Outside of house plants, is there anything easier to kill than creativity?
Many exceptionally fragile things come to mind: an egg, flowers, the ego of a Hollywood celebrity. But none have less resiliency than creativity. How sad because creativity allows us to create or do something new and different in our lives, to prevent it from falling into a mundane pattern, even for the most routine among us.
Its frailty is even more acute for business because creativity is as vital to corporate health and success as accounting, operations and manufacturing. At the same time, negativity robs the organisation of its most valuable asset: new and original thinking.
Surely we’d be violently agreeing that creativity and innovation are extremely important, and by default, that brainstorms are important. And, there's universal agreement that negativity is the single biggest obstacle to creativity. More so, negativity in brainstorms – whether it’s a brainstorm in a conference room, or a spur-of-the-moment discussion over a desktop – frequently prevents us from being creative at work. Why the contradiction between our belief and behaviour? What causes negativity? And most of all, what can we do about it?
Negativity is actually many emotions and behaviours, exhibited in many different ways, among them:Pessimism (that won’t work)
Adversarial (let me play devil’s advocate)
Dismissal (we’ve already tried that) or
Disdain (that’s a stupid idea)
It can also be self-directed. We censure or criticize our own thoughts, using emotional and perceptual blocks to burden our creative thinking, such as: I’m not creative. I don’t feel creative (today/this morning). I’m not as creative as (him/her) I’m really uncomfortable when I have to be creative.
The dynamics of a group fuel negativity further, compounding the problem with a larger range and depth of emotions, mostly fear, such as: I will lose face in front of my peers. People will think my ideas are dumb or bad. I hate making public mistakes. I fear taking risks which might jeopardize (my job/my reputation). I fear exposing my weaknesses in front of others.
Other emotions are based on insecurity or chaos. I hate ambiguity. I can only evaluate in terms of how much something will cost. I must be highly efficient at work because mistakes are costly and wrong.
(Part 2 continues tomorrow.)
