Shortcuts on Creative Process

This week's shortcuts are inspired by Elemental, the new Disney Pixar film. Father's Day was a trip to the theater, where we sunk into the seats and enjoyed the studio's latest creative output. And it's worth it; go see it! But I couldn't help but be captivated by the filmmaker's efforts to push through periods of creative "stuckness."

These periods of stuckness, if you work with them the right way, turn out to be periods of tremendous growth.

Being stuck means you’ve been mired in a particular position for weeks, months, years, sometimes decades, or longer.

Although you may not be sure what to do, it is within your power to make a shift. But shift to what and how? New York University’s Stern School of Business professor, Adam Alter , believes our isolation from social groups and diverse viewpoints is killing our creativity.

Adam had this to say during his May 16 appearance on the HBR IdeaCast podcast.

One of my favorite findings in the psychological literature of late is the creative cliff illusion, which is this finding that when you ask people over time if they’re coming up with creative ideas, for example, if I said to you, how many different uses can you come up with for a paperclip? And you’re trying to be creative; if I ask you, are your best ideas going to come up in the first ten ideas you have for the use of a paperclip or in ideas 11 to 20? Most people say my best ideas will tumble out early. That’s when it feels easy to come up with ideas. And then I hit a bit of a wall, and it gets much more difficult.

And it turns out the best ideas much of the time happen from 11 to 20, that second period when things get tough.

And there are a few reasons for that. One is that when things get difficult, it’s a signal that you are diverging from the herd. Everyone can have the easy ideas, and we tend to have the same easy ideas, but those ideas that come with a bit more effort, where it feels hard, those are often the really creative, interesting, and divergent ideas that are valuable.

And really, if you keep doing things and they feel easy, there’s no movement or change, or I guess growth is the word that’s often used. So you do need to butt up against that difficulty and to push through it before you see growth in all sorts of different arenas.

I think we tend to find being stuck, as I said, very isolating, but humans live in a social universe, and we’re a very social species.

And so what we often tend to do is we have friends who are a lot like us or a brain trust of people we trust who are a lot like us. A lot of leaders put together teams that look quite a lot like they do in certain respects, similar intellectual backgrounds, perhaps similar demographics. And there’s a lot of research showing that consulting with people who are the technical term is non-redundant. They don’t overlap with you in terms of background, and ideas about the world is one of the most useful things you can do to get unstuck.

And so there are these all sorts of really interesting examples of this, that bringing in people from outside who are a little bit different, help you get unstuck, or help organizations get unstuck.

And you can go one step further. Pixar, on some of their Academy Award-winning films, they’ll find someone who isn’t just non-redundant, who isn’t just different from the rest of the team, but who is known to actively see the world in a different way to push back on what the rest of the team thinks. And so that cultivating of diverse opinions and ideas is a tremendous unsticker. And it happens very, very quickly because we are a little egocentric. We do need someone to break us out of the way we see the world.

Ed Catmull on Protecting the Creative Process

Adam's Pixar anecdote reminded me of Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc. Ed is, of course, the legendary co-founder of Pixar and computer graphics pioneer. If you’re in a leadership position in a creative field, take this bit of advice to heart. (Technically not a podcast, but allow me this one).

There are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process. The most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know — not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur.

I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear.

Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

What are you doing these days to get your or your team's creative process unstuck?