In groundbreaking research over this decade, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and colleagues identified workplace conditions that both foster and kill creativity.
Too much time pressure is a bad thing, but just enough pressure brings out the best in people. Another creativity killer: interruption. After being distracted from what we were doing, it takes the brain minutes to get back into the flow of the previous work.
Enter the BlackBerry, iPhone and other devices we consult frequently to “stay in touch.” More and more, we let them interrupt our work, intrude on our meetings, distract our focus. According to Business Week writer Sharon Begley, our electronic tethers are beginning to change the way we think — and not for the better.
“For whatever the virtues of a handheld, there is no question that, depending how you use it, you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything. That’s OK for tasks you can handle with half your cerebral lobes tied behind your back. It’s less fine when the task is, say, watching for track signals while operating a train.”
Encouraging Creativity
So what can managers do to encourage creativity, short of throwing all those ‘CrackBerries’ into a lock box? Here is what Amabile told HBS Working Knowledge on the subject:
- Managers should try to avoid or reduce obstacles to creativity such as too much time pressure, organizational politics, harsh criticism of new ideas, and emphasis on the status quo.
- Creative stimulants should be put in place, including freedom, positive challenge in the work, sufficient resources (skilled work groups), supervisory encouragement (clear goals) and organizational encouragement (conversations about ideas across the organization).
Bye-Bye BlackBerry
Following Amabile’s lead to remove obstacles to creativity, would you ever as a manager consider a temporary ban on mobile devices during a creative work session? How would your team members take to this action?
