Dilbert’s Approach to Creativity

This may be familiar.  Your boss decides that your company needs some creative ideas, some new energy.  Before you know it, you are headed to a half-day “brainstorming” at a hotel somewhere in the suburbs.

The hotel provides you with a meeting room, flip charts, some oversized muffins and weak coffee.  As you arrive, your colleagues are there, some talking on cell phones, others chatting and others staring vacantly out at the parking lot.

Your boss calls the meeting to order.  With marker in hand, he asks for ideas, but none are forthcoming.  So he supplies a few, and people start to build on them.  By mid-morning, flip chart sheets paper the walls. By lunchtime, the group is feeling very satisfied with itself.  There are hundreds of ideas there.  One colleague agrees to have the charts typed up.

A week later, you receive the list of ideas.  But somehow they have lost their magic by now and the memory of your retreat fades into the background, one of those well-intended but ultimately useless ventures your group has undertaken.

It’s like a scene from a Dilbert cartoon: the boss says “get creative!” and suddenly everyone is expected to wear hair gel and pink ties.  Ideas flow quickly, and are just as quickly forgotten.

There are two major problems with this model.  One is that the techniques typically used at sessions like this are unproductive or misused, and the other is that creativity needs consistent encouragement.

Brainstorming is typically used in such sessions.  Participants are encouraged to come up with as many ideas as they can, in a criticism-free atmosphere.  Suggestions that appear to be impractical or off-the-wall are encouraged, as these may become the fodder for other, more useful, thoughts as participants build on each other’s ideas.

The problem is that, in most companies, a criticism-free environment is difficult to achieve.  Clearly, if your boss is present, you are going to self-censor and the range of ideas the group comes up with will be tightly restricted.  Even if the meeting is among peers, social and political networks are still operating and ideas can be quickly killed with a word, a sigh, or a patronizing smile.

Moreover, brainstorming has limitations.  While it can be a good way of papering the wall with ideas, that’s all it does. Most of these ideas will be nonsense because brainstorming sessions tend to be fast-moving and fail to get into depth.  After the euphoria of the session, the mundane task of follow-up is often forgotten and the ideas languish.

Other techniques, such as Synectics^TM, address some of these problems.  But the fundamental problem is that creativity can’t be turned on and off like a tap.

To develop creativity in your organization, you need to foster it.  That’s a much more challenging task that requires ongoing commitment.  But it’s worth the effort.

To begin with, you need clear overarching goals – but the flexibility for your people to use their ingenuity in coming up with subordinate goals and ways of achieving them.  You can tell them which mountain to climb, but let them find their own way of getting to the top.

Creativity happens in organizations as a result of motivation, domain knowledge and creative thinking skills.  Creative people (and yes, your people are creative) are intrinsically motivated – that is, motivated by the task itself, not by external rewards.  Throwing money at people does not encourage creativity, but throwing them wicked problems, and the support they need to solve them, does.

Domain knowledge means that those people charged with solving the problem should have an in-depth understanding of it – otherwise their solutions will be impractical or poorly thought through.  However, since experts tend to think along familiar paths rather than truly innovate, you also need to provide them with skills in creative thinking from the many available courses.

The social and physical environment also need to be conducive to creativity.  Creativity feeds on diversity, so it is important to have teams that can provide ideas from several perspectives.  One major design firm recruits anthropologists, architects and MBA’s to staff its teams.  The physical environment should make it easy for teams to meet informally, but should also provide a “creative bubble” of privacy when needed.

One brainstorming session will not make your organization creative.  But a true commitment to creativity can transform it.