Creativity: Thinking and Doing

The story about Archimedes (287 BC-212 BC) has it that he was taking a bath when the means by which he could determine whether a crown was made of pure gold or had been alloyed with silver was discovered. As it was an irregularly shaped object, and as the king would not have been particularly pleased if the determination involved melting the crown so that it could be molded into a regularly shaped object to facilitate measurement, this proved to be a vexing problem. The solution involved the displacement of water: it would be different for the gold than for an alloyed crown.

So Archimedes allegedly was so excited by what is clearly evidence of creative thinking that he shouted “Eureka!”—“I have found it”—and went running down the street naked. (Presumably, if he was going to share the idea with King Hiero II, the monarch may not have been too pleased with the outfit.)

Arguably, the “Eureka!” moment has become the quintessential example of creativity. The only thing that comes close is the symbol of the light bulb turning on. Presumably this goes back to Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric lamp, somewhat closer in time, 1879. What led up to that success gave rise to the quote, “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” Perhaps more germane is the broader Edison quote, “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

All of this gives rise to two observations about creativity: (1) Persistence is required. While Edison’s tenacity is legendary, think of Archimedes: Even while taking a bath he couldn’t stop thinking; and (2) An objective is necessary. Which is something rather more involved.

Which brings me to a discussion about creativity with consultant Paul Sheldon, who is the sole or principal inventor on 17 patents, a recipient of  the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Leonardo da Vinci Award, and who has worked as a consultant with companies including Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and Siemens. In addition to which, he works with the National Science Foundation “on a regular basis” as a reviewer of proposals.

And Sheldon is a guy somewhat Archimedes-like in that he “can’t turn it off,” meaning that he is regularly coming up with new and different ideas. But here lies an important aspect of creativity that is most certainly germane to those who are creative and who work in organizations: “It takes a fair amount of maturity to keep your mouth shut.”

In other words, while some people might claim that creativity is an unalloyed good, there are parameters that must be recognized related to it. For example, Sheldon recalls when he was a vice president within a corporation. “When we had the weekly review meeting with the CEO, that was not the right time for creative brainstorming.” It was the time to keep to the agenda.

He points out that another issue related to crea-tive people within an organization is that sometimes they aren’t particularly aligned with the organization. “You’ll see a lot of frustrated people wherever you go. There will always be the creative people who haven’t sufficiently understood what the organization needs. So they come up with an idea and are frustrated that everyone doesn’t just jump on it and do it. But that’s unrealistic, because there are considerations of the markets, financials, and so on.”

What’s more, while it would probably be difficult to find an executive within any organization that doesn’t hold forth with some bromide like “Creativity is a core competence of our organization” or a variant thereof, making it seem as though from top to bottom, creativity is a key to employment, Sheldon acknowledges, “There are jobs where they may be a creative component as part of the overall job, but the duties of that job require an understanding of procedure.” That is, if there are standards associated with a task that must be followed, then chances are someone being creative in the interpretation of those standards may be counterproductive.

“In business you need creative people who understand appropriate and inappropriate uses of creativity,” he remarks. This even applies to designers: he points out that on CAD systems there are standard symbols for such things as perpendicularity, and it would not be useful for a designer to come up with a new symbol if the task is to design something in CAD; if an advertising agency designer is working on a layout that calls for a drawing of a Chevy Malibu, putting a Corvette in its place because it is a much cooler car wouldn’t be an appropriate use of the designer’s creativity.

While this might all sound like Sheldon is anything but creativity friendly, that’s far from being the case. In fact, his livelihood is predicated on creativity.

But here’s the case where it goes beyond the single “Eureka” moment. “If you’re doing something new, it’s not one burst of creativity and then you’re done. To actually make it happen”—and here’s where we get to observation #2—“requires continued insight in a creative sense, as opposed to the purely analytical.”

Sheldon says coming up with new ideas isn’t enough: “There are people who have ideas and then want to hand them off to others so that they can figure out if it is possible. That’s no good. There are too many ideas.”

So, in the cases of Archimedes and Edison, these were people who continued to work on their ideas until they came to some sort of fruition. “It is the sacred duty of an inventor to vet his own idea and figure out why it is no good before he bothers anyone else with it.”

Sheldon suggests that one of the issues that occurs during innovation is that there are roadblocks. (“Innovation is the combination of creativity and knowledge,” he says.) “You need a new idea to get something going. But along the way when you’re innovating, making something happen, there will be small and large roadblocks that will take creativity to solve.” So creativity isn’t just useful for the Big Idea—the light bulb, say—but in coming up with the ways and means to determine the proper filament material, how to process it, and so on.

Can people be trained to become more creative? Sheldon thinks that it is best to consider this as a continuum, where there are not particularly creative people on one end and clearly creative people on the other. “You can increase a person’s creavity, but to a small degree compared to those who are already creative,” he suggests. In other words, they’re moved a bit along the continuum. Sheldon thinks that one of the rather amusing aspects of people in organizations who attend creativity seminars or training sessions is that they tend to be the ones who are not particularly creative in the first place.

But you get the wins when you can, and if there are but tiny moves, at least it may engender the opportunity for creative people to be heard within an organization. And that’s no mean feat.

Which brings us back to the aforementioned creative person in an organization. “Creativity doesn’t fit in with the classically trained MBA style,” Sheldon says, “because they’re looking for certainty. When I’m working on some wild things, I’ll get the question from the CEO: ‘Are you absolutely sure this is going to work?’ Of course not. It’s never been done. I can give them an assessment that it is extremely likely. But that looking for certainty is not part of the creative process or of capitalizing on it.”

In today’s economic environment, this focus on certainty seems to be paramount. One manifestation of it is zealous cost-cutting: that’s a sure thing. For the moment. “Those of us who do a lot of work in R&D and product development know that when things get tough, the first thing that gets cut is travel expenses. The second thing is R&D.” The idea is that there is no sense in worrying about next year—which is R&D, in effect—when you have to worry about tomorrow. So the creativity is squelched. And when the recovery comes?

Well, at that point, the company is going to need a whole lot of creativity—assuming that there are any creative people left.