Creativity In Management

Summary

Cleese argues that creativity is not a talent — something you either have or don't — but a way of operating: the ability to get yourself into a particular mood he calls the open mode. His research source, psychologist Donald McKinnon, found that the most creative scientists, architects, engineers, and writers were indistinguishable from their less creative peers in IQ. What differed was their facility for entering a relaxed, playful, exploratory state.

The talk is structured around two ideas: the distinction between open and closed modes, and the five conditions that make the open mode accessible. The satirical finale — instructions for stamping out creativity in your organisation — makes the same points in reverse, and lands harder for it.

Key points

Full transcript

Introduction

Telling people how to be creative is easy. It's only being it that's difficult. I've spent the last 25 years watching how various creative people produce their work, fascinated to figure out what makes people — including me — more creative.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who runs the psychology department at Sussex University, Brian Bates, showed me research on creativity done at Berkeley in the 1970s by a brilliant psychologist called Donald McKinnon. It seemed to confirm in the most impressively scientific way all the vague observations and intuitions I'd had over the years.

The reason why it is futile for me to talk about creativity is that it simply cannot be explained. It's like Mozart's music or Van Gogh's painting — literally inexplicable. Freud, who analysed practically everything else, repeatedly denied that psychoanalysis could shed any light whatsoever on the mysteries of creativity. Brian Bates wrote to me recently that most of the best research on creativity was done in the 1960s and 70s, with a dramatic drop-off in quantity after that — largely, he suspects, because researchers began to feel they had reached the limits of what science could discover about it.

In fact, the only thing from the research I could tell you about how to be creative is the sort of childhood you should have had — which is of limited help at this point in your lives.

Creativity is not a talent

There is one negative thing I can say. It's negative because it's easier to say what creativity isn't — a bit like the sculptor who, when asked how he had sculpted a very fine elephant, explained that he had taken a big block of marble and knocked away all the bits that didn't look like an elephant.

Here's the negative thing: creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have. It is, for example — and this may surprise you — absolutely unrelated to IQ, provided you are above a certain minimal level. McKinnon showed, in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers, that those regarded by their peers as most creative were in no way different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.

So in what way were they different? McKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood — a way of operating that allowed their natural creativity to function. In fact, McKinnon described this particular facility as an ability to play. He described the most creative, when in this mood, as being childlike — able to play with ideas, to explore them, not for any immediate practical purpose, but just for enjoyment. Play for its own sake.

Open mode and closed mode

I'm working at the moment with Dr. Robin Skinner on a successor to our psychiatry book, Families and How to Survive Them. We're comparing the ways in which psychologically healthy families function with the ways in which the most successful corporations and organisations function. We've become fascinated by the fact that we can usefully describe the way people function at work in terms of two modes: open and closed.

Creativity is not possible in the closed mode.

By the closed mode, I mean the mode that we are in most of the time when we're at work. We have inside us a feeling that there's lots to be done and we have to get on with it. It's an active, probably slightly anxious mode — although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable. It's a mode in which we're probably a little impatient, with not much humour. We're very purposeful, and we can get very stressed and even a bit manic. But not creative.

By contrast, the open mode is a relaxed, expansive, less purposeful mode in which we're more contemplative, more inclined to humour — which always accompanies a wider perspective — and consequently more playful. It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate, because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play. And that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.

Examples

When Alexander Fleming had the thought that led to the discovery of penicillin, he must have been in the open mode. The previous day he had arranged a number of dishes so that culture would grow upon them. On the day in question, he glanced at the dishes and discovered that on one of them no culture had appeared. If he had been in the closed mode, he would have been so focused on his need for dishes with cultures grown upon them that when he saw one was of no use to him, he would simply have thrown it away. But he was in the open mode — so he became curious about why the culture had not grown on that particular dish. And that curiosity, as the world knows, led to penicillin.

In the closed mode, an uncultured dish is an irrelevance. In the open mode, it's a clue.

One of Alfred Hitchcock's regular co-writers described working with him on screenplays. He said: when they came up against a block and their discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first the writer was almost outraged — and then he discovered that Hitchcock did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say: "We're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax — it will come." And says the writer, of course it always did.

