People Don’t Actually Like Creativity

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html

by wikiburner • 13 years ago

375 214 13 years ago

slate.com

vezzy-fnord11• 13 years ago

This is a very old observation and in fact, the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system.

From John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s General Education Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913:

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.

We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm."

analog314• 13 years ago

This quote, or maybe ones similar too it, have been cited as the "basis" of our school system, and it's not inconceivable to me that people with those motives helped get our public schools off the ground.

But is there any evidence that such ideas are actually influential in today's schools? I'll bet that most teachers, if shown your quote, would retch.

Maybe I'm lucky (at least, lucky enough to be affluent), but I don't think that my kids are discouraged from being creative at school or in quasi-school activities such as their music lessons.

vezzy-fnord11• 13 years ago

But is there any evidence that such ideas are actually influential in today's schools? I'll bet that most teachers, if shown your quote, would retch.

I assume you have read John Taylor Gatto's works before. In particular, you might be interested in his most recent: Weapons of Mass Instruction.

I don't know how exactly you would gauge their influence. It's certainly much more prevalent in certain countries (the USA and the major Western European forces, where the idea of modern compulsory schooling originated in the first place: Prussia), compared to say, Eastern European countries. The national psychology has always been different there, and after being ravaged by communism, the school system is quite chaotic and ineffectual, though the EU and other powers are trying to enact change (not necessarily for the better).

In any event, just look at how the classroom model of schooling works these days: intense focus on rote memorization, adherence to ritualistic and often obsolete or pointless standards, very bureaucratic operation and government, a fanatical concern with and faith in the grading system, standardized testing as the be-all-end-all of education and so on.

Then depending on the country, schools are used to instill nationalistic and other forms of propaganda, be it in the history textbooks or throughout the entire atmosphere of the classroom. Typically most states do this, though the exact level and subtlety depends on the individual nation.

The teachers would likely retch, but they're just as big of pawns as anybody else. They're not meant to know. They're told to serve a seemingly benevolent purpose in educating the nation's youth, and they must obviously comply with whatever they're given if they'd like to keep their job.

codingdave2• 13 years ago

It may not be new, but in regard to education in particular, it is worth repeating loudly and often. I work in the educational governance arena, and am exposed to many discussions that go on at the school district administration level.

It is very popular to talk about improving creativity in education. Many educational leaders recognize the issue. But at the same time there are even more discussions about Common Core standards and other ways to standardize education. Sometimes both conversations come from the same people.

I was at a conference this fall, with two session at the same time, in rooms right next to each other -- one promoting why the Common Core is the greatest thing ever, the other denouncing it. Both sessions were equally full, and both sessions got the worst reviews of the entire conference, mostly because the people are so conflicted about how to deal with innovation and creativity vs standardization.

It is a problem that is easy to identify, but much more difficult to fix. People are trying. For example, Khan academy is a great resource for independent learning, but even their elementary math lessons are categorized by traditional grade levels.

The best solution I have to improve creativity in the American educational system is to educate the parents. Make sure that all parents are aware of the issues, and make sure that all parents know that the education of their children is not in the hand of their local school district, but in their own hands. They need to understand the pros and cons of all schooling options, and make the right decisions for their children, and include their children in those discussions when they get old enough.

I know this is a huge tangent away from the original article, but this strikes a bit of a nerve with me, and I agree with you that education is an arena in which the issue of creativity is vitally important, probably moreso than in the workplace.

vezzy-fnord11• 13 years ago

Any educational solution that works within the framework of the existing system is doomed to failure.

Schooling, in its present form, is the greatest lie ever told, I would say.

Education is something that should heavily depend on the individual person. The best way to educate is to self-educate. Then there could be certain gatherings like free schools (free as in freedom, look them up if you aren't aware) and democratic schools if one wants to study with a group or requires tutoring from an experienced person. Apprenticeship is also something I would like to see make a comeback.

The school system, however, has done a truly horrifying and dreadful act in that it has killed off the desire for people to autodidact, and has convinced generations that it is the only right way. Of course, many people self-educate in their spare time, but they often do not realize it and instead hold faith in formal academics and schooling as the sole credible form of education.

Another fallacy the schooling system has perpetuated is the incorrect equivocation of school and education. They have nothing alike. One is a strict and guided system, the other is the acquisition of knowledge by any means that are possible.

yongjik• 13 years ago

People want to believe they are special snowflakes and the "system" is holding them down. Have you ever heard anyone say "I wanted to be a dancer, thank god the teachers were more interested in teaching me quadratic functions, which is how I ended up being an accountant now, because it turned out I sucked at dancing!"

If school systems are so inherently broken, how come all the economically successful countries have public school systems that go on for years? It's the same tired argument as "Capitalism is inherently evil." Yeah, maybe, except that no other system was shown to be better.

saraid2163• 13 years ago

It is very popular to talk about improving creativity in education. Many educational leaders recognize the issue. But at the same time there are even more discussions about Common Core standards and other ways to standardize education. Sometimes both conversations come from the same people.

You do realize that the two aren't actually contradictory, right? The adoption of open standards for the web made it more possible for an outpouring of creativity. That's what standardization does.

For a problem you claim is "easy to identify", you haven't even found it.

jcromartie3• 13 years ago

I think that subjects like math are better modeled as graphs of prerequisites rather than "levels". There are so many discrete areas that you can go into without learning about others, it makes very little sense to categorize math the way we do before college. Even topics like "geometry" or "calculus" are too broad.

lectrick• 13 years ago

I think the problem with real creativity is that it is difficult to measure. And schools are all about measuring.

With regards to creativity, I think the infamous assertion about how to distinguish pornography applies: "I know it when I see it."

The problem is, you can't standardize on subjective measurements.

Nursie19• 13 years ago

> the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system.

This is a popular meme but bears pretty much no relationship with reality.

vezzy-fnord11• 13 years ago

Please elaborate.

Popular? It's been getting more attention recently due to the work of various authors, but the vast majority of people still see compulsory schooling as an irrevocable necessity.

no_wave9• 13 years ago

So what is the intended effect of forcing you to do things that you do not want to do and emotionally abusing you if you fail to comply, every day? How can you teach someone agency by traumatizing them if they attempt to exercise it?

api• 13 years ago

Wow. How... Leninist of him. Damn commie.

jcromartie3• 13 years ago

Is there anything wrong with this? Not everybody can be an astronaut. Somebody has to plant the corn or pick up the garbage.

vezzy-fnord11• 13 years ago

Except they're here imposing this as a global task.

