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Fostering Creativity

In this article, I’m going to explore how the culture of the workplace can impact the value of our creative work.  This not only applies to IT shops, but everywhere, including of course, presentation slide design.  Because of the strong civil service protections in government, and in many cases union protection, a culture develops where the status quo is protected.  Granted, this isn’t unique to the federal workforce, but it is magnified.  Some will take issue with what I’m saying, thinking that I’m painting the entire federal workforce with a broad brush.  I’m not.  There are many good, creative federal employees who do not settle for the status quo.  However, in my experience, these are not the norm.

The danger inherent in protecting the status quo over the new and creative is that truly innovative solutions and, in keeping with the theme of this site, engaging presentation visuals fail to see the light of day.  Creativity is essential for the success of any individual or organization, public or private.

This article will address three barriers to truly embracing and fostering creativity:  organizational narcissism, the biology of risk aversion, and misplaced perceptions of value.  I’ll follow this up with some ideas of how to stop the madness.

Organizational Narcissism

Creativity comes in many forms, that much is true.  With that said, there is a great deal of “organizational narcissism” at play that fosters a sense among many that will have you hearing claims that the agencies and offices are just as creative as Madison Avenue, even though they haven’t created anything truly original.

Organizational narcissism is just what it appears to be:  the Narcissistic Personality Disorder on a collective scale.  To better understand this, let’s look at the elements of this affliction:

• There is a grandiose sense of self-importance.
• An inflated judgment of one’s own accomplishments.
• The individual assumes that others are totally concerned about his welfare.
• Though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted due to intolerance of criticism or defeat.

source: http://www.centerod.com/organizational-narcissism.html

Applying these criteria to federal agencies is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Take the first criterion, for example.  Ask employees of any federal agency whether they think civilized society in America will grind to a halt if they closed up shop, and you’ll surely get more than one answer in the affirmative, especially the higher you go.  Of course, none of the agencies are so important that our country couldn’t adapt and adjust to the disappearance of any of them.

The second criterion gets to the heart of my example of repackaging what’s already been done, verbatim, and calling it “innovation.”  Due to the importance of the status quo to organizations such as these, these solutions are innovative only if you exclude the real world and what has been accomplished there.  Of course, this happens because narcissistic organizations are overly focused inwardly on themselves.

The third criterion is one that I believe appears in an organization in a more subtle fashion than the others.  You see it when agencies and their employees expect that other agencies or even the public will gladly seek their council, pay for services, or take the time to learn all about them.  You see it when acronyms (there’s no shortage of those) are thrown about with the assumption that others know what they mean.  You see it when the public is expected to know the organizational structure of a department.  You see it when a support organization expects that the other organizations they expect to support will gladly cut their budgets and off-load the work they had always been responsible for.  You see it when involuntary constituents are called “customers” as though those individuals freely chose to use that agency’s “services” over someone else.

The fourth criterion of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder applied to organizations is where you see the impact on individual creativity.   Intolerance of criticism or defeat is the key ingredient for enforcing the status quo.  Many of us have heard it before.  “Don’t rock the boat.”  “Don’t mess up a good thing [we’ve got going here].”  “Don’t try to change the world.”  “That’s not the way it’s done around here.”  The problem is, if you don’t rock the boat, it’ll never move.  I can’t claim credit for that statement, but I can’t remember where I read it.  It was either in one of the many books I read or perhaps from a fortune cookie.  Either way, it’s a very important message.

This element can manifest itself in different ways, but perhaps the most common in IT shops is through entrenched attitudes and technology allegiances.  In my years in IT, I’ve learned the dangers of the curse of the certifications, especially the MCP and MCSE.  This isn’t a dig at Microsoft per se, but rather at the business of certifications and the overly inflated importance the industry (especially the government) has placed on them.  The process of obtaining and maintaining these certifications often requires a significant investment of time and money.  So much so, that the breadth of products and vendors for which certification is obtained is more often than not limited to one and a small handful of complementary (as opposed to competing) technologies and companies.  Microsoft and the others knew this would happen when they established these certification exams and classes.  Thus, what we get out of this is a technological myopia and a sense (wrongly) that using a technology or product outside of or in competition with the one aligned with their certification is a threat to their job security and thus their livelihood.

