Can Creativity Be Managed?

By Ken Long

Most stories of business creativity feature businesses who are creative as their core competency. They are held up as examples fro all businesses to emulate. But, I think these examples is simply cherry-picking. This method doesn't represent the vast majority of businesses that need to know how to think about, encourage and manage creativity as part of their operation.
These examples show how creative companies manage creativity but they don't discuss the vast majority of businesses where creativity is secondary to their value proposition. It's much more challenging and interesting to figure out how creativity management applies to a power generation utility or a grocery store or a manufacturing plant. This discussion would be much more interesting and useful to a much larger class of managers struggling with ways of creating new streams of value in engaging the insights of their workers. Examining the Toyota method of production is an excellent example of a mature industry that has found out how to make a difference using the innate creativity of their people.
The good news is that science suggests we all have the capacity for creativity, if we can just get past the social barriers that serve to squelch too much creativity. We get socialized in school to value conformity and not rocking the boat. But the potential remains there, wired into our brains through millions of years of evolution, just waiting to be tapped.
R. Keith Sawyer spends considerable effort to demolish the personal traits theory of creativity in his excellent book entitled "Explaining Creativity". He places much more importance on effective group process than the characteristics of individual insight. His work does a great job of debunking our stereotypes of creativity, and shows how you can establish a climate in your business to encourage and exploit creativity through good group process.
As a final note, there are many "creativity surveys" on the market that propose to classify how creative you are. I didn't like the ones with questions that made me declare whether I liked people because of qualities they possess, such as I like this person because they are rational.
I dislike questionnaires that do not offer an opportunity to say "yes, but" because I see the need to be aware of routine simplifications in order to get the daily work done!
Ken Long, Chief of Research, Tortoise Capital Management http://www.tortoisecapital.com
Adding value through independent research, combining technical analysis and human behavioral psychology
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