8

The creative process

In a study of the potential for becoming a successful business innovator – the basis of the introductory test in this book – research was conducted into the next stage: What is it that drives business executives to fulfil their potential and actually develop new business? Researchers found three main factors that controlled the outcome, as shown in Figure 8.1.

As we have seen, prior knowledge (of customers and business) is central to business executives' creative innovation. Knowledge accounts for 32% of the creative result. Motivation accounts for, in total, 25% of the creative result, partly because it constitutes some of the creative capacity (as you could see in the test), and partly because it affects the way executives utilize the knowledge they have. In other words, it is not enough to have the right knowledge. You must also understand that it is correct and thereby want to use it creatively (which is exactly what we will be working on later in the book).

Figure 8.1

The third and most influential factor is ‘Situation’, which explains 43% of the creative result. The studies treated ‘Situation’ as a measure of the working processes that the executives were part of – the incentives linked to their work and the roles they were allowed to adopt. ‘Situation’, like ‘Motivation’, affects the creative result both directly and via the fact that executives can use their knowledge in the best way.

Knowledge

Knowledge and experience are invaluable in the creative process. However strong the motivation, and however good the organization, they lead nowhere without the right building blocks. In a study of 363 Chinese CEOs, product managers and marketing executives, it was found that depth of market knowledge (15%) and breadth of market knowledge (24%) were very strongly linked to their ability to generate successful innovations. When in-depth knowledge (i.e. detailed knowledge of the market) and broad knowledge (i.e. the number of aspects of the market that were known about) were added to the equation, it in fact appeared that the specific market, the pertinent technology and the features of the product itself made no difference. The conclusion is simple: you must know what you are doing in order to do things that no one yet knows anything about. ‘By sticking to what you know, you know that your ideas (and products) will stick!’

The statistics speak for themselves. While most people would guess that development in most markets is driven by new agents trying to break in, an American study shows that of the 64 consumer durables that have achieved the widest distribution in the post-war period, 74% were developed by incumbents, companies with good knowledge of the market, its needs and the demands of doing business.

As we have seen in Part I, creativity is not only about introducing new ideas. In the final analysis what counts is whether or not they are realized. Realization is an important part of the creative process, and the more knowledge one has, the better one's chances of succeeding in this decisive part of the process. Figure 8.2 shows results from a study of all US drug patents during the years 1980–85. Not too many ideas (which is all that patents really are) are realized – in fact only about 20% on average – but the greater the expertise of a company in the field, the higher the probability that an idea will be converted into a success. More precisely, those with the greatest expertise are five times more likely to succeed than those with the lowest (50% vs 10%).

Figure 8.2

Motivation

In Figure 8.2 you can see that motivation has the same positive effect on the possibility of converting ideas into successes. The greater the importance one attaches to the idea, the more effort one makes to ensure that it will work and be understood by others. So meaningfulness lies not only in the eye of the beholder when he or she judges the creative result: in order to generate a creative process, those involved must also feel that the work is meaningful.

The meaningfulness and importance of the creative activity have been shown to be of significance in a number of different contexts. The study mentioned earlier of people's solutions to everyday problems showed that the importance of the outcome and the perceived control increased creativity (in terms of the number of solutions and how good they were) by up to 30%. Personal ability to produce results and the importance of the results were therefore of significance. The same applies to companies. The difference is that people cannot influence the outcome of their ideas on their own. It is therefore not particularly surprising that an American study of 143 middle managers revealed that they were most creative when they felt that their CEO attached great importance to their development work. In one wide-ranging study of more than 200 American companies, it was found that the more frequently the work was monitored, and the greater the number of ways in which this occurred, the more new and successful solutions were generated providing greater employee satisfaction. ‘To make your business creative, you must make the creative work into a business!’

Making creative work into a business for everybody in the company can be simply a matter of establishing personal responsibility. Instead of working on common general tasks, every individual has a specific task. Whether the individual succeeds in solving the task alone or with others in a larger working context, the result is assessed in the context of the individual's own work and focus.

Visibility is important. Good solutions get noticed, perhaps by winning the ‘Bright idea of the day’ title or by all ideas being posted on a notice-board for all to see. If everyone can see everybody else's ideas, there is a good chance of providing each other with building blocks and inspiring new creative combinations (which we will discuss later). Giving small rewards is also important. In order to prevent creative blocks or performance anxiety, it may be better to reward creativity with such things as choosing the biscuits or the venue for the next staff party than to give weighty financial bonuses.

Corporate governance

What, then, is the right situation for maximizing the creative result? Researchers found that the situation could be most simply described by a reverse U-shaped correlation between corporate governance and creativity, as in Figure 8.3. The more the work processes were governed, with roles fixed and incentives predetermined, the further to the right the organization moved in the diagram, and it will come as no surprise to anyone that a tightly controlled and rigid organization impedes creative results. More surprising is the fact that a loosely controlled organization produces the same poor performance in terms of creative results. The optimum creative organization in fact turns out to be relatively tightly controlled and unambiguous.

