In an interesting post about 'disrupting the disruption':
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nathan-clements-a61b684_coaching-alwayslearning-share-7454770209942548480-Iwzx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAC6ebwBKdyPO__fx2Bizw9IaxWK_Gvt71M). Nathan Clements challenges orthodox thinking about the role of leadership.
I’d like to take the argument one step further and look at why sometimes it is so difficult for people to be genuinely creative or innovative. For example,
A company with whom I was working with recently wanted to set up a separate group of employees with the task of being ‘entrepreneurial, disruptive and radical’ in their approach to exploiting the use of new technology in their products. The programme was abandoned within months. Creativity and disruption were killed by corporate processes. The assumption from the leadership team was that the problem lay with the individuals involved, they were simply not creative enough.
The prevailing assumption that creativity is a fixed trait, unevenly distributed among the population, continues to dominate. This assumption is fundamentally flawed. Almost every individual possesses a vivid and vital imagination from birth, but this capacity can be suppressed or enhanced by the environment. When people appear limited in their innovative capacity, it is rarely due to a lack of inherent potential; rather, it is often a symptom of organizational barriers, mindset, and a prioritization of short-term efficiency over long-term growth. Creativity is not the privilege of the few; it is the latent potential of the entire workforce, waiting for the right conditions to flourish.
Start off by deciding that if you practice creativity and develop creativity habits then your performance will improve significantly. You need to believe you possess the ability to produce creative outcomes. The relevance of these internal beliefs cannot be overstated. Individuals who do not consider themselves creative often stop attempting innovative tasks altogether, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of stagnation. As a leader, if you wish to promote creativity you should shift the organizational narrative from "finding creative talent" to "developing creative capacity".
Meta-Analytic Evidence
The effectiveness of structured training programs provides the strongest counter-argument to the "innate talent" myth. A large-scale meta-analysis of 70 prior studies found that well-designed creativity training programs consistently induce gains in performance across diverse settings and target populations. These gains are not limited to artistic endeavours but generalise to technical problem-solving and organisational innovation.
Successful programs focus on:
- Cognitive Capacities: Emphasising problem finding, conceptual combination, and idea generation.
- Heuristics: Teaching specific mental shortcuts or rules of thumb for applying creative skills to real world problems.
- Divergent Thinking: Training individuals to move beyond obvious solutions to explore a wider range of possibilities.
Three components of individual creativity
There appear to be three essential components of creative behavior: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation.
Expertise
Expertise is the foundation of all creative work, providing the factual knowledge and technical proficiency required to solve problems within a specific domain. It represents the individual's mental pathways they can traverse to find a solution. However, expertise is a double-edged sword. While it provides the tools for innovation, it can also lead to "cognitive entrenchment".
Experts often suffer from the "curse of knowledge," where a high level of specialisation prevents them from effectively communicating with others or accepting information from a non-expert perspective. This can result in:
- Communication Breakdown: Experts may under-explain complex topics or over-complicate simple ones, leading to "intellectual resentment" within a team.
- Inflexibility: Pressures to perform can drive experts toward a "performance goal orientation," making them less likely to adapt to disruptive innovations or changing situational demands.
- Stifled Innovation: When experts assume others share their deep knowledge, innovative ideas may be discarded because they are not communicated in a way that others can grasp or support.
Creative-Thinking Skills
The second component involves the "something extra" of creative performance, the ability to take new perspectives on old problems. This includes the application of mental-shortcuts to explore new cognitive pathways. Organisations often fail to provide employees with these tools, assuming that if someone has the expertise, they should naturally be able to "think outside the box". In reality, creative thinking is a disciplined process that involves breaking through "cognitive fixedness".
Motivation
The third, and perhaps most critical, component is motivation. While managers can influence expertise and creative-thinking skills through training, these are slow and costly levers. Intrinsic motivation is the most immediate and effective lever for increasing creative output.
Organisations frequently "kill" creativity by crushing this intrinsic motivation in pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and control. When employees feel that their work is merely a series of check-boxes or that their every move is being monitored, their desire to innovate vanishes. While business imperatives like financial success are necessary, they can coexist with a creative environment if the focus shifts to employee engagement and autonomy.
Barriers to innovative thinking
Structural and policy-based impediments, bureaucracy and over-zealous financial controls are among the most significant killers of organisational creativity. When a "boss is always right" attitude prevails, and every innovative suggestion must pass through layers of risk-averse committees, employees quickly learn that conformity is rewarded and divergence is penalised.