It is this IT myopia that makes it difficult for open source operating systems and software to make more inroads than it already has.  It’s also manifested in open hostility to allowing a few Macs into the environment to perform specific tasks that they excel at or even to broaden exposure to different technologies in the IT shop.  In my opinion, a true IT professional can function comfortably in at least two different operating systems.  Any less is entry level.

This is where I tie this all back to creativity.  Creativity involves taking novel ideas or approaches to solve problems, no matter how trivial or complex they are.  Exposure to and understanding different avenues of thought, methods, and technologies open the mind to different, even radically different ideas.

The Biology of Risk Aversion

Creativity, by its very nature involves taking risks.  As Joseph Chilton Pearce said, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”  Unfortunately, this fear of being wrong and the implications of this, be it embarrassment, rejection, or worse, holds dominion over much of our professional lives.  It is likely the biggest obstacle to overcome in the presentation slide design process and it is often what injects itself into projects.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge defines risk as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.  Risk has a cause and, if it occurs, a consequence.  Project risk includes both threats to the project’s objectives and opportunities to those objectives.”  In a nutshell, anything you think, say, or do can have unintended consequences, good or bad.

If project managers and those in IT share anything in common, it’s the lust for the orderly and predictable.  Creativity is, by its nature, anything but orderly or predictable.  Taking this a step further, Pablo Picasso said, “every act of creation is also an act of destruction.”  To be creative, you need to tear down the old and build something (even ideas) new, whose outcome is uncertain.  All to often, the fear of this uncertainty leads project managers and the time-crunched IT workers to warp the idea of risk management.  What tends to happen is an effort is made to minimize the risks rather than manage them.

If the PMI definition of risk management were implemented for Apollo 11, then we still would have landed on the moon.  There’d be reams and reams of documents written that nobody would ever read, but we’d get there.  How it’s often implemented, however, would have us still in the design phase of the project some forty years later.  There’s no way one of the risk-minimizers would let you strap three people to a giant rocket that costs millions of dollars, propelled by highly explosive rocket fuel and launch them off of this planet and into orbit around the moon finally landing two them on the surface where one boulder, unaccounted for, could cause catastrophic damage.

Why, then, do we have these risk-minimizers who fear creativity?  Why do some of us fear going out on a limb and buck convention when we design our PowerPoint slides?

In large part, it’s biological.  Two books you should, without question, read are Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns and Brain Rules, by Dr. John Medina.  Together, these books will help you understand why people (including and especially yourself) think the way they do, the barriers to creative thought, and how we can allow ourselves to grow.

The Amygdala In the Brain (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constudoverbrain.png)

In short, the amygdala is to blame.  Correction:  the inability for one to override the amygdala is to blame.

The amygdala is the region of our brain that processes and prepares for and stores our emotional reactions.  If you learn to question and even override your amygdala when necessary, it can be very useful as a risk management organ, alerting you of dangers and triggering the necessary emotional response to move you to respond appropriately.  Unchecked, however, it can dominate your responses to new or different ideas.

Take for example, someone, let’s call him John Smith, who’s only used Windows sitting down in front of a Mac.  Based on John’s sensory input, his amygdala tells him this is different and he has an uncertain feeling about his ability to use the computer.  Unchecked, his amygdala can trigger a fear response whereby he gives up and/or starts reading off fifteen year old myths to those around him as reasons why this machine in front of him is worthy only of rejection.  However, if kept in check, John can override the fear response and instead learn and try to understand this different way of doing things, writing new memories and associating new emotional responses to this type of stimuli.  This is what separates those stuck in the OS-wars of yesteryear from those willing to get beyond the old arguments and get on with computing.  It’s what separates those who are afraid of creativity or are afraid to be creative from those who are willing to be creative.

Misplaced Perceptions of Value

If there’s one thing we can all agree to disagree on, it’s what the value of an idea, technology, or presentation visual is.  In IT, there is much agreement on how to assign value to an idea or product, yet they’re incredibly out of touch with the users.  This is greatly evident in the federal government where a cost-benefit analysis more often than not seems to address the former and not the latter.

