Creativity

What are you personal experiences with individual creativity?  Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?

I find my creativity comes in spurts.  I agree with the Jonah Lehrer’s article on creativity in the Wall Street Journal that often times when I am least alert I will come up with a solution to a problem that is bothering me.  I first noticed this in AP Physics in high school.  There would be particular problem that I could not figure out and scribbling on my paper and erasing my work several times over, I would just go to my room and lie down.  I would try to sleep and I would find as I was starting to drift off I would start thinking about the problem again.  Instead of continuing to feel as though there was an obstacle in front of me, I would start seeing connections between concepts that I had not realized before.  These insights would cause me to spring out of bed and back to the paper.  Immediately, I would return to the paper and start sketching out the solution to the problem that had previously vexed me.  This “get groggy” approach as mentioned in Lehrer’s article works well for me.

What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity?  Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?

I think organizations can provide structures that either help or hinder creativity.  Having worked for a large corporation, I have seen instances of both.  It may seem counter intuitive but sometimes having a set form to handle certain things actually helps creativity.  For instance, when I worked at Samsung, whenever there was a major incident someone would have to create a multi-paneled document explaining the cause of the problem and describing how it could be fixed. Having a stock form to describe and solve an issue can allow people to focus on solving the problem and not have to worry about what format they will use to report on that problem. 

On the flip side, I’ve seen managers that can hinder creativity by discouraging feedback and input from their employees or soliciting feedback but failing to act on employee suggestions.  In these cases, employees begin to feel that their voice is not heard and so they tend to stop doing any more than what is directly asked of them.

Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself?  And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?  

I think creativity can occur at the individual and group level.  The only prerequisite for creativity is motivation and often times that motivation comes from an existing pain.  I also think creativity typically requires getting ones hands dirty and testing different ideas until one sticks. Creativity is really about taking existing elements and putting them together in new and unique ways to solve problems.  It is often applying old models to new problems.

Individuals can find creative solutions to their problems on their own.   However, I think for a creative idea to have maximum impact, individuals tend to need to be able to work within a larger organization in order to successfully spread their idea.  One example of this is the inventor of Post-It notes, Art Fry an engineer at 3M invented Post-It notes based on poor adhering glue that another scientist, Spencer Silver had invented.  Prior to seeing Silver’s glue, Fry used to use scrap pieces of paper to mark the pages in his hymnbook in church.  He would inevitably drop some of the scrap pieces of paper outside of his hymnbook and have to quickly pick them back up[1].  Initially Fry’s managers did not see the benefit of the product so he created prototypes and distributed to 3M executive secretaries to use.  A few days later, the secretaries ran out of Post-It notes and asked him more.  He said that he did not have any left but they could talk to their bosses to back his project.  As a result, 3M Post-It notes are one of the most widespread office supplies of all time.

This was an example of a creative idea that one individual came up with but he was inspired by another scientist’s technology.  After finding a novel use for a crummy adhesive, he had to advocate his idea within an organization so that he could actually implement it.

What do you think about this article and the way this author describes different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?  Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

I think that Lehrer’s article is on point.  There are a number of different ways to stoke creativity and creativity is not just a spark of inspiration but something that actually can be obtaining by testing out different processes.  I think there are probably even more creative processes that people to use to help brainstorm good ideas than listed in the article.  I think the key is to try different processes every day. 

I think one thing that is probably implied but not mentioned explicitly in Lehrer’s article is that people can be creative by benchmarking other industries or areas.  He talks about chemists solving molecular biology problems.  The lesson here is that we should always look at how people solve problems in one area to determine how we can solve problems in another area.  Analogies are an incredibly powerful problem-solving tool


As far as trusting ourselves to know when to use which approach, I think that we need to trust ourselves based on what has worked for us in the past.  However, if we don't have much of a successful track record being creative or our existing systems are failing then we need to engage other people.  We need to involve other people that help us by asking us what-if questions and challenging our assumptions.  

However, I think that choosing a specific approach is less important than trying multiple approaches.  Lehrer provides ten different creativity hacks but he could have probably as easily provided twenty hacks or only three hacks.  Trying multiple approaches or thinking about the problem from the perspective of triangulation can help spur creative thoughts.  I think that there is an element of luck to all creativity and by trying multiple solutions/hacks one can increase their odds.

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[1] Daly, John A., 2011, Advocacy.