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Creativity and play: a systematic approach to managing innovation

Business Horizons, March-April, 1994 by Joseph V. Anderson

Creativity is the stuff of legend. It's the gripping core of Henry Ford's rise from watch repairman to industrial dynamo with the perfection of mass production. It fuels our awe for Steven Jobs's rise from garage-bound hustler to computer king, based on his vision of an industry not yet born. It is the source of our pride in the current resurrection of American TV manufacturing with the strategic and technological innovation of digital programming.

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Creativity is also the stuff of survival. Without it, you go under. Consequently, business invests a considerable amount of money and verbal steam in creativity. Organizations are constantly redesigned, systems altered, procedures redone, incentives implemented, enlarged, and changed. Consultants make vast sums explaining, enabling, and haranguing. Yet a Presidential blue-ribbon commission published a very disturbing conclusion in the mid-1980s. It said, unequivocally, that the U.S. economy was characterized as having a vast sea of risk-averse mediocrity dotted infrequently with islands of innovation. No wonder the Japanese have been doing so well. They haven't had much competition.

The same criticism is made by the Japanese themselves. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony and coauthor of The Japan That Can Say No, said, "Real business entails adding value to things by adding knowledge to them, but America is steadily forgetting this. . . . America no longer makes things, it only takes pleasure in making profits from moving money around" ("A Japanese View . . ." 1992). When your competitors feel secure enough to be condescending, you know you've got a problem.

THE ELUSIVE SECRET OF CREATIVITY

The creativity gap, however, is not a result of neglect. In addition to squandering billions in merger mania, American industry also spent the 1980s investing millions in becoming creative. The investment bore only sporadic fruit at best. Jon Henderson, an executive at Hallmark, put his finger on the reason: "You can't just order up a good idea or spend money to find one. You have to build a climate and give people the freedom to create things" (Cocks 1990).

The central idea here is radical. It says you can't make creativity happen, you can only allow it to happen. That is a major frustration for two-fisted managers, but it is completely in line with the stream of reports that come from "creatives," or those who create. The dominant theme from those sources is one of release, not imposition. Michelangelo said he'd never really created a statue. He only got the gravel out of the way so the statue inside it could be released. Bach said much the same thing about music. Authors report the same phenomenon, citing the muse within. Even inventors echo the message, from Thomas Edison to Paul MacCready, inventor of the first practical human-powered airplane and electric car. MacCready credits daydreaming as his major tool. It lets him get underneath what he's "supposed" to think and find out what he really thinks deep in the shadows. How does one achieve that kind of "release" in business?

Structure and Process

The traditional approach has entailed a focus on structure: instituting two-way communication, providing direct access between the top decision maker and the workers, loosening specific work rules, monitoring outcomes instead of inputs, and tying rewards directly to performance. In principle, structure works well, plus it has the added benefit of being easy. A one-time change in policy can become self-sustaining. However, the structural approach has had limited success at best - a point easily explained by looking in your own backyard.

Ask your own teenager to mow the lawn, and you will witness the descent of bone-crushing fatigue beyond the help of medical science. In most respects, the subject "employee" both feels and is incapable of performing the task - despite two-way communication, direct access to the top, a focus on outcomes, or even a direct reward structure. Should the telephone bring the chance to cruise a mall or play ball, the fatigue evaporates and the corpse becomes revitalized. Adrenaline courses through the veins, and a flurry of focused action and creativity ensues.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in all of us; it's just easier to see in teenagers because they have not yet mastered subtlety. What we witness every day is the motivational difference between work and play. More often than not, the difference resides in the process rather than the structure.

Work wears us out, even before we do it. Play energizes us, even after we're done. Play also gives direction and focus to our activities. In class the mind easily wanders. On the ball field, at the mall, or cruising singles bars, the mind is incredibly focused. Play also breeds creativity. Duck into a huddle in sandlot ball. It's a babble of "what if," "let's try," and many other strategies enacted ad libitum. Watch the action at a singles bar. It's a tutorial in the art of attracting and retaining attention, including grooming, fashion, and banter. Greet a tardy teenager after curfew for a yarn that puts Mark Twain to shame.

Business Services Industry

Creativity and play: a systematic approach to managing innovation

Business Horizons, March-April, 1994 by Joseph V. Anderson

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