People: Help or Hinder Innovation?

People are Messy.

I’m sure you’ve thought at one time or another – If it weren’t for my staff or my customers or my board, I could just focus on my product or service and things would be so much easier! People are messy. They often don’t do want you want them to do, or in the way that you want them to do it, or when you want them to do it. And don’t even get me started about those creative folks!

As I mentioned in a previous blog, we tend to think of people as being either creative or not creative. And there are beliefs out there that say that a creative person is uncontrollable or unreliable or a loose cannon.

I disagree. Creativity is, simply put, the deliberate use of our ordinary thinking processes.

Every person has this trait to some degree. It’s not a fixed attribute such as one’s height or eye-color. And the creative gene is not only dealt out to a few such as Lady Gaga, Tim Burton or Maya Angelou.

Why do you want creative people in your business? Creative people have broad interests, are attracted to complexity, are curious, intuitive, have a tolerance for ambiguity, are self-confident, can persevere through challenging times, and are often driven by intrinsic motivation. That sounds like exactly the type of people I want helping me to grow my business. And research has shown that the use of creative thinking techniques reduces costs, increases efficiency and positively impacts ROI.

Let’s delve into two of these characteristics.

A tolerance for ambiguity means that a person can see various angles of a situation or problem and not get trapped in either/or, good/bad, or right/wrong thinking, or just wanting to get to a resolution as quickly as possible.  Being able to remain open-minded and find an unfamiliar situation interesting or exciting, rather than feeling stressed, increases the ability to think and react creatively.

This ability to be comfortable in an unfamiliar or unknown situation is helped by a person’s ability to be persistent and able to push off gratification of the reward. Do I eat that cookie now or when I finish this blog? Maintaining a clear sense of purpose helps to push through obstacles and frustration that others might find overwhelming.

There is a famous marshmallow experiment in which nursery school students were told they could have two marshmallows, rather than only one, if they waited. They weren’t told how long they had to wait, and for a four-year-old a minute probably feels like an hour. The children who could only wait 30 seconds before eating the marshmallow were found years later to have more behavioral problems and average SAT scores that were 210 points less than the students who could wait the entire 15 minutes.

Here’s the really interesting part and relevant part for us. When the researcher taught the children a creative thinking technique to imagine that the marshmallow is only a picture surrounded by an imaginary frame, he dramatically improved their self-control and increased the time that they could delay gratification. So put that cookie in an imaginary clear, locked box. You can look at it, but not touch it. Or stick a post-it note on your screen with a short phase such as ‘blog=new customers’ to keep your purpose front and center.

 Motivation encompasses what to do, whether to do it, how to do it and when to do it, according to Teresa Amabile, a leading creativity researcher. People become motivated to work on something when they find it interesting, involving, exciting, satisfying, and personally challenging. Creative people are driven by curiosity and the enjoyment of searching for new insights. Their work becomes a labor of love and is self-motivating. Job satisfaction studies show that people will be most creative and most satisfied in their jobs and perform better when they are primarily intrinsically motivated.

It used to be thought that external forces, such as the work environment, could not positively or negatively impact intrinsic motivation. However recent research by Amabile shows that people’s perceptions and emotions can affect their motivation.

And perceptions and emotions can be impacted by ‘place’ (the second facet of creativity)—work, family, peers. The impact of one’s environment, including the work place, and whether that place is supportive or pressured has a huge impact on creativity.

I’ll discuss that in the next post where I’ll talk about the second facet of creativity—place.