The five factors

There are certain conditions that make it more likely that you'll get into the open mode and that something creative will occur. You can't guarantee anything will occur — you might sit around for hours and nothing happens. Nevertheless, I can tell you how to get into the open mode. You need five things.

1. Space

You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures — because to cope with them you've got to be in the closed mode. So you have to create some space for yourself away from those demands. You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.

2. Time — creating the oasis

It's not enough to create space. You have to create your space for a specific period of time. You have to know that your space will last until exactly, say, 3:30, and that at that moment your normal life will start again. It's only by having a specific moment when your space starts and an equally specific moment when your space stops that you can seal yourself off from the everyday closed mode in which we all habitually operate.

I never realised how vital this was until I read a historical study of play by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in which he says:

Play is distinct from ordinary life both as to locality and duration. This is its main characteristic: its secludedness, its limitedness. Play begins, and then at a certain moment it is over. Otherwise it is not play.

So combining the first two factors, we create an oasis of quiet for ourselves by setting boundaries of space and of time. Creativity can happen because play is possible when we're separate from everyday life.

You've arranged to take no calls, you've closed your door, you've sat down somewhere comfortable — and if you're anything like me, after pondering some problem for about 90 seconds you find yourself thinking: "Oh, I forgot I've got to call Jim, and I must tell Tina I need the report on Wednesday not Thursday, which means I must move my lunch with Joe…" and so on. Because as we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than to do important things that are not urgent — like thinking.

So when I say create an oasis of quiet, know that your mind will pretty soon start racing again. But you're not going to take that very seriously. You just sit there, tolerating the racing and the slight anxiety that comes with it — and after a time your mind will quieten down.

Because it takes time for your mind to quieten down, it's absolutely no use creating a space-time oasis lasting 30 minutes — because just as you're getting quiet and getting into the open mode, you have to stop. So you must allow yourself a good chunk of time. I'd suggest about an hour and a half. After you've got to the open mode, you'll have about an hour left for something to happen. But don't put a whole morning aside — after about an hour and a half you need a break. It's far better to do an hour and a half now, and an hour and a half next Thursday, than to fix one four-and-a-half-hour session.

3. Time — tolerating discomfort

I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues, who seemed to me more talented than I was, never produced scripts as original as mine. I watched for some time, and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it — even though the solution was not very original. Whereas if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out and finish by 5 o'clock, I just couldn't. I'd sit there with the problem for another hour and a quarter. And by sticking at it I would, in the end, almost always come up with something more original.

My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer. And this was exactly what McKinnon found in his research: the most creative professionals always played with the problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it — because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety we all experience when we haven't yet solved a problem.

If we have a problem and we need to solve it, until we do we feel a kind of internal agitation or tension — an uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort. So we take a decision not because we're sure it's the best decision, but because taking it will make us feel better. The most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for much longer. And so, simply because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

The people I find it hardest to be creative with are people who need at all times to project an image of themselves as decisive, and who feel that to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly and with a great show of confidence. This behaviour, I suggest sincerely, is the most effective way of strangling creativity at birth.

I'm not arguing against real decisiveness. I'm 100% in favour of taking a decision when it has to be taken and then sticking to it while it's being implemented. What I'm suggesting is that before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself: when does this decision have to be taken? Having answered that, you defer the decision until then — in order to give yourself maximum pondering time, which will lead you to the most creative solution.

4. Confidence

When you're in your space-time oasis getting into the open mode, nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

Think about play — true play is experiment. "What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that?" The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, a feeling that whatever happens it's okay. You cannot be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong — something you shouldn't have done.

As Alan Watts puts it: you can't be spontaneous within reason. So you've got to risk saying things that are silly and illogical and wrong. And the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any doodle may lead to the breakthrough.

5. Humour

I happen to think the main evolutionary significance of humour is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else. We all know that laughter brings relaxation and that humour makes us playful.

