The Weird Rules of Creativity
F
OR THE PAST DECADE AT LEAST, the holy gtail for
companies has been innovation. Managers have goneafter it with alJ the zeal their training has instilledin them. They've focused on identifying the optimal in-centives and inputs to the creative process, on bringingcustomers' and other important perspectives to bear, oninvesting in ideas according to their odds of success, andon slashing the percentage of losers. There's only oneproblem: None of that works very well.What does foster creativity doesn't look at all like ra-tional management to most experienced executives. Thepractices go beyond counterintuitive; they seem down-right weird. For example, you might reasonably expectthat creativity would flourish in a fun, low-stress work-place, where conflict is held in check and managers keepa close watch on how money
is
spent and people use theirtime. You'd be wrong. After studying creative companiesand teams for more than a decade, I've found them to beremarkably inefficient and often terribly annoying placesto work, where "managing by getting out of the way" isoften the best approach of all.Managing for creativity, I've discovered, means takingmost of what we know about management and standingit on its head. It means placing bets on ideas withoutmuch heed to their projected ROI. It means ignoring whathas worked before. It means taking perfectly happy peo-ple and goading them into fights among themselves.Good creativity management means hiring the candidateyou have a gut feeling against. And as for those peoplewho stick their fingers in their ears and chant,"rm not lis-tening, I'm not listening," when customers are makingsuggestions? It means praising and promoting them.In this article,
I
advocate several ideas about managingcreativity that are clearly odd but just as clearly effective.One set of ideas relates to hiring, another to management,and a third to risk and randomness.
All
of them have solidgrounding in academic research. And here's what's reallyweird. I've actually found numerous companies andteams that use these ideas with great results.
Why These Weird Ideas Work
The practices in this article succeed by increasing therange of a company's knowledge, by causing people tosee old problems in new ways, and by helping compa-nies break from the past. Decades of research show thatthese three conditions produce the richest soil for cre-ative work. So why do ideas for promoting them seem sostrange to managers?It's because as important as innovation
is
to most com-panies, it isn't-and never will be-their primary activity.Quite the contrary, companies are overwhelmingly fo-cused - and correctly so - on the more routinework of making money
right now
from tried-and-true products, services, and business models. Thepractices that are well suited for cashing in onold, proven ways are drastically different fromthose needed for innovation. Consider the contrastbetween how Disney organizes the work of castmembers at its theme parks and that of "imagi-neers" at its research and development facility inBurbank, California. The job titles are revealingmetaphors for the two kinds of
work.
Cast membersin theme parks follow well-defined scripts; whetherthey are playing the role of Cinderella or Goofy, act-ing as guides on the Jungle Cruise, or sweeping thestreets, precise guidelines are enforced to ensure thatthey stay in character. This is Disney's routine work. Incontrast, Disney Imagineering is a place where peopleare expected to keep trying different things. Imagi-neers come to work each day to dream up wild ideasabout new things a guest might experience. The bestpractices for imagineers can't be choreographed in thesame detail
as
those of cast members. After all, the man-agement problem is to expand the possibilities of whatan imagineer might do, not to constrain them.The right balance of what organizational theorist JamesMarch has termed exploitation of proven knowledge ver-sus exploration of new possibilities varies across indus-tries. But even in companies that are much ballyhooed for
Robert
I.
Sutton is a
professor
of management
science
andengineering at Stanford University in Stanford, California.He is the author
()f Weird Ideas That Work:
11'/:
Practicesfor Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation
(Free Press, November 2001), from which this article isadapted.
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