Of course we need lower level labor as well, but those do not require much formal education in the first place.

andyl• 13 years ago

I'd say: people don't like change. Creativity is change. Change takes energy, and there's a fininte supply of energy to go around.

If you can introduce creative changes that require little energy to adopt, you're on to something.

Arnt• 13 years ago

Rephrasing in a most unkind way: "Change requires too much energy, but if you also bring along a perpetuum mobile, you're on to something."

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Two observations...

One is general - that other people imposing their creativity on me requires me to think. This isn't bad, but I have a limited capacity to think, and my bias leads me to think that my new ideas are great, and yours aren't. This is an oversimplification, but if everything changed all the time, we couldn't cope. Some people reject all creativity as a result. Others just put up filters.

Second is just practical career advice. Someone at a large company once told me, "People around here talk about diversity and innovation, but what they really want is people doing the same things just a little cheaper, a little faster, and a little more predictably."

This isn't to say that Change is bad, only that there is lots of resistance with semi-rational reasoning behind it.

jerf3• 13 years ago

In general, things that we are constantly reminding each other of are things that we either do not naturally believe and thus need constant reminding of, or things we do not really believe (which can be determined by looking at our actions). The things we all already know and believe, we never even talk about. We know and agree, what would be the point?

For another example (and my, did I have to search for one that was politically neutral...), consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it, constant reminding to carefully consider our real priorities, or our actions will betray our true priorities, which aren't whatever we want or think them to be.

By contrast, consider how often we debate whether the best way to learn programming is by doing it, (exclusive) or by studying it. We might discuss the best way to learn by doing, but virtually no one really believes programming is best learned by extensive study before one is even permitted a REPL. (And anyone who pops up here and claims they believe that I will assume is being contrarian for contrariness' sake. Do take note of my "exclusive" there; of course there's a place for study, but even in formal studies there's no reason not to have the student in front of a compiler/interpreter on day one, or lab day one anyhow.)

Xcelerate• 13 years ago

do not naturally believe and thus need constant reminding of
consider how often we're telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it

I don't think it's so much that there are people who think procrastination isn't a bad thing, it's just that it can be a really hard problem to overcome; hence, so much discussion about ways to do so.

jerf3• 13 years ago

There's an old saying that actions speak louder than words; I've come to believe it's phrased too weakly. Especially when it comes to determining what a person believes, words verge on useless. It's easy to assert that you believe procrastination is bad, but if your actions don't show any change, I don't consider that as you really believing it.

I do not believe that repeated assertions are a bad thing. A huge amount of self-discipline amounts to just this sort of hack, where your forebrain tries to figure out a way to basically trick the hindbrain into doing what you want. I also think that in order to optimally use these techniques, its important to understand what you're doing, and to clearly see and understand the discrepancy between actions and words. So I do not intend pointing out the mismatch between words an actions as a criticism, but as an observation.

the_af• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I am definitely being contrarian here and do not necessarily advocate Dijkstra's position.

In Dijkstra's essay "On the cruelty of really teaching computer science", posted here multiple times, he states:

"Right from the beginning, and all through the course, we stress that the programmer's task is not just to write down a program, but that his main task is to give a formal proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification. While designing proofs and programs hand in hand, the student gets ample opportunity to perfect his manipulative agility with the predicate calculus. Finally, in order to drive home the message that this introductory programming course is primarily a course in formal mathematics, we see to it that the programming language in question has not been implemented on campus so that students are protected from the temptation to test their programs. And this concludes the sketch of my proposal for an introductory programming course for freshmen."

(Do read his guesses about how his suggestion would be attacked and ridiculed. Reasons he obviously didn't agree with).

jerf3• 13 years ago

I wish we could consult a Dijkstra of today. He faced radically different costs of sitting a student in front of a computer. His opinions might change if he could do what we do today, both simultaneously, for what might as well be "free".

As I said, study still has its place, do not get me wrong, but I see no reason to hold the student back from a compiler/REPL even as we are formally educating them.

mrcactu53• 13 years ago

the discrepancy between what we say and what we do is overpowering...

swalsh• 13 years ago

I consider myself a creative individual, mostly because my boss brings it up in every review...

I think the thing a lot of "creative" people do is get too attached to ideas. When you have that idea its a diamond. Sometimes its hard to tell that its really just another rock. Of course sometimes ideas don't die. When that's true, you just gotta do it. Find a way.

asiekierka• 13 years ago

I wish I were creative.

egypturnash• 13 years ago

It's a learned skill like any other. Google "learn how to be creative" and you'll find a lot of techniques to train yourself; read a bunch of these things and try stuff that you see popping up in a lot of them and/or stuff that sounds fun.

nickthemagicman• 13 years ago

Everyone is creative...it's what propelled human beings out of the woods as a successful species. It's the defining characteristic of humans. We're not big animals, you think we would have survived all the large predators if we weren't creative or be able to populate all regions and adapt to any environment if we weren't creative.

You are creative, trust me, you're the result of millions of years of hyper creative areas of brain specialization however current culture has convinced you other wise.

seiji• 13 years ago

A wise man once said:

when you have a flabby culture of consensus that rejects those who offend the few, that’s exactly what you’re going to get: risk-minimizers, not excellence-maximizers. It’s generally agreed upon that some people are too creative, too interesting, to succeed in typical human organizations because of that specific effect.

Adrock• 13 years ago

That's a quote from here:

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/corporate-behavior/

Why not include a link to the source or even the author's actual name?

rswai• 13 years ago

Normal people (none of who are on hacker news ofcourse :p) tend to be scared of change, because change is 'different'. Little do they know that there really is no such thing as 'different' when it comes to your personality because the moment people start classifying you as different then you've actually started acting upon and becoming the real you! You've stopped being what they want you to be. Sadly enough most people in the world live in denial,suppressing their capabilities thus most partnerships formed by a group of 'conformists'. I guess it explains why we're still light years behind any real WORLD development.

michaelochurch6• 13 years ago

I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you've gone too far.