Yet how many times have important discussions been held where really original and creative ideas were desperately needed — but where humour was taboo because the subject was so serious? This attitude seems to me to stem from a very basic misunderstanding of the difference between serious and solemn.

A group of us could be sitting around after dinner discussing matters that were extremely serious — the education of our children, our marriages, the meaning of life — and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand — I don't know what it's for. The self-important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humour. That's why they see it as a threat.

Humour is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity that we need to solve problems — no matter how serious those problems may be.

Working with others

It's easy to be creative if you've got other people to play with. I always find that if two or more of us throw ideas backwards and forwards, I get to more interesting and original places than I could ever have got to on my own.

But there is a danger: if there's one person around you who makes you feel defensive, you lose the confidence to play — and it's goodbye to creativity. So always make sure your play-friends are people that you like and trust. And never say anything to squash them — never say "no" or "wrong" or "I don't like that." Always be positive and build on what's being said: "Would it be even better if…?" "I don't quite understand that — can you explain it again?" "Go on." "What if…?" "Let's pretend." Try to establish as free an atmosphere as possible.

Sometimes I wonder if the success of the Japanese isn't partly due to their instinctive understanding of how to use groups creatively. Westerners are often amazed at the unstructured nature of Japanese meetings — but maybe it's just that very lack of structure, that absence of time pressure, that frees them to solve problems so creatively. And how clever of the Japanese, sometimes, to plan that unstructuredness — by, for example, insisting that the first people to give their views are the most junior, so that they can speak freely without the possibility of contradicting something already said by somebody more important.

Connecting ideas

Creativity is like humour in a joke. The laugh comes at the moment when you connect two different frames of reference in a new way.

A new idea is exactly the same thing — it's connecting two hitherto separate ideas in a way that generates new meaning. Connecting different ideas isn't difficult — you can connect cheese with motorcycles, or moral courage with light green, or bananas with international cooperation. But these new connections are significant only if they generate new meaning. And of course your intuition tells you whether any of them seem to have significance — that's the part the computer can't do.

Edward de Bono, who invented the notion of lateral thinking, specifically suggests in his book Po: Beyond Yes and No that you can try loosening up your assumptions by playing with deliberately crazy connections. He calls such absurd ideas "Intermediate Impossibles." He points out that using an Intermediate Impossible is completely contrary to ordinary logical thinking, in which you have to be right at each stage. It doesn't matter if the Intermediate Impossible is right or absurd — it can nevertheless be used as a stepping stone to another idea that is right.

So to summarize: if you really don't know how to start, or if you've got stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.

And one last thing: because it takes time for your mind to quieten down, the reward from your unconscious often doesn't arrive during the oasis itself. It arrives later — probably in the shower, or at breakfast the next morning. Suddenly, out of the blue, a new thought mysteriously appears. If you've put in the pondering time first.

How to stamp out creativity

Now, in the time I have left, I can come to the important part: how to stop your subordinates becoming creative — which is the real threat. No one appreciates better than I do what trouble creative people are, and how they stop decisive, hard-nosed managers like us from running businesses efficiently. If we encourage someone to be creative, the next thing is they're rocking the boat, coming up with ideas, asking us questions. We'd have to start justifying our decisions by reasoned argument.

So here's how to stamp out creativity in the rest of the organisation:

• Allow no humour. It threatens your self-importance, especially your omniscience. Treat all humour as frivolous or subversive. Blame humour for the resistance that your way of working creates — then you don't have to blame your way of working.
• Undermine confidence. Zero in immediately on all the things you can find wrong with any work presented to you. Never balance the negatives with positives. Only criticise. Just as your schoolteachers did.
• Demand that people always be actively doing things. If you catch anybody pondering, accuse them of laziness and indecision. This starves employees of thinking time, because thinking leads to creativity and insurrection. Demand urgency at all times. Establish a permanent atmosphere of stress, breathless anxiety, and crisis. In a phrase: keep that mode closed.

In this way, the tiny quantity of creativity in your organisation will all be yours. But let your vigilance slip for one moment and you could find yourself surrounded by happy, enthusiastic, and creative people whom you might never be able completely to control ever again.