Is it time to shift our focus from productivity to creativity?

I’m not sure I know exactly why, as I find it neither easy nor natural, but for some reason or other I’m doing an Open University BSc in Physics – very slowly mind you, and I slot it in for 40 mins each morning whilst getting a coffee before work.

Now, the reason I mention this, is the other day the study book included a wonderful story about Heinrich Hertz, who following Maxwell believed that oscillating charges would transmit electromagnetic waves and wanted to prove it. To do so he created an experiment that showed it occurring.

When asked by a student what use these waves might have, he replied:

“It is of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right. We just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.”

“So what’s next?” asked the student.

“Nothing I guess” replied Hertz.

Of course Hertz was completely wrong and our modern world would not be able to exist without his work.

This really hit home, in particular in relation to something I find myself often contemplating: our culture of ‘productivity’. I can't help feeling that there is some hidden danger in it that we don't openly discuss and the Hertz story sparked a series of thoughts I've noted down here.

A quick search finds a definition of productivity:

"The effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input"

Fundamentally this boils down to "producing more with less work so to maximise profits". There’s a number of things I find bothering in this and which don't seem to relate to the real world.

'Producing More'

Most of human history has been dominated by an economy of undersupply, with the risk of famine an actual real and present danger. What we appear to have failed to notice is that the modern world is no longer an economy of undersupply but is one of oversupply. Yes, there are still famines but these are down to human conflict, stupidity and tribalistic supply lines – not the lack of supply. Even though the world population has reached 8 billion we are producing, in total, more food than we need.

However, the language of undersupply is so deeply ingrained that in us that we still think about everything as if it’s a race to get a few scarce resources. In fact, we are so obsessed with such a mentality that we permit a culture that artificially generates scarcity by permitting, even encouraging, a few percent of the global population to grab everything for themselves so as to produce actual real scarcity for others. We don’t seem to have realised that the world has changed and we want to desperately keep hold of our undersupply mentality of past ages. But to make matters worse, this continued obsession with the narrative of undersupply whilst operating within a system of oversupply is literally destroying our world and driving us ever closer to an ecological disaster our children will never forgive us for.

'With Less Work'

In the past the greatest proportion of work has been tough, back-breaking and often dangerous. Quite rightly, we’ve focussed on reducing that and we now have tools available that reposition the worker as the guide who directs the machinery rather than do the hard labour itself.

However, the mentality of ‘technology for less work’ is a slight misunderstanding of what technology has done. It is not that the machine has reduced work. Technology has removed most of the tough, back-breaking and dangerous aspects of work but human work has actually increased as a consequence of technology. We have a million more specialisms than in the past, a million more things we can do, a million more things we can spend time working on. As discussed in a previous post, technology expands our potential for work –?it does not reduce it.

Our notion that work is intrinsically unpleasant is from the fact that, historically, so much of work came with unhealthy and dangerous consequences. But it was those consequences that were bad, not the work itself.

We are animals who are able to create amazingly complex and beautiful things on a scale unlike any other animal on the planet. It is not that we initially needed technology to be creative – we are biologically engineered to be creative. The sense of pride and satisfaction we get from creating is deep, long lasting and hardwired.

With the rise of complex societies we ended up with work that was unpleasant. This overwhelmed and swamped our intrinsic biological sense of reward for creativity. Money stepped in as a proxy for this reward – a token we can gain and exchange later for pleasure. But money cannot truly replace the intrinsic pride in doing.

In our consumerist world, the dopamine hit we get from purchases is so small that we have to consume ever more, ever faster, to keep the pleasure coming, with each of us becoming addicts to a greater or lesser extent. It is no wonder surely that the rise modern consumerism correlates with a growing sense of declining mental health –?one just needs to see the massive response on X to Elmo's asking how everybody is doing!

'So To Maximise Profit'

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with profit – profit is a necessary part of private business. But we do need to put profit into context. If we step back from the day-to-day (and often overwhelming) reality of the need to pay bills, just a moment of reflection allows us to see that money itself is an artificial token we have created to help organise the distribution of work and that this token is useless if it’s not always moving. The reflection allows us to see that money is itself a type of technology to help us balance supply and demand.

The system of money is a self contained, never ending cycle where the purpose is not for it to be accumulated or owned by any one individual, but for it to be forever passed on. Profit is just one form of this 'passing on', just one part of a continuous redistribution of money tokens between different parts of the population. There are many others – salaries, taxes, price of goods etc. And whilst profits are redistributed to a very small part of the population (typically shareholders) and as a consequence can easily result in blockages to the further flow through obsessive and extreme hoarding, other parts of the redistribution process are more likely to keep the flow going.

Our obsession with profit as a measure that determines the ‘health’ of the system and of a business is to prioritise one aspect of this flow above all others. We have to move from prioritising one to prioritising all aspects of the redistribution process. The obsession with profit no doubt comes from our past where an economy of undersupply meant hoarding was essential to combat potential future famines, but the world has changed. Valuing profit above all other forms of redistribution is like expecting a body to send all the oxygen to the brain and none to the other organs. The body will die and the same will go for the body economic.

Creativity as a sustainable alternative

Our obsession with ‘producing more with less work so to maximise profits’ reveal to me a deep lack of awareness as to just how drastically technology has changed our world and society.

• We talk about a world of undersupply when we live in a world of oversupply.
• We talk about removing work when work itself has now the ability to be both pleasant and satisfying.
• We obsess about producing a surplus of money when money is not to be hoarded but to be permitted to flow like oxygen in a body.

We act as if we live in the past and not the present.

The retort to all of this would, of course, be that a decrease in productivity will result in an increase in costs. And yes, this is true. But this criticism fails to recognise the hidden costs in our current approach – costs to the world & environment and to the wellbeing of each and every one of us which we sweep under the carpet and refuse to confront. If we take those hidden costs into account then the change would be a net gain.

With a more creative approach to work, celebrating the value of doing for its own sake, creating opportunity for quality and passion, and not just measuring ourselves as if we were machines, we could find a way that is not only more personally satisfying but more sustainable for the world as a whole.

Just imagine how much more interesting economics would be if it concentrated on GDC (Gross Domestic Creativity) rather than GDP!

Let us be thankful that Heinrich Hertz was not worried about productivity when he investigated the transmission of electromagnetic waves, for otherwise the gains we have now would not be possible. The creative approach gives us chance to think, to explore new possibilities, to innovate and fundamentally change the world. And if there was ever a time when we need to be creative to change the world, it is now.