More generally, creativity (in particular, I'll focus on social humor) has a status effect. Let's put social status on a scale from -1.0 to 1.0. Below 0.0, you're an at-risk member who may be expelled from the group. At 1.0, you're an unquestioned god-king of it (most groups' leaders are 0.5 to 0.7).

When you're above +0.4, you can't really use humor (which I'm taking to be a microcosm of creativity) except of a stunted kind, because most good humor is partisan or offensive, and not "presidential" or "leader-like". That, I would argue, applies to creative expression in general.

Below 0.0, you're a disliked member of the group and your ideas (or humor) will be rejected just because they come from you and are therefore taken to be unskilled displays and desperate attempts to improve status. Between 0.0 and +0.2, your jokes might be well-received, but it's not worth the risk, because you don't have much status capital to spend. This leaves a narrow range of the status spectrum-- 0.2 to 0.4-- in which humor (/creativity) can bring improvement. However, people at +0.3 to +0.4 aren't high enough to end up climbing corporate ladders-- you need +0.6 to +0.7 to play that game, and you need to achieve that status reliably (at each level of the executive hierarchy)-- and doubling down on humor typecasts you as "the funny guy", which isn't the image you want and limits you at the +0.4 ceiling.

The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.

drunkpotato• 13 years ago

I like your contributions here and follow your blog. I think this particular post is being downvoted because it seems a bit out of place and not your usual intelligent response to an article or comment.

tbrownaw• 13 years ago

Are you sure it's not just your presentation that does that?

Also keep in mind that morality of systems is complex. Just because bad outcomes can be traced back to $FOO, does not mean that not-$FOO would result in less bad outcomes and so does not mean that $FOO is wrong or immoral.

Some VC-istan companies having asshole managers who react poorly to conceited employees, does not necessarily mean that all of VC-istan shares bad management philosophies. It doesn't even mean that that one company has bad management policies, it could be that anything else (or anything else they've tried) results in more asshole managers or other worse problems.

The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.

How can a group best maximize the well-being of its members?

Suppose interesting new ideas from a group member are nomally distributed, with a mean that varies by the member's skill/intelligence (approximated by status), a standard deviation that varies by the member's creativity, and are adopted by other group members based on some combination of status and approximate value.

Whether you personally get better ideas (and can help the group more) by rolling the dice yourself vs collecting the best ideas from others (and vs spending your time implementing ideas from a single cheap/fast source), depends on how many others there are and how relatively skilled/intelligent you are. As the number of creative people increases, the value of your being creative decreases. As the group size increases, the percentage of the group that needs to be creative decreases (the absolute number of creative members should still increase).

Mistrusting new ideas is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Mistrusting complex ideas because they're complex would be anti-intellectual. Wanting to see a larger sample size so you have a better approximation of someone's cool new idea isn't.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

People challenge venture capital all the time on HN to apparent ill effect. I'm certainly no VC champion. Not only that, but I've repeatedly annoyed Paul Graham, talked down YC, complained about the moderation on HN, and suggested conflicts of interest.

You very consistently manage to mine personal conflicts out of threads and stories that have no apparent connection to you or your beliefs. It's a worrisome habit, in the "I almost worry about criticizing you because I'd feel bad if it turned out that you were actually ill" sense. Broken record: I really think you need to relax and let some of this stuff go, or, at least, if you're totally dedicated to the idea of promoting your vision of the evils of startup culture, find a more coherent way to do it. Perhaps your ideas would be better carried in long-form essays.

michaelochurch6• 13 years ago

You're being ridiculous. You're making this about me, and I am frankly not a very interesting topic to 99+ percent of the readers here.

It's not that I am especially important; however, my encounter with HN moderation has shown one of the mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation. That is all. By observing those mechanisms, we can possibly make inferences about its health. If what is said on Hacker News actually matters to VC-istan, then it's not a very robust system.

I really think this should be the end of the conversation. Leave the inane personal attacks out of it.

moron4hire2• 13 years ago

This is why I view social status as currency to spend on speaking my mind as I see fit.

JamesArgo• 13 years ago

Let's suppose everyone is behaving relativity rationally. How could we explain this? One obvious suggestion: the average value of a "creative" idea is less than that of a inside-the-box idea. Though the peek value of a "creative" idea can be tremendous, most "creative" ideas are of negative utility, similar to how most mutations decrease fitness, even though most increases in fitness are caused by mutations. Though all earth-shattering ideas are creative, perhaps all creative ideas aren’t earth-shattering and, on average, one is better off thinking inside the box.

studiofellow2• 13 years ago

Knowing the value of an idea is difficult until we see it in hindsight, already fulfilled. I think that pretending to know the value of a creative idea when it's merely an idea is presumptuous.

The article describes how the reception of creativity is all about risk--that we don't know its value immediately. I think this is a more logical way of looking at it.

colomon• 13 years ago

Let me amplify your point with a specific, personal example. I write Irish traditional-style dance tunes, reels & jigs, mostly. I think I do a pretty decent job of it. (Of course, I might be wrong about this -- certainly there are loads of bad, creative ideas! Assume for the moment, though, that I actually am okay at it.)

As far as I know, the number of people who can play even one of the tunes I've written can be counted on your fingers. It might take only one hand. Like so many things, there are strong network effects in Irish tunes. Most of the musicians want to play with other people; so there is limited incentive to learn a tune that almost no-one else knows. When you do want to learn something novel, there are literally thousands of obscure tunes to choose from, with more being written every day. And of course, since my tunes have not been professionally recorded, only a very limited number of people have ever been exposed to them; mostly close friends and a few people who heard me get up the nerve to play them in a bar somewhere.

What I'm trying to get at here is this is all perfectly reasonable. If you looked at it from a narrow focus on me, then you could certainly say that creative ideas are being ignored. But if you look at it from a broader perspective, you'd be wrong to conclude that all those musicians don't like creativity. Most of them are looking for something new to play. There's just no compelling reason it should be my tune.

wrongc0ntinent2• 13 years ago

I don't think the "negative utility" aspect you bring up is warranted. If "creativity" is a term of differentiation, it only implies unconventionality. There is plenty of room between utilitarian and detrimental.

jd_free• 13 years ago

We live in a society where people who use "diversity" as a buzzword are actively promoting policies that discourage diversity of thought and demand conformance. "Standards" dictated from on high are the bane of creative exploration.

