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By definition the ability to create something novel and appropriate, creativity is essential But increasingly, managers are not the source of the idea.” of its award-winning artist-founder—and took organizational creativity for granted. likely to be in creating viable commercial and military aircraft, they focused on securing.
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Can creativity scale? She believes that creativity within an organization depends on vibrant, ongoing collaboration and free idea flow—which tend to dry up as a business adds people and projects. A former entrepreneur Scott was involved in three start-ups before joining Google , she hates the fact that more layers of management often lead to more bureaucracy—and the end of entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking, and learning from mistakes.

Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation

At the same time, she recognizes that it is not reasonable to have organizations so flat that managers are saddled with dozens of direct reports. Bob Sutton echoed the sentiment, citing research showing that when organizations focus on process improvements too much, it hampers innovation over the long term. Process management, Mark Fishman explained, is appropriate in some phases of creative work but not others. Efficient models make good sense for the middle and end stages of the innovation process, when the game has moved from discovery to control and reliability. Appreciate the different creative types among your people—and realize that some are better at certain phases than others.

And be very tolerant of the subversive. The consensus is that, eventually, an innovation reaches a point where it will be best served by people who know how to take it to market. Unfortunately, since the passion for an idea is highest among its originators, projects often lose steam at the handoff.

In entrepreneurial settings, idea originators are often forced to engage in commercial activity well beyond their comfort zones. Bob Litan, VP of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, which supports American entrepreneurship, noted how great a barrier that constitutes for many inventors. He described a program in which Kauffman links postdoctoral scientists to commercializers, rather than trying to teach inventors to spot market opportunities for their discoveries.

Nonetheless, many inventors do successfully grow their businesses think Google. These opposing models highlight the tension that always exists in the management of creatives: whether to round out their individual skill sets or allow them to run with their unique strengths and then balance them with complementary resources. Colloquium participants were of one mind on the subject of bureaucracy: It stifles creativity. Clay Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, offered a useful analogy for understanding why. He likened the life of an idea in a large corporate setting to that of a bill going before the U.

The idea is reshaped at various points along the way to suit the agendas of the people whose support is required in order for it to be funded. Christensen advised managers to recognize what that process does to ideas and deliberately decide to contain it.

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Kim Scott added that the manager must act as a shepherd—an analogy also used by Christy Jones, founder of Extend Fertility. Both believe that executives must protect those doing creative work from a hostile environment and clear paths for them around obstacles. In fact, Scott warned the managers in the room that, by creating the necessary new structures to support cross-unit collaboration, they might unwittingly create other forms of bureaucracy.

Not surprisingly, some push-back occurred. It all sounds very nice, someone pointed out, but gardens do have weeds; managers must not only water and fertilize, but also kill off the stuff that holds no potential. At what point and by whom should that determination be made? One school of thought says that the people closest to the idea are best equipped to make the call—but only if their personal commitment to its success, and the professional ramifications, can be severed.

In a spirited discussion of how ideas should be winnowed, Johansson suggested that the filters must be diverse. Unless the people sitting in judgment represent a variety of disciplines, functions, and viewpoints, they are unlikely to make wise decisions. Perhaps the best way to tap the wisdom of the broader market is to give it the power to turn thumbs up or thumbs down on new commercial possibilities. That approach resonated with the company founders present. That committee is death to creativity.

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Motivating people to perform at their peak is especially vital in creative work. An employee uninspired to wrap her mind around a problem is unlikely to come up with a novel solution. What spurs creativity, however, has long been a matter of debate. A convincing analysis was put forward by Henry Sauermann, then a doctoral candidate at Duke University now at Georgia Tech , who presented new research done in collaboration with Duke professor Wesley Cohen.

The surveys uncovered which workers were more intrinsically motivated—fired up, for example, by intellectual challenge or independence—and which were more extrinsically motivated, by such things as salary, benefits, and job security. The researchers looked at patents filed by each respondent as a reasonable proxy for innovative output. Their finding was clear: Early-stage researchers who were more motivated by intellectual challenge tended to be more productive.

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Interestingly, this did not hold true among the group doing later-stage work. A stronger desire for independence was also associated with somewhat higher productivity.


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The desire for intellectual challenge was, however, much more strongly linked to it. If the keys to creative output are indeed intellectual challenge and independence, management must find ways to provide them. Scott Cook pointed out that some people are simply more revolutionary in their thinking than others and therefore more suited to radical projects.

When people are well matched to a project, granting them independence holds less risk. Ideally, creative workers would be able to set their own agendas, at least in part. The practice of letting researchers spend a significant percentage of their time on projects of their own choosing was famously employed by 3M in its high-growth era. The screen for such projects consists of two questions—is it scientifically tractable, and does it meet an unmet medical need? A good leader can do much to challenge and inspire creative work in progress. Amabile and Steven J.

Kramer, May , Ghosh argued that employees doing creative work are more motivated by managerial behavior, even seemingly little things like a sincere word of public recognition, than by monetary rewards. Arguably, the managerial reactions that speak loudest to creative workers are reactions to failure.


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Virtually everyone in the colloquium agreed that managers must decrease fear of failure and that the goal should be to experiment constantly, fail early and often, and learn as much as possible in the process. Kim Scott observed that, ironically, the firms in Silicon Valley that have the hardest time managing creativity are the ones that have been most successful, because they develop an aversion to failure.

How might that aversion develop? Research on firms in an emerging industry by Chad Navis of Emory University and Mary Ann Glynn, a professor at Boston College, suggests that there are particular periods of time when stakeholders become more sensitive to the prospect of failure. Navis and Glynn traced the first 15 years of the satellite radio industry through the stories of the only two U.

In the early years, both companies fought an uphill battle simply to establish the legitimacy of satellite radio. During that time, both firms focused on making progress toward a viable model, and their individual advantages went more or less unnoticed by outsiders.

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Performance assessments shifted from the sector as a whole to the individual firms. Fear of failure also seems to rise with the scale of a business. Not only do firms become more conservative as they grow, but fear also makes managers more likely to deny that failure has happened and more eager to erase all memory of it. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, underscored what a lost opportunity that constitutes.

Any business that experiments vigorously will experience failure—which, when it happens, should be mined to improve creative problem solving, team learning, and organizational performance. How can an organization capitalize on failure? Above all, Edmondson said, its management must create an environment of psychological safety, convincing people that they will not be humiliated, much less punished, if they speak up with ideas, questions, or concerns, or make mistakes. Beyond that, she cautioned against any broad-brush approach. Failures in organizations fall into three quite different types: unsuccessful trials, system breakdowns, and process deviations.

All must be analyzed and dealt with, but the first category, which offers the richest potential for creative learning, involves overcoming deeply ingrained norms that stigmatize failure and thereby inhibit experimentation.