These results contradict the widely held idea that creativity cannot be controlled. But that idea is a myth. A number of studies show that the companies that generate the best creative results are also those with the most systematic creative processes. For example, a study of 227 Chinese companies found that the companies that most successfully developed and sold new products had clear routines for competence exploitation and competence investigation. Competence exploitation involves continuously matching new people and processes in the organization with each other; and competence investigation means constantly experimenting with new people and elements in the processes.

Figure 8.3

Creativity must be integrated as a central part of the company in order to succeed. Don't step outside to be creative! A study of all American patents for the years 1975–2002 shows that those ideas that have arisen within cohesive structures achieve a much wider distribution and lead to successful innovations. For every additional person within a company who was involved in the process, the probability that the creative effort would produce a successful result increased by 14%.

A closer psychological examination shows that it is really self-evident that the creative process can – and must – be controlled. Psychologists agree that the creative process in general can be defined as ‘following a rule or routine with an uncertain outcome’. It is easy to see that the outcome is uncertain: it would not be particularly creative to know the solution to a problem in advance. Following a rule or a routine implies having a working method and a plan for reaching a solution, even if one does not know what that solution will be.

Thought tunnels and riverbeds

A rule or routine is needed in order to be creative because the brain is lazy. In psychology, words such as ‘thought tunnels’ and ‘riverbeds’ are used to illustrate the fact that our thoughts and ideas automatically follow ingrained patterns in the same way as a train can only travel in the direction of the rails and the water in a river, in spite of its enormous force, obediently follows the course of the riverbed.

The brain's patterns are so strong that they even affect our bodies in predetermined ways. An amusing example of this is provided by an unusual study which compared the ageing of deaf Americans (the report did not reveal what deafness had to do with the study). It was found that a small group of those studied were considerably less affected than the majority by physical degeneration as the years passed. The reason was found to be that this group did not live with the idea that old age was the end of life, as most of us do, with the result that the body begins to deconstruct itself in accordance with a pattern predetermined by the brain (‘your hearing and eyesight start to go’, ‘you can no longer take exercise’ etc.).

A classic example of a thought tunnel or riverbed is the one about the four friends who took a car out for a spin in the country and got a puncture. Three of them asked themselves the question ‘Where can I find a jack so that I can change the tyre?’ and disappeared in different directions towards a service station they had passed earlier, a farm beyond the big field on the other side of the road, or further up the road to see if there was a garage. When they came back, the fourth friend had already changed the tyre by asking himself the question ‘How can I lift up the side of the car?’ using two logs lying by the roadside. By arranging them crosswise he could use one of the logs as a lever to lift the car with a small amount of force (if you have difficulty imagining a lever, think of a seesaw lying over a log). In another version of the example the fourth friend asked himself the question ‘How can I free the wheel?’ and backed the car at an angle over the roadside ditch so that the punctured tyre was hanging in mid air.

The example illustrates how creative and powerful it can be to break free from thought tunnels and riverbeds. Most of us would probably have gone for a long walk to look for a petrol station or a distant farm because we asked ourselves the obvious question ‘How do I find a jack?’ Tyres are changed with jacks, so the jack is usually the light at the end of our thought tunnel. In other words, forcing yourself to ask as many and varied questions as possible when you have a puncture is a simple rule or routine for generating an uncertain creative outcome.

If we do not give ourselves routines and rules for our work, we will in all probability end up with different variations of our own standard solutions. For that is the easiest way. The brain follows the path of least resistance. You are sure to recognize the term from your school electronics: the current follows the path of least resistance. And your thoughts are in fact only electrical impulses that seek the simplest possible path.

Creativity therefore requires a certain degree of compulsion, to make things difficult for itself. Routines and rules can differ widely between individuals, from the more philosophical variety such as ‘I will always do the opposite to my initial instinct’ or ‘For every idea I will think out three new angles’, to concrete routines such as turning the painting upside down every morning (a classic and controversial trick among artists), or always throwing out and rewriting the business plan at least three times.

For companies that wish to develop creative business, it is a matter of using controlled processes with routines that force people to think in new and different ways and adopt new roles, but without predetermined incentives (for the outcome must be uncertain). The studies mentioned above show that external pressure in the form of processes and deadlines can actually compensate for a lack of motivation in a creative business manager (although motivation is still the optimum driving force). Creative processes can thus, to all intents and purposes, be defined as compulsion.

Two ways of introducing compulsion into the process are to limit the time allowed for the work or to limit the input (e.g. ‘you must work with these three components’, or ‘you must keep to these three processes’). Figure 8.4 shows the positive effects of such limitations on creativity in work. It is based on results from several experiments where people in a toy factory were given the task of developing new, attractive toys with or without limited time and/or components. The products developed were assessed by independent experts on the basis of their potential capacity to succeed in the market.

As appears from the figure, working without limits, with free time and input, clearly gives the worst result (3). The best result was achieved with limited input and free time (1), where people were working in given routines but had plenty of time to carve out the smartest product. The next best result (2) was achieved with limited time but free input; the limited amount of time forced people to make combinations quickly and left them no time to find the components they would normally use. ‘Boxing in’ the work with limitations forces people to be creative.