Cognitive and Functional Fixedness
"Cognitive fixedness" is a state of mind where one focuses on a single interpretation of a situation. This is particularly prevalent in mature organisations where "the way we've always done things" has become an invisible and powerful constraint.
Types of fixedness that inhibit organisational innovation include:
- Functional Fixedness: Viewing an object or process only through its traditional use (e.g., seeing a screwdriver only as a tool for screws, rather than a potential lever or weight).
- Structural Fixedness: Viewing services or products as whole, indivisible units rather than collections of components that can be rearranged or removed.
- Relational Fixedness: Assuming that the relationship between two attributes (like the price of a car and its weight) is fixed and cannot be decoupled.
These mental blocks create an "intellectual block" that prevents innovation, as teams remain trapped in conservative patterns and trends.
The Physical and Social Environment
A workspace that is uncomfortable or lacks "space" for creative thought can suppress the sharing of innovative ideas. The social environment, specifically "evaluation pressure" can hurt the willingness to be creative. Even the perception of a barrier can be enough to halt the creative process.
What can you do to drive creativity?
The most powerful driver of team creativity is psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety is not about lowering performance standards; in fact, the highest-functioning teams operate in the quadrant of "High Psychological Safety" and "High Standards". In this environment, people have the "difficult conversations" necessary for progress. Leaders can promote psychological safety by:
- Admitting Fallibility: Openly acknowledging their own mistakes and limitations to humanise authority and encourage honesty.
- Explicitly Creating Space for Voice: Inviting input specifically from those who are quieter or lower in the hierarchy.
- Modelling Curiosity: Asking open-ended questions that elicit ideas rather than providing all the answers.
- Building a "Fearless Organisation": Moving away from a "safe space" (which implies comfort and protection from challenge) toward a "psychologically safe space" (which implies the courage to speak up and be challenged).
Beyond brainstorming
When leaders complain that their teams are not creative, they are often relying on outdated ideation methods like verbal brainstorming. Research shows that traditional brainstorming is often ineffective due to "production blocking" (waiting for a turn to speak) and "evaluation apprehension" (fear of judgement).
The Superiority of Brainwriting
Brainwriting is a silent, written alternative to brainstorming that levels the playing field. For example, a typical "6-3-5" session is where six participants write down three ideas every five minutes, passing their papers to the next person to build upon. This method:
- Minimises Status Differentials: Dominant personalities cannot overshadow quieter members because everyone contributes simultaneously and silently.
- Eliminates Production Blocking: Participants do not have to wait to share their thoughts, allowing for uninterrupted idea generation.
- Reduces Social Loafing: The structured nature of the task ensures that every individual is accountable for contributing.
- Increases Diversity: Because ideas are often anonymised before discussion, they are evaluated on their merit rather than the status of the person who proposed them.
Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) and Innovation Templates
Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) challenges the "outside the box" mantra by advocating for "thinking inside the box", using the "closed world principle" to find solutions within the existing constraints of a problem. This approach uses structured templates derived from the analysis of thousands of successful innovations.
The six major creativity templates identified by Goldenberg et al. (1999) can explain almost all of the high-quality, award-winning advertisements and product designs. These templates facilitate "focused cognitive effort" and are highly trainable, making them more effective than general divergent thinking approaches. Examples of templates are "Substraction" (removing a core component) or "Multiplication" (adding a modified version of a component). These templates help teams break through cognitive fixedness to generate genuinely novel ideas.
Diversity, it’s a double-edged sword
Leaders often assume that a diverse team will naturally be more creative. While diversity of thought can lead to increased creativity and higher profitability, it can also lead to conflict, communication silos, and a breakdown in social integration.43
Deep-Level vs. Surface-Level Diversity
The benefits of diversity are most pronounced when organisations focus on "deep-level" or "cognitive" diversity, differences in personality, values, and knowledge, rather than just surface-level traits like age or gender. For these benefits to be realised, leaders must manage the "context dependent nature" of diversity.45
The factor that most determines whether diversity leads to creativity or conflict is the "diversity climate". Leaders must foster "task reflexivity", the ability of a team to reflect on its goals and adapt its processes. When a team is highly reflective, diversity of thought serves as an "engine" to transform individual creativity into collective output. Without this reflexivity and a sense of inclusion, the potential benefits of diversity are lost to "in-group bias" and "familiarity attraction".
Humility matters
"Humility" is a critical strategic advantage. Experts with low humility are more prone to cognitive entrenchment and performance pressure, making them inflexible in the face of change. Conversely, experts who report high levels of humility are perceived as more flexible as their expertise increases.