Creativity at the heart of Creative People

Creative people lie at the heart of creativity. Creative people are the main reason a company could hope for and thrive at creativity. I couldn’t agree more with Sutton (2001), who in his article, “The Weird Rules of Creativity” mentions that the very process of creativity starts with hiring creative people.

But the question is, what is creativity and who are these creative people? And could we, if ever, measure creativity and the creative potential of a creative person?

In his talk (Video Link),

Sutton attempts to answer the question, what is Creativity?

Creativity, he says, is largely doing new things with old things, blending new things with old ways of doing things. While making his point, he mentions how the play-dohs were invented, and also how Apple’s iPod was invented. Apple’s iPod if you do not already know is made up of off-the-shelf components. The housing the components sit in, and the software application was the real innovation and the creativity of Apple. Sutton recommends, thinking of creativity as Important and Export business, that’s how it happens fast, where you combine ideas from different places and build a creative product.

The question then becomes, how are these people who could thrive at mixing and matching old ideas with new ideas, and building a creative products. How do we identify such people? Sutton (2001) recommends weird ways of identifying and promoting weird behaviors and attitudes to foster creativity in an organization.

Sutton (2001) suggests and explains the following weird rules of creativity. He says, hire slow learner. Hire people who would make their coworkers uncomfortable, might as well hire someone whose skills you don’t even need. Now, who does that? These sure are weird rules.

The second step, Sutton (2001) recommends is “Managing for Spark”, where he suggests that in order to foster creativity, you might want to keep and promote people who do what is right, not what they anticipate what their superiors want. Second thing Sutton (2001) recommends is that you should re-assign people who have settled in productive grooves in their jobs. Third thing he recommends is that, you should start rewarding failure, not just success; reserve punishment only for inaction.

These are all the steps I couldn’t agree more. I would still want to add my two cents to all of this. I would agree and add to the statement that, the creative process begins at hiring. There should be creative hiring process for creative people - challenging them to exploit their creative potential building their creative product, under constraints, having to deal with difficult co-workers.

Any creative endeavour, some would argue, follows a creative process (read: non-routine work procedure) to build a creative people. A process, however chaotic, is required. We would have to create an environment and organizational structure, which supports the creative process. We might want to keep our creative division separate from mainstream and routine based business operations.

At the end, I would say, creativity and effectiveness comes about through hiring the right people, and providing them with the right tools  and suitable environment.

References:

Sutton, R. (2001). The Weird Rules of Creativity. Harvard Business Review, September 2001 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1187