Creativity & Culture Flashcards
3 Components of Creativity
Creative thinking
- Approaching problems flexibly and imaginatively;
- Whether their solutions upend the status quo;
- How perseverant they are through the incubation process.
Motivation
- Must be intrinsic motivation (inner passion)
- Extrinsic motivation hurts creativity (money, promotion, etc.)
Expertise
- Technical and procedural knowledge possessed by those engaged in creative acts
- Many years of experience can lead to deep understanding of domain and better creative outputs
- But too much experience hurts creativity (mindlessness and norming)
3 Creativity Templates / Can creativity be learned?
- Extreme Situation
- Interactive Experiment
- Pictorial Analogy
Defining Creativity
The process of generating ideas that are novel and useful.
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Novel (within a given domain!)
- Originality, uniqueness, rarity
- How much it deviates from traditional/status quo
- Flexibility: range of categories from which ideas are drawn
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Useful
- High in value: good quality, well thought through, considered
- Practicality: how relevant it is to a given situation or problem
- Appropriate: level of riskiness, fit for purpose, meeting constraints
Novelty and usefulness may have different weightings…
- 50-50? 25-75? 75-25?
What is a creative personality in terms of NEO?
- High in Neuroticism (sometimes)
- High in Openness to experience
- Low in Conscientiousness (sometimes)
- Low in Extraversion (sometimes)
- Low in Agreeableness
5 Strategies to facilitate Creativity
1. Reverse assumptions
- What’s the worst product you can think of?
- How can you hold a really bad meeting?
2. Random inputs
- Think of ways to use your idea in 5 randomly selected industries
- Have someone act out (without words) a problem/situation while others guess it
- Pick random words from newspaper; come up with an idea that connects them
3. Think about the issue from different perspectives
- What would a customer think, a supplier/front line employee/alien, your grandma?
- Follow someone with a different perspective around for a day
4. Thought walk
- Walk around and write down things that you notice/see
- Write down characteristics of the things you notice, and try to find a connection between them
5. Reframe the problem
- Think about other ways to achieve the same goal
- How can we lift the car? vs. Where is the Wagenheber?
5 cognitive biases that limit creativity
1. Confirmation bias:
- people tend to ask questions to confirm their expectations rather than deny them
2. Anchoring & adjustment:
- people make assessments by starting off at an initial value based on whatever information is provided and adjust from there to yield a final decision
3. Perceptual bias:
- the background and context of a situation influences the way people tend to see it
4. Blocking:
- once an idea is thought of, it can block people’s ability to think of alternatives
5. Functional fixedness:
- people tend to represent things as having one function or purpose, and find it difficult to think of alternative uses
How Intrinsic Motivation Facilitates Creativity
- Increases likelihood of experimenting with new ideas and trying out things or processes
- Makes people more perseverant, willing to work on task longer
- Increases willingness to go against norms of the organization or culture, because they don’t fear sanctions
- They have fun, which facilitates creative thinking
Pros and Cons of having creative employees
Creative thinking skills
- Think in a different way than others
- But often disagree with others
Motivation
- Enjoy work
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But are happy to engage in the process, without caring about efficiency
- Happy to run into ‘dead ends’
Expertise
- Seek deep expertise in multiple areas,
- But avoid routinized work
Creativity vs. Innovation
Creativity: Generationof ideas that are novel and useful
Innovation: The conception and execution/realisation of ideas within a field/domain
- Get others in the organization to notice the idea
- Find resources to back the idea
- Hire people to work on the idea
- Manage the people working on the idea
- Produce the idea
- Market the idea to the public
Types of Organizational Culture (Grid)
(Categorization by Cameron & Quinn 1999)
What organizational attributes promote innovation & creativity?
- promote intrinsic motivation
- relax surveillance and deadlines
- involve the client
- divisional structure
- flat hierarchy
- enable experimentation, variety of work
- low-key management focused on sharing knowledge across internal boundaries
What is culture?
All values, norms & artefacts shared by the members.
Organizational cultures differ on various dimensions:
- Internal/external focus
- Organizational flexibility/stability
- Their “software/hardware” configurations:
- software: symbols and stories
- hardware: formal organization and control systems. E.g.: configurations in R&D vs. commodities
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The Creative Thinking Process
How groups can reduce creativity in choosing ideas?
Groups are expected to have an advantage at creative thinking…
- Diverse perspectives (backgrounds, experiences) should stimulate creativity
But, they exhibit a bias against novelty
- Groups tend to select ideas with average levels of novelty and eliminate the most novel ideas they generate
- Individuals also experience an implicit, automatic bias against novelty
WHY?
- People avoid novel ideas because of uncertainty.
