I just came across an interesting article on Fast Company about the 6 myths of creativity. Their list goes as follows:
1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
5. Competition Beats Collaboration
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization
I totally agree; these beliefs that many people in management positions hold about creativity and what triggers it are simply wrong and have nothing to do with reality.
Even if they hold in one case or another, it’s obvious they are not the rule, and that there most probably were some other factors in the background that helped.
Check out the full article: The 6 Myths Of Creativity
Number one:
1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
Is not a myth. Find people who score extremely well on the abstract reasoning part of an IQ test, and you’ll find they are creative problem solvers. Every time.
Given they were obviously wrong on their #1, I think it casts doubt on teh rest of the list as well.
And in actuality, I’ve yet to meet a “management type” who believed any of those items, anyway. And I work in software development. That’s one of the reasons the industry is so stagnant, now. They treat employees as if anyone with equivalent work experience and education is equally capable of performing any task. It just isn’t so. That’s how you get teams of 100 people working on a project, that could be done just as well if not better by 2 or 3.
I’m afraid you have been sold a bill of goods by those very same people who are supposedly the believers in these “myths”. High techs do not like to be dependent on low level creative types to the extent they have been the last 50 years, so they engage in a lot of wishful thinking that they really aren’t. But go to any development team at a high tech company and you’ll find all the good stuff is being done by a few key people, while the rest are just acting busy and downloading porn. And hoping like hell nobody notices they are being paid 6 figures for doing pretty much nothing.
Well, what you said about point one is true, but not every company has a system in place to evaluate the creativity of its employees; so the problem is rather in their definition of “creative types”. Still even though IQ tests and others do give us an idea about people who are creative by nature, they’re not the only ones coming up with good ideas, maybe most come from them, but others can too with a little bit of coaching, I believe.
As for management types not believing in the points above; well I know many managers that think they can trigger creativity by throwing money at their team or by putting them under huge amounts of pressure, …etc. But obviously none of those are a solution.
Being an IT person myself, and being in the development environment my whole career, I totally confirm that it’s usually a small number of people who are doing the most creative work, with others not giving much of a plus in that area.
But not all work depends on creativity, and this is where a manager should step in, evaluate his team member’s strengths, and push them in that direction to complement the team. In the end if a person isn’t helping anywhere in the team, then he simply has no place in the team.