Truth 55. Creativity is a balancing act

Some departments seem to have all the fun. Their walls are covered in bright colors, with pretty or funny pictures tacked up everywhere. Little toys sit on cubicle ledges, and shreds of bright bunting are stuck to the acoustic tile overhead, which bristles with pencils that have been flung up there (colored pencils, no less, certainly not that old standby Ticonderoga #2). Laughter rings out from the half-walls on a regular basis. It’s like those guys have no sense of dignity. You’d think this wasn’t an office so much as a kindergarten. What a bunch of goofballs. And that’s the accounting department, for Pete’s sakes!

When you see that kind of high jinks inside a company, it’s easy to assume that those folks spend a lot of time goofing off. And they might. But goofing off is good. Playfulness has become acknowledged as an essential component to a company’s most competitive productivity edge: creativity. Creativity is the economic engine that drives the present to the future. According to Fast Company magazine, “The explosion of creative thinking in the past century and a half or so is the main reason living standards have risen eightfold, market economies have outperformed socialist ones, corporations have become innovation labs, and work has become more interesting.”

Creativity is the economic engine that drives the present to the future.

Few companies can thrive today without some level of creativity or innovation. Whether it’s their product or their internal processes, they need a regular infusion of what University of Chicago Professor of Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls acceptable novelty. It’s up to the managers to make their departments goofball-friendly, even if it’s only just a little bit. You just never know when the next great ideas will come. And from where—even accounting!

It’s up to the managers to make their departments goofball-friendly.

Creativity is indeed a mystery. To be the most effective at managing a creativity-driven team, you have to be willing to relinquish control and give into that mystery. It’s a paradox, to be sure. Get used to it. The paradoxes surrounding creativity are just beginning. In his research on creativity, creative people and the concept of flow (for which he is most famous), Csikszentmihalyi came up with these ten paradoxes. Learn to hold them loosely at the same time, and you stand a good chance of creating an atmosphere where your people can do their best, most original work. That could be your most post powerful creative contribution—provided, of course, that you can control your need for control:

• Creative people tend to be physically energetic but needing periods of downtime.

• Creative people tend to have high IQs, but they also harbor a sense of naiveté.

• Creative people tend to express their discipline through playfulness.

• Creative people tend to enjoy wild bouts of fantasy while being firmly grounded in reality.

• Creative people tend to be both extremely introverted and extremely extroverted.

• Creative people tend to be both humble and proud at the same time.

• Creative people tend to be unconstrained by gender-role stereotyping, displaying both masculine and feminine characteristics and behaviors.

• Creative people tend to be both traditional and rebellious.

• Creative people tend to be both passionate about their work but coolly professional and objective about it as well.

• The work that creative people do exposes them to pain, suffering, and rejection. But it also gives them the greatest joy.

To be the most effective at managing a creativity-driven team, you have to be willing to relinquish control.

If, as a manager, you can look at this list and think, “Well, that describes just about everyone on my team,” consider yourself both blessed and cursed. (Oops, there’s another paradox.) You have people who identify strongly with what they do, who are willing to go out on a limb for the sake of their work, who can be fun to be with (except for those times when they aren’t), and know the importance of developing products and processes that didn’t exist yesterday (and within the confines and rules of convention and tradition). You’re cursed in the sense that you have to somehow corral all this energy and eventually have something to show for it that will impress the, shall we say, less-creative types further up the corporate food chain.