At the same time, many "creative" ideas are actually just really stupid ideas. It's to be expected that the person with the stupid idea will accuse his critics of stifling his "creativity". That doesn't mean they're wrong.

studiofellow2• 13 years ago

I think a lot of cultures (including much of startup culture) place too much emphasis on ideas. So many creative ideas really are stupid ideas.

However, that doesn't mean creativity should be criticized--it just means we need to teach people to do more than have ideas. Creativity comes into play when problem solving, and determining whether ideas are worthwhile, too.

edit: spelling.

analog314• 13 years ago

An observation about the article is the frequent mention of risk. What's risk? It's the chance that something will go wrong. If risk is how we formally define it, then a ten million dollar idea with a 90% chance of failure is worth a million. This suggests a potential gap between the innovator's view of their own idea, and its actual value. On the other hand, a dullard who comes up with a million dollar idea that's demonstrably risk free, has delivered equal value.

What happens when the innovator presents the ten million dollar idea to a room full of dullards? After several such episodes in succession, they've persuaded themselves that the dullards hate innovation.

Blaming people for being risk-averse isn't good enough. There has to be something else going on, such as a gap between perceived risk and real risk, that influences both innovators and dullards.

jaimebuelta• 13 years ago

Creativity (substitute it by change if you prefer) is only interesting if it produces better results (by whatever definition of "better" that applies to the area).

Creative people will produce a lot of meh stuff/crap for each interesting output. Environments that promote creativity are easy on mistakes/failed outcomes, because they know that, at some point, it will produce something interesting. Will be 1/100th of the times, but it will be worth it. But most of the people assumes that, just because someone is creative, all the stuff will be awesome. And that's simply not possible. With no patience, there can't be any creativity. And very few people is patient.

polskibus• 13 years ago

It's not just about quality, the throughput also can vary. Doing something new every time, means you will most likely not do it as fast as a person already skilled in the same topic.

mdakin• 13 years ago

I call these anti-creative people of the world who work to hold the world of humanity fixed in one conceptual place/time "The Lords of the Status Quo." These "lords" are great in number, but always individually weak. This group somehow combined forces with "The Lords of Hierarchy"-- those who built and currently inhabit the hierarchal social structures that last throughout time (e.g. Corporations, Religions, Governments). That combined force is the most powerful abstract entity that I know of on this planet, and has somehow managed to impose its collective will over everyone on this planet. (Drone strikes, anyone?) If you want to understand the combined group you want to understand "Slave Morality." They are all something like Slaves. The creatives are best understood using "Hero Morality." I can't wait until this world's "Slaves" finally free themselves. I am generally an anti-Nietzsche thinker and I believe his ideas should be taken with a huge handful of salt, but I think the Hero/Slave archetypes actually do explain a lot about this (effed up) world.

jnorthrop• 13 years ago

If an organization really wants to embrace creativity it also has to embrace failure. A large percentage of creative solutions--stuff that is "out-of-the-box," unique and innovative--are likely not to work. If the organization is risk adverse, it will never truly embrace creativity.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Except that, most creative ideas are bad.

Like the famous observation about Churchill: "His chief of staff Alan Brooke complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of which was good -- and he did not know which one."

And when I think of product meeting's I've sat in on... generally 90% of the "creative" ideas would be complete disasters. And a lot of the remaining 10% might be good, but the work involved in figuring that out for sure would often be prohibitive, for an unclear payoff. But occasionally you get a gem that everyone gets excited about.

I would say that people do like creativity, but only when it's clear that the particular creative solution will likely work. Which is generally not the case.

And if people went chasing every plausible creative idea, we wouldn't have time for anything else, like normal productivity. That's why it's a very difficult balance to get right.

mrcactu53• 13 years ago

most people don't have time to risk investing their personal or business resources on a bad idea.

So they don't try anything. This is classic "fear of failure".

I agree -- people like creativity when someone else takes all the risk

WalterBright• 13 years ago

Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the risk, time and effort involved in making them work that has value.

no_wave9• 13 years ago

I disagree. People get angry at the exercise of creativity.

Look at the reaction to the financial independence/lifestyle design. People HATE them. Tell many Americans that you're going to stop working for six months to read books in Thailand and they will despise you.

There are so many upsides to creativity, and so much human potential for it - the thing that stops most is the shame that gets splashed on you every time. And then you start splashing it yourself. And that's the game.

dmazin4• 13 years ago

You are demanding something you're just not going to get. You want it to be clear that a solution will work. Next you'll say you want market research. Next you'll say you want to test 42 shades of blue.

This is why it's important for an idea to be distilled into something that can be tried without much investment, so that a lot of ideas can be tried and that you'll stumble onto something great. Larger ideas usually end up being tried through force or by going behind somebody's back, and that's probably how it'll stay.

roberthahn2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I don't know.

Look, You're close. I think the process of trying out ideas is poorly understood by most people, and based on the way you wrote this, even yourself. You touched on it a bit - "distilling ideas into something that can be tried without much investment". That's the gem.

This is what you're supposed to do with an idea:

* Identify the hypotheses that make it work.

* Identify which hypothesis is the most critical one - if that one fails, then you know the idea isn't going to work. It's fair to say that an idea depends on 2 or more hypotheses - the key here is to identify the critical ones.

* Finally, figure out how to fail each critical hypothesis as fast (and as cheap) as you can. There is always a way. If you can't fail it, then you got something good. You don't need market research. You don't need the assurance the idea will work. Just test the hypothesis.

What about testing the non-critical hypotheses? You'll get to them. Failing those doesn't mean the idea should be thrown out, only that you need to adjust the idea to take your new knowledge into account.

That's it, really†. I'm using this process to build my own business, and it's working out extremely well. I've thrown out tons of bad ideas and got some great traction on the good ones. The scientific discipline to testing the ideas is the key.

†I lied. There's one more step: keep track of your critical hypotheses - that's your business intelligence. You can use them to validate future ideas.

