There
is a fundamental tension between productivity and creativity, and
managers won’t get more of the latter until they recognize it.Productive people move through the tasks they have to accomplish in a systematic way. They make steady and measurable progress toward their goals. They make effective and efficient use of their time.
Creativity… doesn’t.
Creativity needs time and space to grow. Although we can systematically engage in activities that are related to creativity, it is hard to systematize creativity itself. In particular, creativity is fundamentally about knowledge. Nearly all creative ideas involve people finding new uses for existing knowledge – some novel configuration of old insights. James Dyson developed his vacuum by drawing a parallel to sawmills. Fiona Fairhurst designed a faster swimsuit by understanding shark skin. George de Mestral invented Velcro by understanding cockleburs.
That means people need to have the time to learn things that are not obviously relevant to their jobs, so that they will have a broad and deep knowledge base to draw from when they need to be creative.
Moreover, creative enterprises rarely involve steady and measurable progress. Instead, being creative involves trying lots of different possibilities, struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right solution.
YOU AND YOUR TEAM
How to build this critical skill.
But these activities — building
up a knowledge base and exploring it — take time. It is hard to simply schedule
a few hours here and there to engage in creative pursuits. Instead, there are
times when it’s necessary to spend hours learning about a new area of
knowledge, or to have a rambling conversation with a colleague to pull the
thread of a new idea. And so a lot of creative activity may look suspiciously
like loafing around until the breakthrough comes.
This difference between
productivity and creativity is a central reason why many companies want more
creativity from their employees than they get.
Companies typically evaluate
employees based on measures of productivity. More importantly, they set up
their hiring plans based on the assumption that they are going to hire
productive people. They want the people in the organization to make clear
progress. And they focus on developing conscientious individuals who finish
tasks.
If an organization truly wants
creativity, it has to start by hiring more people than it needs just to
complete the tasks required for the company to stay afloat. Much has been made
of Google’s 20%
time, in which employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time
on new ideas. While there has been some discussion about how this policy has
actually been implemented in the company, I think it is correct that you need
to hire 10-20% more people than you actually need to complete jobs if you are
going to give everyone an opportunity to develop their creative skills.
Managers also need to provide
some flexibility for employees to alter their schedules when an interesting new
idea begins to develop. Giving someone the freedom to use 10-20% of their time
to develop their creativity does not necessarily mean that they will spend 4-8
hours each week on creative pursuits. Instead, there may be weeks in which
someone focuses exclusively on tasks they need to complete and has other weeks
in which several days involve pursuing an idea down a rabbit hole.
But it’s not enough just to give
employees the time and flexibility they need to be creative. Managers have to
reward employees for engaging in tasks that may ultimately lead to creative
solutions, like learning new things, developing new skills, having wide-ranging
conversations with colleagues, and trying out ideas that don’t work.
It is possible to manage in a way
that promotes creativity, but it will require productivity-obsessed managers to
loosen their grip on the way people spend their time at work.
Art Markman, PhD, is the
Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the
University of Texas at Austin and founding director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He has
written over 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision
making, and motivation. He is the author of several books including Smart Thinking, Smart
Change, and Habits of Leadership.
This
article is about CREATIVITY
an except from hbs
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