Think You Manage Creativity? Here’s Why You’re Wrong

….my ideas will seem strange to people who believe that the best ways for managing routine tasks are equally well suited to innovative work, but they are supported by theory and practice. If it’s creativity you want, you should encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers—and while you’re at it, get them to fight among themselves. You should reassign people who have settled into productive grooves in their jobs. And you should start rewarding failure, not just success; reserve punishment only for inaction.

I found this article through a blog trail. Randy is a new friend — I think I can call him that even though I just met him — at People’s Church. He had a link in a recent post to Darrell‘s brief post on this article from Harvard Business School.

How I wish my supervisor on the field on my last overseas assignment had read this article and taken its advice to heart! So many people would have been spared a lot of pain and frustration, including he and his wife, who paid a hefty price for his inability to "manage" us. Had he just known — and allowed himself — to follow this article’s wise advice, we would have been a happy, productive, dynamic team and proved how vital our gifts were to the whole region through our powerful impact on everyone who received the advocacy and mobilization materials we were tasked with designing and creating.

Why is it mission agencies, heck most "agencies," corporations and organizations, feel compelled to find the most productive person in their sights and stick them in whatever job needs the most "productivity" without regard to their actually strengths and gifts in that area, and/or without giving them proper training before throwing them into the fire? I don’t begrudge my former supervisor anything. He was so in the wrong job. I used to tell people at Mosaic that having him in the job was like putting Robert Martinez in charge of the Creative Arts team. Everyone got that analogy immediately. Robert was a numbers guy. An incredible numbers guy. Without him, Mosaic would have been in financial chaos many years ago. He’s also an incredible counselor; caring, compassionate, considerate, quiet, wise…. and logical. Very logical. And traditional.

Robert’s an amazing man, and I love him very much. I think my former supervisor is probably pretty nice too. I just never got to see it. All I saw was a very wounded, very stressed man who wasn’t likable at all. It was all very sad.

There are times when I still find anger flooding over me. I spent a year of my life in a missionary hell. Not solely because of the mismanagement problems — there were several major factors involved — but that was a huge chunk of the problem, and at times I still get angry when I think about that time. Other times I feel tremendous sadness and sympathy for my supervisor and his wife. They were hurting people just trying to do their jobs.

Logic and creativity don’t go together the way most logic-wired people think they do. Creativity that leads to innovation isn’t linear and doesn’t happen in a scheduled fashion. It has to be nurtured, marinated and percolated, sheltered and protected and given freedom to come and go, ebb and flow and fight for its rightful — and right-fitting — place in the mix of vision, mission, culture and message. If my supervisor could have understood this he would have saved himself and the rest of his "team" an island-full of pain, frustration and anger.

Personally, I think all executives in charge of creative people tasked with innovation ought to read and implement what’s in this article. As a creative thinker and innovator, I think this should be part of Management 101 in every business, organization — especially Christian ones… why is it we Christians tend to suck the most at doing this kind of thing??…. and institution of higher learning (especially seminaries!).

Read the whole article.