(edit: formatting)

Millennium7• 13 years ago

We do not live in a Dr. Seuss book.

The fact is, Mr. I-Am, that most of the time, green eggs and ham are just rotten. We are not looking for a guarantee that we will like your culinary experiments, but we would like some assurance that they are edible.

msellout• 13 years ago

Testing 42 shades of blue seems like an experiment "without much investment". Are you saying that's an example of a bad experiment?

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

Creativity is not simply an idea in the same way that a start-up is not simply an idea. The ability to execute is essential to creativity. A lot of real skills are involved.

gngeal• 13 years ago

Except that, most creative ideas are bad.

If you never fail, you're not trying hard enough to do stuff that's appropriately difficult for you.

Millennium7• 13 years ago

But if you fail too often, you wind up dead or worse.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Right... it's not really creativity itself that people are afraid of, it's risk. When someone suggests an idea that's new, never been tried before, nobody can really assess the risk. So they go to worst-possible-case scenarios, or just reject the idea out of hand. Unless it's one of those flashes of insight that is immediately and obviously a good idea, people will take the risk-averse position on most "creative" ideas.

girvo• 13 years ago

And that's why "sales" skills are important. If you can sell people on the idea, you'd be surprised what risks places can take. Do I wish I didn't have to? You bet! But for now, it works.

matwood• 13 years ago

Except that, most creative ideas are bad.

You are right, but that is part of the process. When finding a good idea it helps to find lots of bad ideas and understand why they are bad. In the end it makes the good idea easier to see.

When coming up with a system design, db or otherwise I like to understands lots of different ideas, and more importantly, actively reject those ideas with a clear understanding as to why. The helps to find the idea that really does work.

TrevorJ• 13 years ago

It is important not to confuse the process with the product. 99% of good ideas do not come out as fully formed gems. Most of the time it takes collaboration with a group of trusting partners to nurture the thing into something good.

There's a point in time where you have to look at all the things that are being pitched, and think about it objectively in terms of what will work and what won't, but if that's the first step then what your really doing is looking at the steel ore that's being shipped to the auto factory and saying 'this isn't a BMW, throw it out'. Which turns out to be a great way of not making anything.

codingdave2• 13 years ago

This reaction -- that "most creative ideas are bad" is exactly what the article is talking about.

How are you defining "bad"? Do you mean to imply that all creative ideas must be financially rewarding to be good? Or must have literary or artistic value?

I do agree that within the context of a working environment, many creative ideas are not going to result in a net benefit to the company. But does that make them bad? Or are the cliches and the bad ideas necessary stepping stones to finding the right idea?

I would posit that the bad ideas are a necessary part of the creative process. You are absolutely correct that spending time on every idea would be a disaster. But being dismissive of "bad" ideas does not respect the creative process, and expressing that negativity to a creative team will just encourage them to be less creative next time.

I think your post proved the point of the article.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Why would you expect different? Creativity is risk. Without risk it wouldn't be creative, it'd just be the obvious, safe thing to do.

The thing about creative risk is it's an investment. Most of the time it's likely to fail but occassionally it'll provide enough RoI to make the risk more than worthwhile.

The returns on creative risks over the last century have been astounding. Micro-processors were a creative risk. The airplane was a creative risk. Orbital satellites were a creative risk. The internet was a creative risk. And so on.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

And very frequently the Idea Fairies have 100s of ideas for everyone else to spend time either chasing or refuting, but nothing to contribute beyond that. It's a balance.

stcredzero• 13 years ago

Apple and Toyota have 10 groups pursue their ideas. YC does this with groups as well, except they aren't directly salaried.

mrcactu53• 13 years ago

some people are very creative but can't get things done

other people are not very creative but move things over.

in order to achieve that result that everyone appreciates, there is usually some technical detail we have to work through that nobody else cares about or understands. anyone who is both creative and wants to do stuff has to work through that lonely period.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) gave a lecture on this topic, which I think is pertinent if you want to consider some solutions to this problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

(I posted it to HN almost a year ago, but it got no upvotes then, though I think it is excellent and merits its own discussion so we don't derail this article's comments too much, so here's a repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862219)

He gives several pointers on how work environments could foster creativity if they wanted to, but also weighs the merits of both "open" and "closed" thinking. I thought it fascinating, and a good breakdown of "being creative" versus "getting things done", and the environment needed for each.

I definitely prefer written articles to videos, but I do think the video has a lot of merit for anyone interested in this topic. It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article.

dgesang• 13 years ago

Absolutely amazing talk!

pinaceae• 13 years ago

Thank you for sharing, it is indeed a great talk.

jvehent• 13 years ago

Fantastic lecture indeed, and very well delivered!

UNIXgod• 13 years ago

I love this! Thank you for linking it up. This also how to do a talk proper.

hsitz• 13 years ago

"It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article."

I enjoyed the talk, but I don't really see how actionable the advice is. Or, rather, I think it's either wrong or what he says is incomplete. As he sets things up creativity is unleashed in sessions where you have "open" mind and you do the more mundane work in sessions with "closed" mind.

This bifurcation, at least as he sets it up with (e.g., "set aside at least 1 1/2 hours for your open mind session"), doesn't really fit with how creativity gets expressed. In many endeavors -- e.g., music, acting, sports -- the opportunity for creativity comes about only because of huge amounts of practice, in which the endeavor is developed to a point where it becomes second nature. Then, when placed in a situation where you have to perform, creativity comes out. I can't see how this fits with the process of switching from open mind to closed mind, as Cleese describes it.

I also have problems when I think of how creativity comes out in process of writing, whether it's writing fiction, non-fiction, or software. This process of getting work done is much more fluid than Cleese describes. People don't brainstorm for ideas for an hour or two, then sit down to do the mundane work. The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.

Cleese's characterization in the talk is much more like brainstorming, where you just ponder, daydream, think things up, for an hour or two to find a right "answer", then go to work with "closed mind" implementing your answer. That doesn't seem to me to be how creativity happens, at least not for wide variety of different "creative" endeavors. Creativity comes out when you're in the flow, getting work done in single long session that is not characterizable as an "open mind session" or "closed mind session".

nardi• 13 years ago

Where you are missing the point is that in those endeavors you mention—music, acting, sports—the activity IS play. Playing is what you are expected to be doing, and you actually practice at it. (Source: I majored in acting and music.)

