How the Work Environment Can Crush the Creative Spirit

Source: Geralt/Pixabay

Many business leaders subscribe to the belief that to stay competitive in an ever-changing world, they must embrace creativity and innovation as primary goals. A creative environment engenders new ideas, products, and approaches that can solve problems and offer goods and services that meet the immediate needs of a sometimes fickle public. To support that perception, IBM conducted a Global CEO Study several years ago; 1,541 chief executives, general managers, and public-sector leaders across 33 industries and 60 countries around the globe were surveyed. Approximately 60 percent of those executives cited creativity as the most important leadership attribute needed for future success.

Yet, despite an overwhelming embrace of creativity as a significant factor in the success of a business or organization, many companies have practices and principles in place that actually crush the creative spirit of employees and seriously hamper the generation of new ideas and dynamic change. Indeed, there is a plethora of tales in which well-respected firms actively work against creative expression on an almost daily basis. In short, far too many businesses talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.

In his seminal book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson makes a compelling case not just for the generation of creative ideas but also for the habitats that stimulate, foster, and enhance creativity in the first place. He contends that specific types of environments are necessary for creativity to prosper. These environments, according to Johnson, may encompass diverse locations, including the office, nature, the home, or interaction with media. He caps his thesis with a profound thought: “On a basic level, it is true that ideas happen inside minds, but those minds are invariably connected to external networks [physical environments] that shape the flow of information and inspiration out of which great ideas are fashioned.”

Organizational Mindsets

Michael Roberto, director of the Center for Program Innovation at Bryant University, describes several organizational mindsets that tend to inhibit creative expression in the workplace. Roberto describes these as “a collection of explicit and implicit beliefs that shape how people analyze and evaluate, make decisions, and take action with regard to imaginative, original ideas.” These mindsets include:

1. The Linear Mindset: Many business leaders envision creativity as a linear process, one that moves from problem identification to analysis to idea formulation to execution to solution. By rule, creativity is frequently discontinuous.
2. The Benchmarking Mindset: It is not unusual for many businesses to copy or reproduce the solutions proffered by their competitors. “If it worked for someone else, it must work for us” is a common misconception.
3. The Prediction Mindset: Predicting what will come next and relying on experts to foretell the future impedes creativity. Managers often become overconfident that “experts” have “inside information” on what will happen next.
4. The Structural Mindset: Redrawing and redesigning the organizational chart is often seen as a way of improving performance and stimulating creativity. It rarely does!
5. The Focus Mindset: Establishing rigid time, place, and setting parameters for “creative work” seldom works. Creative thinkers oscillate between periods of focus and un-focus. Creativity seldom happens in confining circumstances.
6. The Naysayer Mindset: An organization that allows or even encourages naysayers (“That’ll never work!”, “Are you kidding me?”) causes many good ideas to wither and die. More importantly, it significantly reduces the number of good ideas in the first place.

Roberto postulates that these mindsets need to be completely eradicated before the creative process can thrive in any organization or business enterprise. He strongly suggests that if these beliefs aren’t eliminated from the corporate mindset, "the production of fresh and original ideas from all sectors of the organization is seriously jeopardized.”