So for today's project I decided to expand on the talks we watched in class and explore more of what some of the creative minds out there have to say about creativity. I watched three talks today that were about different aspects of creativity and innovation, but found an underlying theme that surprised me. They're well worth watching.
The first talk was with Dan Pink – The Puzzle of Motivation. His talk involves the idea that our modern business environments, with a strong focus on creativity, have a fundamental misunderstanding about how to motivate create work. External rewards, like increased financial compensation, can actually have a negative effect on creativity: by holding out a reward in front of someone, you actually narrow their vision right when they need to have their mind open and receptive to creative approaches. He backs the argument up with an impressive array of examples and studies about projects ranging from Wikipedia to Google, but his fundamental argument is that intrinsic motivations – feeling that a project is important, feeling a sense of personal investment, having a sense of autonomy in solving it – are productive in creative tasks, while extrinsic motivations are not.
I moved from there to Elizabeth Gilbert's talk Your Elusive Creative Genius. She wasn't talking about rewards here, but about the creative process itself and how creative people experience it. Even as a successful author, she's haunted by the fear of failure. She's concerned about how our culture links creativity and suffering as related concepts. And her suggestion for addressing it is to externalize the concept of creativity and separating from the artist. Referring back to ancient Greek and Roman concepts of creative spirits – external 'geniuses' – she makes the argument that treating the creative exercise as an external factor useful both for humbling the ego and for relieving the stress of performance.
Between the two of them, a couple of unconscious assumptions I had about creative work were flipped and inverted: rather than an external motivation driving creativity, it looks more productive to draw motivation from within. Rather than looking inward to find creativity, it might make more sense to turn your attention out.
That's only reinforced by the third talk: Steve Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. Johnson is setting out to rebut the idea of a Eureka moment as the key of the creative process in favor of the gradual accumulation of ideas into a useful innovation. Whether it's the free exchange of ideas in a coffeehouse in England in the 1600s, the combination of a high-tech incubator with low-tech car parts to provide service to less affluent countries, or the much-disdained meetings that follow scientific lab work, he argues that the final form of a creative idea comes out of the combination of many everyday occurrences – but those examples are all cases where the ideas are coming together because the people involved have a passion for their ideas and a desire to exchange them or make them work in a new context, not because of an outside factor rewarding them for creating.
If you break the creative process apart and separate the HOW and the WHY of it, these three talks make a pretty compelling argument that a healthy creative environment (and by that I mean healthy both for creativity and for the creator) comes from looking outward – always, being constantly open and receptive – for the HOW, and looking inward for the WHY.
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