About a week ago, I think it was Dan Pink that tweeted a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled “Why Creative People Are More Likely to Be Dishonest.” I bookmarked it, but before I moved on I retweeted the link with a comment that this was an aspect of creativity we shouldn’t tout too frequently.
Creativity is getting a lot of attention these days. When I saw Tom Borrup speak yesterday, he mentioned that one of the few sectors not spending a lot of time researching creativity was arts and culture. Business, he said, sees creativity as an important asset in the effort to gain a competitive edge and is investing in studying it.
The researchers in the HBR article found that people who believed creativity was something only a few possessed were more likely to be dishonest than those who felt creativity was a talent everyone shared. The researchers said for the less honest people it appeared the idea they had a rare skill lead to a sense of entitlement that different standards applied to them.
In order to combat this, the researchers suggest companies should create a sense that creativity is something everyone shares and can tap into; focus on the team being a collective of creative individuals that succeed together; don’t give people special treatment and
Carefully define what creativity is and is not. Our results demonstrate that the definition of creativity is not fixed and can be changed. While creativity involves a certain degree of risk-taking, managers should make clear that taking risks does not mean ignoring the rules and moral guidelines.
I was pleased to see the idea that everyone can be creative being promulgated. If the arts and cultural sector is going to have a long term goal of disseminating this concept, it is helpful if the message is being spread by entities and in situations that are not perceived as being aligned with arts and culture organizations.
I emphasized the point of defining what creativity is and is not because it often feels like I read about businesses who equate creativity with the risk taking and out of the box thinking that is going to catapult them to the next stage or whatever. Most of the time creativity doesn’t really step out of the box at all but reinterprets the contents of the box to emphasize different elements.
Nearly every social media app can be described as providing the ability to share images, videos and short messages with friends. What separates Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pintrest, Snapchat etc from each other is what features each focuses on.
It is probably important to point out, as the people in the article’s comment section do, that not all creative people are dishonest and not all dishonest people exhibit creativity outside of being adept at masking their dishonesty. It is also easy for people to feel entitled for reasons unrelated to recognition of their creativity.
In a number of past posts, I have noted that there is no magic formula that will engender creativity in people and organizations over the course of a short seminar. Creativity is gained by practice over time, a sentiment echoed by HBR article commenter Linda Adams.
Raise your hand if you have had an experience that resembled the first sentence:
A lot of people think creativity is simply brainstorming a bunch of ideas and that’s it—that’s where writers get “I’ve got this great idea. You write it and I’ll split it 50-50.”
But creativity is far more than coming up with ideas. It’s executing them—which is a skill that can take years or decades to learn–and taking the dynamic leaps into the unknown to see if something works. It’s taking a risk because something that we try might not work at all, but trying itself is part of the creative process and a learning experience. But most people are not going to take that much effort, and those who try are sometimes surprised about how much hard work it is.
When I read the article last week I thought it gave a very superficial insight into creativity and a wholly presumptuous connection to ‘dishonesty’. Its authors seemed to view creativity as primarily the out of the box type thinking and innovation that presents creativity as change and results as difference. Is it any wonder that looking at creativity in such a way there would be an unfavorable connection to honesty, following the rules, and other societal norms? From the outside creativity always looks like something different, something new. It CAN be a challenge to accepted ways of doing things. It can be a threat to the moral guidelines that inform collective values.
And yet, that is only looking at creativity from the outside. Its difference IS a threat if being different threatens us. What this way of looking at creativity does not seem to understand is that when its not simply the reactionary breaking of rules creativity is essentially normative and value laden behavior. Even when its essentially just rearranging the contents, creativity is telling us that what we may have accepted as ‘the one right way’ has alternatives and that other ways are possible if not also valuable too. From the inside creativity gives a new set of values and proposes an alternative frame for how we look at things. From the inside, the charge of dishonesty is either irrelevant or meaningless because creative action is almost always FUNDAMENTALLY moral in nature. Perhaps just not in traditional senses of ‘the right’ and ‘the just’, but putting new creative work into the world is almost always a proposition that this too needs to be considered. It is normative in the sense that new values and other beauty is disclosed to us. THAT is its purpose. It is not always a reflection of some thing that needed to be broken, but an alternative perhaps equally justified set of values. To an artist, at least.
The research in the study was framed in a way that put creativity as something exceptional and inherently offensive to the status quo (problem ‘solving’), and perhaps outside the arts this is how it is often perceived. From a shallow and external point of view, perhaps that IS the way creativity looks. For anyone who has extensive experience being and living creatively it is a deformed and barely intelligible appreciation. If creativity often works by its own internal logic, then viewing it from a foreign system of values will only get you so far. If we teach creativity merely to break rules we are not teaching it to FIND meaning. Its pretending that horticulture is a study of the destruction of seeds not the growth of plants. The plant does not ask the seed for permission to grow. The farmer does not ask the plant’s permission to harvest, the miller to grind, the baker to bake. Each creative act is its own law. Looking at creativity as leading to dishonesty simply misses the point and takes honesty as something rigid, objective, and absolute. The humility you talked about in your previous post is precisely what is lacking……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icyPFsIcAV0 (Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die)
I think your comments, as well as some of those on the HBR study itself, encompass the tension that exists between the ideals people hold about creativity. Essentially, they want something that will disrupt the market without disrupting their business.
Creative ideas either need to come from a brainstorm session in the board room full of people in suits who go back to their desks and continue to work or it needs to come from independent contractors or employees from a division that is physically separated from the rest of the employees so they won’t have an averse influence.
It can take a lot of faith and courage to cultivate a business culture that tolerates both the benefits and the costs of creativity