Certainly Cleese is more interested in the creativity of ideas, especially writing, but his requirements for creativity (space, time, time, confidence, humor) apply to anything.

alexkoay• 13 years ago

I can't see how this fits with the process of switching from open mind to closed mind, as Cleese describes it.

Granted, you will need to be proficient enough in the act before you can be creative with it. However, I would think that musicians have their open time, where they explore themes and ideas, just fiddling with chords and seeing where it goes, i.e. improv, versus their closed time, when they find an interesting theme and want to flesh it out even more, i.e. composing.

The work gets done in sessions that are better described by the concept of "flow", where if you still want to use Cleese's concepts of "open mind" and "closed mind" then it is best said that you drift frequently perhaps imperceptibly between the two.

My personal experience with drifting frequently between the two is that you hardly get things done. An example I can think of is of programming a particular algorithm. With the "open mind" you'd explore how to express it in interesting ways, but with the "closed mind" you'd have to implement it and move on. If you were to drift between the two frequently, it occurs to me that I would possibly be:

1. spending time exploring (while the deadline is looming)

2. implementing a bad solution (if I did not explore enough)

3. doing no.2 halfway, getting a flash of brilliance, do no.1 to see if it works, then rinse and repeat

By setting aside time to play with the ideas, and then get down to actually fleshing the concepts out, I know how much time I have before making a decision, and once that time is up, I make the best decision I can within that time-frame and stick with it. Second-guessing after this point would be counter-productive, as Cleese mentions.

jonmc12• 13 years ago

Cleese says to switch back and forth and specifically drills into the aspect of getting into open mode. I didn't take that to mean you should not switch back and forth within a state of single flow if you can.

Also, I think the characterization of "open" as "brainstorming" is a bit more limited than Cleese intended. I understood "open" to mean in consideration of observed feedback. One example he gave of this was "playing" with other people, and thats brainstorming, but thats just one case where the feedback is from other people.

I do think there is something incomplete in the talk, which is the notion of deliberate practice - I'm not sure the distinction between general experience and deliberate practice was as well understood a the time of this presentation. Yea, the more you practice, the faster you can work, and compress the "open"/"closed" cycle - in this sense mastery of work and play increases potential creativity.

leoedin• 13 years ago

I think your definition of "creativity" is quite different to mine. I'd argue that the most creative musical process occurred long before any public performance, and that the creative part of acting occurs during the rehearsals while you flesh out the character and try varying how things are expressed. Obviously it's an overlapping area - there's plenty of improvised music which is created at the point of performance and lots of dramatic improvisation happening - however to consider just the moment of performance to be the "creative" part misses the bulk of the process.

It's also important not to forget that creativity isn't in any way limited to the arts. The Cleese talk resonated strongly with my experiences in both engineering design and theatre. The size of the windows for creativity and closed-mind work vary, but the underlying concept is the same.

herdrick• 13 years ago

the opportunity for creativity comes about only because of huge amounts of practice, in which the endeavor is developed to a point where it becomes second nature

Not always. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18i08hEO_xw#t=1m30s

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

In my experience (and this is going to sound weird), creativity comes from having constraints to work in. "I need an X, and it has to do Y" leads to much more creative solutions than "Let's think up a thing to do!"

antman• 13 years ago

This is a very good talk. For people who prefer transcripts: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativit...

mathattack3• 13 years ago

I've seen several management videos by John Cleese over the years. I always assumed that whoever paid for them somehow being subversive, but he's actually got quite a lot of useful stuff for companies.

mcguire2• 13 years ago

I would really suggest reading the paper mentioned first in the article[1]. Although it has a good deal of the usual statistical ranting, it's short and reasonably well-written. From the conclusion:

"Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Our findings imply a deep irony. Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most."

The key finding is two-fold: in a normal, non-uncertain, state, creativity has positive associations and is easier to recognize and assess. However, when people attempt to deal with an excess of uncertainty, creative ideas have negative associations.

That's something to think about the next time everything is on fire.

Oh, and the final bit is interesting:

"In addition, our results suggest that if people have difficulty gaining acceptance for creative ideas especially when more practical and unoriginal options are readily available, the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."

[1] http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... [PDF]

toddmorey• 13 years ago

Catchy headline, but I feel it's an inaccurate generalization. From my experience, there is a spectrum of people between two different viewpoints: creative people who are energized by new ideas and non-creative people whose default posture is to be skeptical about them.

Neither bias is either completely right or completely wrong. Most new ideas fail, so it's healthy to know critics who can help counterbalance creative enthusiasm and perhaps see potential pitfalls.

But new ideas—the right ones—are hugely valuable. I've heard creativity described as a tolerance for the cognitive dissonance—that is, the natural mental pain and discomfort—of combining unrelated or incongruent ideas. This process likely bothers a skeptical person a lot more and they tire or frustrate out earlier.

Less creative people can be difficult to brainstorm with because they don't enjoy the process and want to "get to the answer." But creative people can be difficult to execute with because seemingly everything at every moment is up for reinvention.

The point here is that we need people on both ends of the spectrum and they need to understand each other and the value they bring.

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

Because they are the trouble makers. Now get back in line and do your work as you are told!

calinet6• 13 years ago

People love creativity, as evidenced by our love of the results of creativity.

Our systems however, are not set up to reward creativity.

Our systems at work, at school, and in life in general are set up to maintain a status quo, to result in the least amount of risk possible (especially as those systems become larger), and in general to reward predictability, consistency, and obedience. All of which describe the opposite of creativity.

The reasons the systems are this way is due to our style of management, primarily in the US. Carrot-and-stick styles, with emphasis on short-term goals and comparison of employees to each other (bonuses for the top 5% etc) result in short-term thinking styles and discourage creativity in the workplace. Bonuses and employee evaluations also tend to focus on measurable goals, and creativity is difficult to measure and difficult to quantify, therefore it's optimized away. Just one of the many negative unintended consequences of our default individual-focused reward-and-punish management style.

Deming-style management process would likely fix this and encourage wider thinking and creativity, with less of an individual focus. Read more and spread the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Brakenshire• 13 years ago

People love creativity, as evidenced by our love of the results of creativity.

