How to Unleash/Kill Creativity

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HOW TO UNLEASH CREATIVITY

  1. Always dare to expose ideas that put you at risk of being wrong. Be particularly uplifted when your co-workers don’t expect you to unveil the best ideas. They know better!
  2. Be a shelter and protect your people from the threat of bureaucratization. Undisturbed attention makes space for creativity and inspiration.
  3. Lead or get out of the way. Be critical and give constant positive feedback (they love it!). Trust them in reporting to you when needed.
  4. Make sure that creative staff gets a chance to see the larger picture, the whole process and the vision behind. Boost the talent of your people by giving them the chance to excel in what they are really good at.
  5. Cultivate multilinguals; that your specialized co-workers are trained to understand the worlds of other departments and disciplines. Make sure they co-create a shared language for what they do.
  6. Nourish open and personal relations with your co-workers. Use every oppor- tunity to praise their talents, skills and deliverables in public and in a meaning- ful way.
  7. Lift’em high. Let the originators of the most prosperous ideas present them directly to the people in power.
  8. Embrace all idea generators in talk, dare to act swiftly on the most prosper- ous ideas.
  9. When the proposed idea is too radical, take a deep breath and remind your- self this might be the one that works. Make sure it’s a point of self-discovery and knowledge evolution if it doesn’t work.
  10. When the proposed idea is not radical enough, ask your co-workers to turn it into something even more far-reaching.

Source: The Idea Work research project

HOW TO KILL CREATIVITY

  1. Always pretend to know more than anybody around you. Especially be sus- picious when people from below come up with ideas. You know better!
  2. Police your employees by every procedural means that you can devise. Insist that they stick to the rules of good old bureaucracy and fill in many forms that need to be signed by almost every senior manager in the organization.
  3. Run daily checks on the progress of everyone’s work. Be critical (they love it!), and withhold positive feedback, which would only encourage them to do things that are potentially dangerous.
  4. Make sure that creative staff do a lot of technical and detailed work. Make sure that they do their own bookkeeping, and count everything you can count as often as possible.
  5. Create boundaries between decision-makers, technical staff, and creative minds. Make sure that they speak different languages.
  6. Never talk to employees on a personal level, except for annual meetings at which you praise your social and communicative leadership skills.
  7. Be the exclusive spokesperson for every new idea, regardless of whether it is your own or not.
  8. Embrace new ideas when you talk, but do not do anything about them.
  9. When the proposed idea is too radical, you can always argue that no one has done it before and that there might be reasons for this.
  10. When the proposed idea is not radical enough, just say that the idea is not really new and that someone else already did it.

Source: S. Clegg, M. Kornberger and T. Pitsis (Eds.). Managing and Organizations. Sage.

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