Is Creativity Overrated?

One of the companies that presented at the Techdirt Greenhouse was Alignent Software, a company with products to help companies manage the innovation process.  The nature of the event was such that they didn't delve deeply into how their software worked, but nonetheless it was somewhat controversial.  There were those in attendance who couldn't imagine that innovation was something that could be managed in such a way:

I made some comment about how innovation is not something that can be rigidly planned and controlled - especially not if one wants the best outcome possible. Alan Bushell, a South African gentleman who was sitting next to me and is a veteran of the technology world, piped up and said exactly what needed to be said. To paraphrase: In his experience, the way you work with inventive people is to make space around them, break all the rules for them, and let go of any notions of corralling them with suffocating processes.

This has become something of a popular notion, I think.  The professor Richard Florida has become something of a star by linking the economic growth of cities to his "bohemian index", and arguing (as above) that the way to move forward is to tear down the rules and let your freak flag fly.  This is the seductive myth behind places like Austin (where I am as of this writing).  But is this all too pat?  Do we just want to believe that by banging on drums, letting people think freely (outside the box as they used to call it) and ignoring conventions we create the best breakthroughs?

George Mason professor Robin Hanson (probably one of the most creative thinkers you can find) has an intriguing BusinessWeek piece entitled The Myth Of Creativity:

Creativity is in. Seminars teach employees to "think outside the box" and release their inner Picasso. Managers preach innovation, and today's rich and powerful prefer to describe themselves as creative heroes, valiantly besting the naysayers to bring us the radical changes that add up to progress. Richard Florida's best-selling The Rise of the Creative Class argues that societal progress increasingly comes from places like New York and San Francisco, in part because those cities encourage creativity by embracing bohemian self-expression and openness to diversity in dress, speech, or even sexuality.

Despite this affirming chorus, much of the hoopla over creativity is a crock. Why? Because we are already up to our eyeballs in it. Make no mistake: Innovation matters. Nothing is more essential for long-term economic growth. But to get more innovation we may want less, not more, creativity.

The sobering truth is that the dramatic artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking "creativity" matter little for economic growth. Creative new clothes or music may change fashion, but are soon eclipsed by newer fashions. Large and lasting economic innovations, like steam engines or cell phones, are rare and tend to be independently "invented" by many people. One less visionary would matter little.

Instead, the innovations that matter most are the millions of small changes we constantly make to our billions of daily procedures and arrangements. Such changes do not require free-spirited self-expression. Instead, people quite naturally think of changes as they go about their routine business and social lives.

More:

Where's the biggest surplus? All those "big ideas." After all, big changes take even more resources to pursue, and people long to be creative heroes celebrated for their big ideas. It seems every actor wants to direct, every musician wants creative control, and every manager wants to be a CEO.

Such striving for creativity can actually reduce innovation. Vying for creative credit, people routinely neglect good ideas "not invented here." And they often join the crowd behind a new idea just to declare their creativity, which distracts them from really trying to make that new idea work.

To succeed in academia, my graduate students and I had to learn to be less creative than we were initially inclined to be. Critics complain that schools squelch creativity, but most people are inclined to be more creative on the job than would be truly productive. So schooling is mostly about selecting the smarter and more diligent, and learning to show up day after day to somewhat boring jobs with ambiguous instructions.

What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.

So if not from creativity and unstructured thinking, where does innovation come from?  Because it's not sexy in any way, there isn't much interest in routinization.  But routinization is key.  More broadly it's a matter of discovery (of, say, a method) >> systematization (learning how to repeat the method) >> routinization (making the method idiot simple) >> automation (creating a machine or computer program to do it).  This is the ongoing process that frees up spare brain cycles to tackle important issues, like squeezing more transistors onto a chip.  It's not a matter of having an "aha!" moment, but of doing the same things we did yesterday only cheaper, faster, and with higher quality.  This is the core of progress and wealth.  This is why goods get cheaper and more democratized as time goes one, because it gets easier and easier to produce them, requiring less effort from society.  Other than for monetary reasons, nothing should ever get more expensive, because that would be a breakdown, a step back from what we'd attained in the previous period. 

It would be great if we could all be innovating, constantly breaking the rules and questioning assumptions.  But it's also nice to think that progress can be broken down to a steady structure, that can be managed (perhaps with software) for better results.

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