I don't think this follows. Just because you like the result of a process, doesn't mean you like the process. For instance, just because people use the fruits of scientific and engineering processes, that doesn't mean they actually think, or want to think, like scientists or engineers.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

I would argue that work does favour creativity. If you go to work just like everyone else does, you'll make an income just like everyone else does.

It is only the people who reject the status quo and find their own way to work that actually are able to make incomes that rise well above the typical worker.

colmvp• 13 years ago

"In the documentary The September Issue, Anna Wintour systematically rejects the ideas of her creative director Grace Coddington, seemingly with no reason aside from asserting her power."

Having watched it, t's entirely possible that they cut the explanatory bits to frame Wintour as even more cold as she is in public persona. I wouldn't be surprised.

But in any case, she's the Editor-in-Chief, which makes her the final filter. She's goes a lot by her hunch which is based on taste, a palette that revitalized Vogue and kept it relevant in the fashion industry. Taste is hard to justify.

In such cases, I don't think it's so much about people not digging creativity so much as the idea isn't there. That's just part of being creative. Sometimes you think you're doing interesting work and it's actually not as good as you think it is.

Millennium7• 13 years ago

People generally want to be convinced of an idea's value before implementing it, and this is reasonable. For tested and tried ideas, this value is generally a known quantity, or at least one that can be estimated reasonably well. As long as that value is high, convincing people to do it is relatively easy: it's mostly a matter of presenting that value in ways they'll accept.

For untried (i.e. "creative") ideas, this is much harder. Further complicating the process is that the creators of ideas inevitably place a very high intrinsic value on them. There are many reasons for this, but a lot of them are tied into the ego, either directly ("I had this idea, so it's good") or indirectly ("This idea reinforces beliefs I hold, or advances a cause I favor, or lets me practice my favored hobbies, or may answer a question I'm personally curious about, etc., therefore it is good"). Other people just plain don't find these ego-tied arguments compelling, nor really should they, and so they cloud the process of convincing people to go along with a new idea.

It would seem, then, that the trick is to remove one's ego from the convincing process, and argue solely based on what's left. But the ego still complicates things. Even when more observer-independent arguments can be found, they never shine as brightly in the eyes of the creator as the ego-tied ones, and so it feels like you're selling it short: not something creatives like to do, and for obvious reasons. Worse, though, are the many ideas that just plain don't have many (or even any) arguments that don't tie straight back into one's own ego. No one else will ever be convinced to go alongside these, but to attack them is to attack the creator's ego, leading to accusations of sour grapes and headlines like "People don't actually like creativity."

trustfundbaby• 13 years ago

This is true and more important than it sounds. There is also the problem that a lot of people think that they will have to invest a lot in an idea to see if it will work which means that unless something sounds completely brilliant, there will always be friction to try it.

This IMO is what causes creativity to not respected, because people try to use their opinions or common sense to evaluate ideas (because of the perceived high cost of actually evaluating ideas by implementing them) instead of relying on cold hard data. We know is that a good number of the best ideas start out sounding really silly at first, if not they would already exist (right?) So it stands to reason that people would scoff at creative ideas because they would generally not "make sense" to the average person.

That is why it is important to come up with a process or culture that allows you to quickly run an idea through its paces, to validate or invalidate it using data. Making it cheap to entertain ideas in the same way git makes it easy to create and throw away branches.

I think that this is why you find that at the most innovative companies this is exactly what happens, and as soon as this culture of quickly validating ideas goes away, the company starts its slow decline.

johnohara• 13 years ago

It's important to distinguish the difference between elegant design and creativity.

Elegant design is often easy to recognize and appreciate. We celebrate its creativity and thought because it "looks right" and "feels familiar."

But true creativity is abrasive, uncomfortable, and many times, divisive. It doesn't often look right or feel familiar, especially when it comes from persons or sources not easily understood.

Which is why it struggles in environments where the goal is to stay focused on the task at hand.

the_cat_kittles• 13 years ago

Another simple reason I think lots of people don't like creativity: It is an affront to tradition. Lots of people subconsciously (or otherwise) think you are arrogant for thinking you can improve on the status quo.

overdrivetg• 13 years ago

"If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken

I suspect many here can relate.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

People like results. If you demonstrated good results in a creative fashion? Then they like creativity. If you did it conventionally? They like that too.

The problem with the "creative" way is you have to go through the process of eliminating all the bad ideas again, which the conventional approach has already done. But the ideas are the fun part.

Being creative means producing lots of bad ideas that nobody wants to deal with. Dragging unwilling participants through your creative process of throwing out all the bad ideas? That's your dirty work. That's housekeeping and laundry. The few good new ideas? Prove them, then bring in others. Unless somebody is paid to put up with your crap.

They laughed at Einstein, but the also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

wrongc0ntinent2• 13 years ago

Most of the comments so far, this one included, evade one aspect of creativity in the sense of unconventional ideas. The risk associated with testing out a truely original hypothesis is often greater than we can actually comprehend even far into the experiment; but failure doesn't mean the hypothesis was incorrect. We often speak of an idea "before its time", etc., - sadly, in retrospect. These are the ideas we drown by not sharing the risk as a group, ideas that could spare us great amounts of everything from discomfort to pain.

njharman• 13 years ago

I don't know how most people define creativity. The author seems to be equating creativity with independent, non-conformist risk takers. Which is not how I'd define creativity, but maybe that is what makes people "creative".

gwern• 13 years ago

Unfamiliar things are distrusted and hard to process, overly familiar things are boring, and the perfect object of beauty lies somewhere in between (Sluckin, Hargreaves, & Colman, 1983)...

(More details in http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0b/open_thread_july_1622_2013/9f1o )

j2kun• 13 years ago

Who says that creativity implies risk? This article treats the two as equivalent.

normloman• 13 years ago

Copywriter here.

Sometimes clients ask me to create slogans for their company. I screw around for a bit, generate a list of maybe 25 slogans, then present them with the 5 best.

I always have a favorite out of the bunch. A slogan that's so memorable, because it's so out of the ordinary. One that gets to the point, and really delivers the benefit of the client's product. And that slogan never gets picked. Business owners are afraid to stick out. So they pick the most tame slogan from the bunch.

