more clear goals are set, the better they work, that is, leaders must eradicate uncertainty. One way to do this is to establish standards and plant them. But when people are asked to describe a creative personality, along with the characteristics of “visionary” and “charismatic”, words like “strange”, “non -conformist” and “non -focused” arise. Müller says: "They see creative personalities in a positive way, they are perceived dual." Of course, this is just one study, but made qualitatively and using different methods. And it shows that our stereotypes about creative personalities often conflict with our ideas about good leaders. In particular, it can be added that creative people are perceived as concentrated on themselves (not just non -focused), inconsistent and unreliable. Most of us do not want to have such a chef. It is also interesting that charisma allows you to imagine yourself as a creative person and as a leader. It definitely worked for people like Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, David Kelly from IDEO and Oprah Winfrey . The study shows that if you are a personality of a creative type and at the same time want to lead, then do everything so that your boss and others who evaluate you think about your charisma - “activate” the potential of the charismatic leader, conducting conversations about famous charismatic personalities, as well as performing actions that fit into the “prototype” of charismatic persons: clear, inspirational, setting an attractive attractive. A vision of the future, affecting topics and stories, which arouses energy and passion in others. On the other hand, there are many successful creative personalities who have reached leadership heights and deprived of at least part of these qualities - Mark Zuckerberg , Bill Gates , David Pacard and Bill Hughlet come to mind. And there are also other successful creative personalities who lived a wonderful and significant life, despite the fact that they did not show much interest in leadership - at least Steve Vozniak and the winner of the Nobel Prize Richard Feynman. And although we need real leaders, it seems to me that - especially at this moment of history - we need creative people even more. For me, the plus here is that the conclusions are intriguing, and some will seem useful to some - especially creative personalities who are trying to get to leading positions. But it is also important that the creation of a fake facade eventually hit you with a ricochet. And, perhaps, the most important conclusion: if you have to choose leaders and judge them, then all the time remind yourself that you will have an unfair prejudice against creative people - except when you consider them charismatic, and in these cases, on the contrary, you will overestimate their potential. Original post