Figure 8.4

But ‘boxing in’ the work not only forces people to be creative, it also enables them. Look at Figure 8.5. It shows how 100 ordinary people were required to solve creative tasks, with or without a given target, and with or without step instructions. The results show that people with both target and step instructions feel least enjoyment, autonomy and competence in their creative work (1). But not far behind come those who had neither target nor step instructions (2). Not knowing where you are going or how to get there makes for work that people are neither motivated nor able to complete. Limitations, such as step instructions telling you to do something in a certain way, provide a ‘boxed in’ security and allow people to get into the process quickly. The journey is most exciting when you do not know where you are going (no target, 3). You feel most empowered (no one has decided the route for you) and use all your abilities. Above all, you find those places, ideas and results that no one has found before you.

Figure 8.5

By killing off the myth that creativity cannot be controlled, a company can enjoy an explosive increase in the usefulness of its creative potential – and, in the process, free itself from empty phrases like ‘process thinking and institutionalization are the worst enemies of creativity’. In fact, it is far more difficult to avoid process thinking and institutionalization in organizations (any organization expert will tell you that in practice it is impossible) than it is to adapt creativity and turn it into a process. For creativity has no solid form, merely a need for rules and routines.

Randomness

At this point, you will probably have gathered that even if control of creativity is important (in contrast to the myth), this does not contradict the next myth – that creativity is random. By thinking up three extra ideas, or doing the opposite of your initial instinct, you can arrive at any solution whatsoever depending on what you are influenced by. And this is exactly the essence of bisociations, as psychologists call the smallest building blocks in the creative process (roughly in the same way that atoms are still called nature's smallest building blocks, although this is only true to a certain extent).

The word ‘bisociations’ evokes associations, as it is intended to. The word ‘association’ implies a group of objects that belong together. Bisociations, on the other hand, are combinations of two different associations that do not naturally belong together but are brought together to form a new entity. (Actually it might just as well involve three associations, in which case the term should be ‘trisociations’, but for the sake of simplicity they are called bisociations no matter how many associations are combined.) An example of a bisociation could be ‘tyre change-ditch’, the solution that the fourth friend found for the problem with the punctured tyre above. Tyre change goes together with, for example, jack, lift, steady, and fix. Ditch belongs with pit, fall, and lose grip. The bisociation ‘tyre change-ditch’ results in the new entity free.

You might think that anyone by sheer accident could come up with the idea of backing the car at an angle over a ditch in order to change the tyre. By spreading out a lot of pieces of paper with different words on them in front of a monkey, one would eventually put the words ‘ditch’ and ‘tyre change’ next to each other. In a similar way, a Swedish newspaper let a monkey choose shares. It turned out that the monkey put together a better share portfolio than several professionals (because of the effect of randomness on share prices). But the monkey would never make the bisociation free. You do not have to be a mechanic to make the bisociation free if you quite accidentally happened to back the punctured tyre over the ditch, but there are certainly people who drive a lot but have never thought about how a tyre is changed. A certain kind of expertise is still necessary to succeed, and the amount of expertise naturally increases with the difficulty of the problem.

Thus we can now puncture the myth of the randomness of creativity. The combinations and expressions can arise accidentally, but not the solution to which they lead. We can in fact refer back to the section on the creative result, where it was evident that ‘meaningfulness’ was above all the essential building block in creative enterprises and results: the creative person is not the person who happens to stumble on something, or brings two things together by accident; it is rather the one who makes the whole thing meaningful.

Let us play a little more with the idea of using a monkey to find new combinations. A rule or routine in the creative process might be to let the monkey put new combinations of words together, and then make them meaningful. The problem is that there is a risk of an appalling number of words, and a great deal of time spent finding meaningful combinations. In other words, the enterprise might eventually turn out to be creative, but the company would hardly be economically viable. For this is the other objection to the myth that creativity is random. Creative enterprises require one to know which building blocks to combine. To continue the image of the monkey, it is a matter of knowing which words to put in front of the monkey, and that choice is not random.

The use of knowledge

We can now return to the explanation of why knowledge has such central importance in the development of creativity, as shown in the model that introduced this section. Knowledge affects not only what one chooses to combine and test in different ways, but also how one generates meaningfulness in the result. And the motivation and the situation affect the extent to which one really uses one's knowledge in the existing steps and thus avoids randomness.

Before we leave the creative process, it is worth mentioning that knowledge, which is central to creative business innovation, is not only about understanding customers and businesses. A small but very important part of it is knowledge of the significance of creativity for successful businesses and of how creativity works. In Chapter 1 (if you skipped it when you started the book, it might be worth going back and glancing through it quickly now) it was emphasized that we humans want to know why we are doing something, otherwise we are not inclined to do it. Certainly, one important reason why more business people and companies do not work systematically with creativity is that they regard creativity exercises and routines as irrelevant and unproductive (‘it feels stupid to sit with a monkey and combine words’).

The first solution to the problem is to increase our knowledge of the creative result and how the creative process works. The second solution is to use exercises and routines that are closely related to business innovation in particular, which is the purpose of Part V of this book.