Creativity and ideas are some of the biggest drivers of positive change in the world. Everything our species creates starts out as an idea — something that often seems utterly insane at first, like transplanting a human heart or landing on the Moon. I’ve had the privilege of spending most of my days surrounded by some of the most creative people on the planet, and I have come to believe that creativity needs to be looked at as a gift that needs to be nurtured or else it disappears. Whether you are in a Marketing Department at a Fortune 100, a tech startup or NASA, building and sustaining a culture of creativity is a tall order. There is no secret recipe or way to guarantee creativity and great ideas will manifest, but below are 5 principles that can help unleash creativity in your world:
1) Make Levity Louder:
You can usually tell how creative an organization is by the amount of laughter there is in the office. Working to create an atmosphere of lightness, where people can be free to express their authentic self (vs. the corporate self that stresses about org charts and 401Ks), crack jokes and feel free to play is critical. Science has actually proven the link between laughter and creativity. It turns out that laughter helps us create emotional distance from the problem we are trying to solve, freeing us up to think differently about potential solutions. Check out this video to learn more…
Introducing humor before starting out to develop new ideas allows teams to relax and feel emotionally safer, priming the pump for higher quality ideation. If your organization is overly reliant on process, formality and politics, chances are creativity is running low and it’s time to shake things up.
2) Be Friends, Not Co-workers
Putting yourself out there and sharing a creative thought takes guts. You instantly open yourself up to be judged and experience all types of emotions. Sharing an idea is tough, but it’s even tougher when you have to do it with people that you barely know. I’ve seen teams that have been together for years that barely know anything about each other. They are supposed to reveal their deepest, most personal creative thoughts, but they don’t even know where their partners live, what food they like to eat, or how they spend their time outside of the office. Invest time and energy into getting to know each other before you sit down at a table and try to come up with a brilliant creative idea together. Doing so establishes a bond of trust and familiarity that prepares you to share more intimate stuff.
3) Promote Radical Candor
Organizations that lack the ability to have intense debate about ideas will never produce a single great one. Developing a process to provide feedback in a non-contentious way is critical. I can’t stress how important it is to train people not to turn feedback into a blame game, complete with finger pointing and passive aggressiveness. A feedback system needs to be built on empathy — on the idea that we are all in it together and have been there before ourselves. Depending on the size of the organization, I’ve found that smaller groups are better for working through feedback. When you invite too many people in, it makes it feel like the person’s idea is in the town circle getting heckled and having food thrown at it from every angle. It’s also important to make sure you are hiring people that are open to feedback. I’ve found the best creative minds are always open to hearing thoughts that could make their work better. They should not be expected to embrace everyone’s feedback, but rather use the feedback to go back and continue ideating on what other solutions could look like.
4) Reward Courageousness
Most organizations reward safe, buttoned up and rational thinking. If you want your taxes done correctly, these things are paramount. If you want to develop a world-changing idea, you need to think a bit differently. Organizations need to go out of their way to reward thinking that breaks established norms and doesn’t have all the data in the world to guarantee it will be a success. Take something like the Airplane for example. Sitting in a flying chair at 30K feet is an utterly insane premise. Although planes are now commonplace, it was the Wright Brother’s crazy idea to invent three controls (roll, pitch and yaw) that let a pilot navigate the airplane in all three dimensions, making it possible to fly from place to place. This one idea fundamentally changed our ability to move around the planet and was thought to be ridiculous when it was first conceived in 1902. The more you promote and reward courageous ideas, the more people will focus on developing them and the more you will accumulate. It’s important to remember that not every courageous idea will lead to a massive breakthrough, but it will train the behavior within your team and eventually result in big leaps forward. When it seems like nothing is working, remember what Thomas Edison said about innovation — “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
5) Get rid of the Egos
There is no place for BIG egos in the world of creativity. They get in the way and are usually worn by people that are covering up a great deal of fear and insecurity. Creativity isn’t dependent on fancy titles, what designer label you wear or what you may or may not have done in the past. Also, most truly creative people tend to shut down when all the air in a room is being taken up by someone with a massive ego. They either remain quiet to avoid an inevitable confrontation or worse, censor their thinking, for fear of how the loud ego might react.
Lastly, when it comes to creativity and ideas, always remember that no organization is perfect and every person thinks differently. Although we would love to be able to manufacture world-changing creative ideas on an assembly line, it’s just not the way it works. The best we can do is make sure that we surround ourselves with talented people and do our best to create an atmosphere for creativity to thrive.
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