I occasionally play a game with my friends, where I rapidly say some words aloud and they respond with the first visual image that pops up in their minds. It is a rough version of the IAT and some fascinating conversations result from there.
With the word “creativity”. I hear responses ranging from names of luxury brands, to activities such as drawing or fashion design, to adjectives people associate with “creative people”. It is common though astonishing to me how so many people think creative people are different from them in ways they could not articulate.
This week’s readings are all about creativity.
While it is evident that announcing a creativity department does not help organisations, managing creative people has always been tricky. Not least when research finds how creative people are likelier to have dubious ethics.
However, being creative also has an undeniable dark side—one that can be very costly for companies if left unchecked. Research has shown that while creative people are adept at coming up with new ideas, they can also be more likely to engage in morally questionable behaviors. In a set of studies, Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely at Duke University found that creative thinkers are better at rationalizing dishonesty than uncreative thinkers. “Thinking outside the box” can lead to acting unethically.
The explanation sounds simple but worth pondering over.
The idea that creativity is rare leads to a sense of entitlement; if you are creative, you see yourself as more deserving than others. Leaders reinforce this when they don’t hold creative people to the same rules as those who are less creative, or when they give them special treatment.
Can we all be creative? Are we all already creative and just don’t know how to give expression to it? Here is an interesting perspective on broken sleep as a creative window. The whole essay is worth reading.
Night also triggers hormonal changes in our brains that suit creativity. Wehr has noted that, during night-waking, the pituitary gland excretes high levels of prolactin. This is the hormone associated with sensations of peace and with the dreamlike hallucinations we sometimes experience as we fall asleep, or upon waking. It is produced when we feel sexual satisfaction, when nursing mothers lactate, and it causes hens to sit on their eggs for long periods. It alters our state of mind.
Prolactin levels are known to increase during sleep, but Wehr found that (along with melatonin and cortisol) it continues to be produced during periods of ‘quiet wakefulness’ between sleeps, triggered by the natural cycles of light and dark, not tied to sleep per se. Blissfully zonked out by prolactin, our night brains allow ideas to emerge and intertwine as they might in a dream.
Wehr suggests that not only have modern routines altered our sleeping patterns, they have also robbed us of this ancient connection between our dreams and waking life, and ‘might provide a physiological explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies’.
Ekirch agrees: ‘By turning night into day, modern technology has obstructed our oldest avenue to the human psyche, making us, to invoke the words of the 17th-century English playwright Thomas Middleton, “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies”.’
This is an oldie but a goodie by John Hagel that I re-read this week – the manifesto for a passionate creative person.
… we celebrate the passionate and dedicated individuals in all fields who have both led us to where we are now, and are creating and shaping the future. They are explorers, pushing back the limits of our current understanding. They pioneer new ideas, discover new truths, and tirelessly innovate. They actively seek out new challenges and connect broadly with others to solve them. Though they come from every occupation and background, they are unified by the sincere belief that they can leave the world a better place than they found it.
And lest we should think all this is airy-fairy bunkum, I came across this heartening story of Cuba’s creative voices are dealing with constraints.
Very early on the second day, when we were working together to think about how our group might concoct ongoing meetings, one member, a self-described pedagogue who helps lead Cuba’s school of design, said ‘Of course all Cubans are designers. Take for example my car: it’s an old Peugeot from France with transplants, an engine from Russia, a German carburetor and a steering system from Italy. To live here, one has to be a designer.’
Constraints lead to creative solutions, something known as Jugaad in India. Making such constraint-led creative fixes sustainable and scalable is the problem definition, the chasm between creativity and innovation.