The 6 Myths Of Creativity

I stumbled upon an article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html that resonated powerfully with me. It discussed a range of creativity-motivating schemes that I'd seen tried over the years; paying out "innovation bounties," assigning arbitrary deadline dates to projects to "keep the adrenalin flowing," and of course the infamous "two team horserace" internal competition. I must admit that in my experience anything good that resulted seemed to occur in spite of those management tricks, rather than because of them.

The teams I've seen at their most creative (and coincidentally, also the ones that demonstrate the most consistent productivity) seem to share a very different set of characteristics. First of all, they've had some sleep; a nasty side effect of a 60-hour-plus work week is sleep deprivation and its associated mental sluggishness. They're playful at work; you hear the banter of ideas being brought up, merged, discarded, even turned inside out. Finally, there are enough participants to provide some diversity of experience and background (and enough hands to record the ideas before they're lost,) but not so many that interpersonal interactions turn into scheduled committee meetings. Just enough people to share a large pizza or pot of coffee seems to be optimum.

Now, if I could only figure out how to package a managment technique that's based on bringing together a handful of creative folk who actually have time for a life outside work, and then leaving them alone to do their stuff. "Extremely Normal Development"? "Ultra-Rapid Regular Work-day Teams"?

Time for a fresh pot of coffee. This one's going to take an all-nighter....