Managing Creativity MBA dissertation

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I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled "Is creativity management an oxymoron?"

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of "creativity management" was the word "management." Replace it with the word "optimization" and the resistance disappears; all we're really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they're likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

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TIP OF THE DAY: TIME PRESSURE

There is a pervasive belief that time pressure stimulates creativity. This is both true and false.

There are a number of forces at work:

a) Time pressure increases creative output. By forcing idea production, setting goals and incremental deadlines, a greater number of ideas are produced than if a "do your best" approach is taken. If a leader asks particpants in an idea generating session to address a problem and think of at least 5 ideas every half an hour, then 80 ideas are produced by one individual and 1600 are produced by 20 individuals at the end of an average working day. This level of output is conscious and would not be produced normally.

b) Time pressure encourages prolific production and therefore the probability of generating good ideas increases. It can be said with great confidence that quality of output is closely related to quantity. The best single creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.

c) Forcing output pushes individuals along the experience curve, refines their methodology, builds competencies and knowledge and improves performance. Screenwriters know that they are likely to produce more, better quality work faster if they set themselves a schedule of a certain number of pages per day.

d) Motivation is critical to creativity. If a person is intrinsically motivated, time pressure may be a synergistic extrinsic motivator. If the person is not intrinsically motivated then it may turn out to be a non-synergistic extrinsic motivator, which reduces the level of engagement in the endeavour.

e) Short term time pressure may be bad in that it does not allow the mind to engage in the endeavour at various cognitive levels. It does not allow rich ideas to formulate through the process of incubation. Intrinsically motivated individuals will benefit from short term time pressure and goals (sets cognitive forces in motion) and will generate richer ideas through incubation over the longer term.

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If you haven't already done so, you can buy the MBA Research Project on Managing Creativity and Innovation, DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator software and the 50 slide Powerpoint Presentation from http://www.managing-creativity.com

Best

http://www.managing-creativity.com

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