6 Tips on Creating a Culture of Creativity

BY Christina Desmarais

 To stay alive today companies need a constant stream of fresh ideas. Here's how to get them.

Decades ago companies could stay alive based on the strength of their products alone. Today it's different: Consumers are constantly plugged in and they're fickle with their affinities, which are largely influenced by the content they consume online. Are your ads entertaining them? Do your videos strike an emotional chord? Are you engaging with them authentically on social media with clever that which endears them to your brand?

What you need is creativity--lots and lots of it coming from your employees, who need to get work out the door much faster than they once did. Suzy Deering, CEO at digital agency Moxie USA, which boasts clients such as Quilted Northern, Coca-Cola and Chic-fil-A, has some ideas about how to foster a culture of creativity.

Tout creative thinking throughout your organization.

Companies that are good at cranking out novel ideas understand creativity should not be the domain of only certain departments. It's a way of thinking that should pervade your entire organization, including functions like finance or IT. To keep creativity at the forefront of everyone's minds, Moxie USA sends a Friday email to all of its 600 employees shouting out the top handful of the company's creative successes across functions every week. "It's just a philosophical difference of what is creative and what makes creativity," Deering says. "It comes from anywhere."

Encourage in-person relationships.

If your workers are outfitted with modern technology, there's a good chance they never have to leave their desks to get their work done. "Relationships are not necessarily done through email," she says. "It's a tool that we can use, but some of the best discussions and best thinking comes from…having a thought and sharing it with somebody live where you can go back and forth and bounce off of each other."

Encourage employees to leverage non-company contacts.

Your employees know lots of talented people, whether they're family members, neighbors, or friends. Why not tap them for ideas, advice, or connections? For example, another company that does this is Chicago-based GiveForward, which sends job descriptions to well-connected investors, posts them on Facebook, and emails them to employees and their personal connections during a hiring campaign. Once a job listing is passed on to people who may not have a relationship with the company (and thereby aren't inclined to help), referral incentives keep them sharing. Meanwhile, all these people are reading GiveForward's company story.

Offer structured freedom.

If you want your employees to come up with good ideas, they need to know their voices will be heard, they can make a difference, and they won't be shot down. At the same time, boundaries help, too. In the case of Moxie USA, Deering says they include making sure employees:

• Are true to the consumer and deliver on brand
• Drive off a key insight and ensure it ladders back up to an overarching strategy
• Keep timing in mind, since it's usually a factor given the speed of the consumer
• Make sure they know what they are solving for or what they expect the consumer to do
• Are accountable to a reaction and know what they are measuring

"Boundaries…keep them within a space that they feel more comfortable," she says.

Hire people who have a persevering, entrepreneurial spirit.

The most rewarding things in life are not easy. In fact, think of the most rewarding experiences of your life and they're likely the ones that were emotionally or physically challenging. "But the output becomes so incredibly rewarding because of the fact that it was hard," she says. "When you're in the hiring process, you've got to look for those people that really have that spirit."

Banish bureaucracy and form small nimble teams.

After seeing too many layers of bureaucracy hinder progress for some of her teams serving a big brand client, Deering decided to structure her teams as smaller units. After the pivot, a squad named Unit 3C proved it was agile enough to provide solid thinking in real time. For example, during a recent "Cow Appreciation Day" at Chick-fil-A stores, Unit 3C was able to generate rapid-fire creative for social media by tapping into what was actually going on in stores. Essentially, the team created a pop-up that allowed in-the-moment dialog with restaurant patrons about their love for Chick-fil-A and cows by retweeting their quotes in a creative, illustrative manner.

The problem many companies have, Deering says, is using an old-school process of creative development that just doesn't work anymore in light of consumers who never turn off.

"We expect that we can cram the same approach into an extremely condensed timeframe and many times approach it like it's an assembly line," she says. "It can't be that way anymore. We have too many resources and partners that we can tap into in order to get to the right place and unlock thinking that wouldn't happen on the assembly line."

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Secrets of the Creative Brain

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness. 

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Nancy Andreasen

 

 As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.
He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. Kurt’s father was a gifted architect, and his older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurt’s daughters are visual artists. Kurt’s work, of course, needs no introduction.

For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, observes, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

Compared with many of history’s creative luminaries, Vonnegut, who died of natural causes, got off relatively easy. Among those who ended up losing their battles with mental illness through suicide are Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.

My interest in this pattern is rooted in my dual identities as a scientist and a literary scholar. In an early parallel with Sylvia Plath, a writer I admired, I studied literature at Radcliffe and then went to Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship; she studied literature at Smith and attended Cambridge on a Fulbright. Then our paths diverged, and she joined the tragic list above. My curiosity about our different outcomes has shaped my career. I earned a doctorate in literature in 1963 and joined the faculty of the University of Iowa to teach Renaissance literature. At the time, I was the first woman the university’s English department had ever hired into a tenure-track position, and so I was careful to publish under the gender-neutral name of N. J. C. Andreasen.

Not long after this, a book I’d written about the poet John Donne was accepted for publication by Princeton University Press. Instead of feeling elated, I felt almost ashamed and self-indulgent. Who would this book help? What if I channeled the effort and energy I’d invested in it into a career that might save people’s lives? Within a month, I made the decision to become a research scientist, perhaps a medical doctor. I entered the University of Iowa’s medical school, in a class that included only five other women, and began working with patients suffering from schizophrenia and mood disorders. I was drawn to psychiatry because at its core is the most interesting and complex organ in the human body: the brain.

I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted? My latest study, for which I’ve been scanning the brains of some of today’s most illustrious scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, has come closer to answering this second question than any other research to date.

  

 http://www.theatlantic.com/