Example: A web design company wanted to target a display ad to small businesses without websites. I wrote the ad with the headline: "If you're not online, you don't exist." Client changed this to "If you don't have a good website, we can help."

Most people don't know what they like, or they are afraid to admit it. So instead, they pick the same thing everyone else is doing. It simplifies making decisions. No feelings, no uncertainty. Just a quick Google of your competitors to see what they do.

ritchiea• 13 years ago

I have one of those awful people as a client right now. We spent hours with a truly fantastic marketer (and I don't throw that kind of praise around lightly, especially in marketing), who not only helped us identify great copy, but also helped us identify some broader values to give the company character. I sat in that meeting with the 2 founders. We took notes, raved about the meeting, had a bunch of great concrete stuff to move forward with.

A week later the CEO designed the startup's landing page. None of the good stuff from the meeting was there, just a generic uninformative slogan and a generic long parallax marketing page that doesn't tell anyone what the product does. Sigh.

Mikeb85• 13 years ago

I think a lot of it comes down to the way societies have evolved, and our 'survival' function. We don't want to risk our limited resources and time on ideas that, more than likely, will yield nothing.

Furthermore, a lot of 'creative people' are just hipsters that use it as a crutch to never get anything productive done. I mean, shit like this isn't a particularly great expression of creativity: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/63/Robert_D...

We should encourage creativity, but also temper it with realism. While the life of the 'starving artist' is alluring, it's really not all that...

jgeada• 13 years ago

I heard somewhere an interesting distillation of creativity: - if something is obviously a good idea, it would already be the way things are done.

Creativity largely ends up coming up with good approaches that are not immediately obviously good and, in that respect it is inherently difficult to tease apart the good ideas from the bad ideas.

emhs• 13 years ago

They're right that people don't like creativity or dissent. There was a good post on Less Wrong about this [1], and about how the rejection of creativity, the rejection of what to you, is blindingly obvious, is key in the break between the creative person, the independent thinker, and their trust in society's expectations and sanity [2]. Seeing the things that the established process missed requires valuing finding a better idea more than how many people you might piss off along the way. It make take several ideas to get there, but you have to learn to reward your brain for producing ideas, and you can't expect society to provide that reward. You have to produce that reward all on your own, until you find the right idea and succeed with it. Then everyone shuts up for a moment, before talking about how they knew you'd figure it out all along, and they were starting to think in that direction just the other day.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ [2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/

simonsquiff• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Shanks law: "Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal."

danielharan• 13 years ago

What circular rot: because creative people have historically faced rejection, that rejection is good, because you'll need it.

"Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon—training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take. Even the work of Nobel Prize winners was commonly rejected by their peers for an extended period of time."

drawkbox• 13 years ago

I agree with this, it is mainly people's plight against change.

Don't ask for approval for creativity, noone will let you. Do it and ask for forgiveness later. If you are waiting for approval for creativity you are doing it wrong.

This is the same problem that plagues big companies who had a large market share, without creativity/prototypes/new innovations those companies are dead. The people in those companies are shut down when asking for approval. See the pirate flag days at Apple and what Steve Jobs had to go through for a high level at what happens, even if you start the company they won't let you be creative without a fight.

The very definition of creativity is thinking different and with that comes resistance.

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

Heh, about the part where it goes “I even say, ‘I’ll do the work. Just give me the go ahead and I’ll do it myself,’ ” she says. “But they won’t, and so the system stays less efficient.”

I get that at least once a month. What I generally do now is tell people "You are wrong" when I'm told no. This has caused a few surreal situations (one was a bunch of NASA guys listening to a presentation on how Widget T was badly behind schedule and needed a lot of work done, with the first production batch of working Widget Ts in a heap on the conference table).

hyp0• 13 years ago

I've never seen a job ad for "idea people". Usually, idea people are made fun of, like Michael Keaton's character in Night Shift (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084412/quotes) - or Scriber, in A Fire Upon the Deep (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uRjpxtbshBYC&lpg=PT110&o...).

  "[...] It's that, the actual doing, that's going slow."
  Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life too.

The "big" problem is the space of ideas is huge, expanding exponentially, each variation admitting many more ways of varying. And... the vast majority are no good. So youth's easy enthusiasm for ideas quickly turn to caution, doubt, ridicule, and they become bitter cynics before their time, getting very angry with youth's easy enthusiasms.

The exception is an idea that actually has a verified concrete benefit. A good idea. But here, people don't care about the idea; but they care about the benefit.

A common problem is when the greatest benefits of your wonderful idea are not yet verifiable... the solution is to find (or work to create) some benefit - perhaps much smaller than the dream - that is concrete and verifiable. Then, people will adopt it. Ideally, as time goes on, you can add more and more benefits which comprise the dream til it is complete (or at least give you time to work on making real your dream's benefits.)

chacham15• 13 years ago

“I even say, ‘I’ll do the work. Just give me the go ahead and I’ll do it myself,’”

That's the difference between a leader and a follower: if you strongly believe that you are indeed correct, work on the system on your own time and then you either learn a valuable lesson that youre not as "good" as you think you are or you teach the others a valuable lesson that you're better than they think you are. This way people who are good will become leaders and have a better say in what goes on and people who are not will learn and one day be good. The shame is in the people who are good, but remain inactive because they dont figure out if they are actually correct and neither does the management.

plumeria• 13 years ago

This reminds me of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand...

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Though her company initially hired her for her problem-solving skills, she is regularly unable to fix actual problems because nobody will listen to her ideas.

So true. Half (or maybe more) of being successful as a creative person is learning to play politics and sell your ideas.

liotier• 13 years ago

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. Please do it somewhere else and just give us the benefits once you are established" - Steve Jobs (the quote usually truncates the last sentence)

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again, Pirsig hits on this among other themes:

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you to get you get a bad grade. Here in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything --- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

The book of course is all about Quality, Creativity, and Innovation. Highly recommended.

rumcajz• 13 years ago

Consider how hard is it to push through a "sane" solution in corporate environment. "Creative" solution is out of question.

Ideka• 13 years ago

Relevant: http://youtu.be/9C_HReR_McQ

People Don’t Actually Like Creativity

Related Stories