Technical folks, in my experience, see value as a numbers game.  For example, if solutions A and B both meet the minimum requirements and A costs $10,000 and B costs $20,000, the response from most in the field would be that A is a better value.  In addition, they most often see a slide crammed with a couple paragraphs or a dozen wordy bullets as a better value than a slide emphasizing one point visually.

What is often ignored is how the end-user, the public, or customer (in the case of private industry) perceives value.  Judging by how consumers are buying up Macs at a rate well above the other brands, those outside IT clearly don’t see value as a binary numbers game.  They place value in those other intangibles such as ease of use, security, less required maintenance, and yes, design.

In Summary...

It is these three impediments to creativity that are why you don’t ground-breaking web-based interfaces coming out of the government.  It’s why, in my opinion, why so many cling to bullets and openly resist attempts to introduce a new way of presenting information.  You’re attempting to mess up the “good” thing they’ve got going.  You’re introducing uncertainty, and therefore risk.  Good design can’t (easily) be quantified.

So, what can we do about this?  Let’s look at the ways we can address these issues and rather than inhibit creativity, let’s see how we can foster it:

Dealing With Organizational Narcissism

• Refocus on what’s real.  Try to move the group’s focus away from grandiose fantasies and refocus it on reality.  When the conversations start swirling around how great the organization is, change the subject to what the organization should be doing.
• Think outwardly.  The organization’s leadership should be setting the collective sight outside of the organization itself.  Goals should be set for how you can make life better for your constituencies, customers, or audience rather than how good you think this will make you organization look or how powerful it may become.
• Mission first, everything else last.  If you work in a web shop, what’s your mission?  Is it to build web sites and applications that support your agency/company or is it to build web sites and applications that support your constituents/customers?  Are your presentation slides being used as notes or a “record” of what’s discussed (internal focus) or are they being used to help with comprehension and retention of your message (external focus)?
• Expose yourself and your organization to new and different ideas, tools, and ways to do things.  Change organizational perception of the new and different from one of fear and loathing to hope and opportunity.

Dealing With Risk Aversion

• Embrace risk.  Nobody ever got anywhere playing it safe all of the time.  Progress is made when someone goes out on a limb with either an new idea, product, process, or design.  What looks like an invitation for disaster may turn out to be the key to success.  As Mark Twain said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
• Be willing to accept and own up to failure.  In science and in life, far more is learned from mistakes and failures than is ever learned from doing it right the first time.  The former forces you to try new things and different approaches while the latter fosters tunnel vision.  Owning up to failure can also lead to taking ownership of success.  Passing the buck will surely lead to passing the baton.  To quote Marshall Cook, “Creative people must entertain lots of silly ideas in order to receive the occasional strokes of genius.”
• Force yourself to experience and learn new things.  Do you work in IT?  Do you only know Windows?  Take a class in or teach yourself how to use Linux or the Mac.  Are you a designer?  Expose yourself to different disciplines and artists that have a different perspective.  Do you deliver presentations?  Expose yourself to different presentation styles and try them yourself.  Force yourself to broaden your perspective.
• Get out.  Get away.  Meet off-site occasionally to force yourself into a different environment.  If you regularly meet off-site, change up the locations.  Thrusting yourself into new and unfamiliar territory tricks your brain to process your thoughts and external stimuli, cutting-off the emotional shortcuts your brain typically takes.

Reevaluate Value

• Remember who you’re serving.  That web site you’re building isn’t for use by your organization nearly as much as it is for the site’s constituency/customers.  That presentation you’re giving isn’t for your benefit nearly as much as it is for your audience.
• The user/audience experience matters just as much as the requirements.  The functionality may be there, but if the users can’t find it or your audience doesn’t comprehend or retain it, then the whole effort was a waste.
• It’s not a purely numbers game.  A confusing interface that meets 100% of the technical requirements yet costs half as much as an easy to use interface that meets 95% of the requirements is arguably not a better value.  Slides that distract, yet hold all the information you’re sharing are by far a worse value than slides that reinforce the spoken message clearly and efficiently.
• Employ the Golden Rule.  Put yourself in your your constituent’s/customer’s/audience’s shoes.  Ask yourself how you, as a regular person, would want to be treated.