Work Matters

Category: d.school

  • Can You Handle the Mess?

    Proto messy

    Remember that speech from a  Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson famously ranted at Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth?" I was vaguely reminded of it when I saw this picture. It reminded me that, when it comes to creativity and innovation, if you want the innovations, money, and prestige it sometimes produces, you've get to be ready to handle the mess. 

    I love this picture because it is such a great demonstration that prototyping — like so many other parts of creative process — is so messy that it can be distressing to people with orderly minds.  This picture comes from a presentation I heard at an executive program last week called Design Thinking Bootcamp. 

    It was by the amazing Claudia Kotchka, who did great things at VP of Design Innovation and Strategy at P&G — see this video and article.  She built a 300 person organization to spread innovation methods across the company. She retired from P&G a few years back and now helps all sorts of organizations (including the the Stanford d school) imagine and implement design thinking and related insights.  As part of her presentation, she put up this picture from a project P&G did with IDEO  (they did many). We always love having Claudia at the d.school because she spreads so much wisdom and confidence to people who are dealing with such messes.

    That is what prototyping looks like… it even can look this messy when people are developing ideas about HR issues like training and leadership development and organizational strategy issues such as analyses of competitors.

  • Why the Sharp Distinction Between “Individual” and “Group” Brainstorming is False in Real Teams

    I wrote a post earlier in the week about how the claim in The New Yorker that brainstorming "doesn't work" is an oversimplification.  I gave various reasons:  Most of this research is done with novices rather than skilled brainstormers, only looks at one measure (quantity), and ignores how brainstorming is done and the impact it has in real organizations.  As I have been thinking about this research a bit more and of the brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I studied at IDEO years ago, that I see at the Stanford d.school, and especially, that I've seen in recent weeks in some very skilled groups I have seen in action, something struck me:

    The comparison between group and individual brainstorming that underlines this research is false, or at least irrelevant, because both happen at once when skilled practioners do it.

    When a skilled facilitator calls a brainstorm, he or she usually gives the topic in advance and asks members of the group to do some individual thinking about it before the gathering; for example, I once went to a brainstorm at IDEO on how to give an itchless haircut.  I dutifully went to a stylist and asked her to give me an an itchless haircut  She did things like wrapped my neck really tight with the top of the smock and put a bunch of talcum powder on my neck.  So I came prepared to add some ideas. The funniest part was one designer who tried to talk his barber into giving him a haircut while he hung upside down.  It was a crazy idea, but the notion of using gravity to solve other design problems was not — so having this story in the IDEO culture was useful.   

    In addition to the routine practice of encouraging solo idea generation before the group meets (and most relevant to the research) is that if you watch skilled teams, there is a blend of individual and collective idea generation going on most of the time DURING the brainstorming session.  Typically, in a group of say 6 or 7 brainstormers, you will have 2 or 3 people talking about the idea that is in play at the moment — one written on a post-it, written on the board, illustrated with a drawing, or a quick prototype.  Meanwhile, the other 4 or 5 people are half listening, writing ideas on post-its, drawing, building something, or semi-tuning out and just thinking about how to mix their ideas with with those they are hearing and seeing around them.

    There is a method called "brainwriting" where members write ideas on slips of paper, then pass their ideas to each other, and generate new ideas in response to others — all in silence.  As least one experiment shows that brainwriting enables people to develop more and apparently better ideas compared to brainstorming alone. This research is interesting in that, when you watch the best brainstorming groups, although they don't work in silence (the solo brainstorming happens before they meet in many cases … and since they are working in ongoing projects, they have time for individual silent contemplation afterwards as well), people are constantly switching between "solo" mode to generate ideas and "social" mode to share their ideas, listen to others, and build on the ideas of others 

    Real groups do "brainstorming" in much messier ways than it is sliced-up in psychological experiments, but the headline here is that in practice, if you watch how the pros do it, it entails a blend of individual and group idea generation — even during group gatherings.  This insight is, I think, important because skilled brainstormers are constantly switching between "solo" and "social" mode and the best facilitators — I think of people like Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley at the Stanford d.school — constantly take steps to help brainstormers switch back and forth between these modes in the moment.

    Again, I don't want to defend brainstorming too strongly because there may well be better methods for facilitating idea generation and creativity in general .  As I said last time, I do believe that teaching groups how to fight well is probably more important than teaching them how to brainstorm (and a lot harder) if you want to spark creativity, a point made well in The New Yorker story.  I also believe — and can show you evidence, notably from the late Robert Zajonc — that it  is impossible for human-beings to withhold judgement about anything they encounter (despite instructions to do so during brainstorming).  But I confess to be annoyed by the conclusion that "brainstorming doesn't work" because it is based on research that is largely irrelevant to how it is actually done in teams and organizations that use it routinely.

  • Why The New Yorker’s Claim That Brainstorming “Doesn’t Work” Is An Overstatement And Possibly Wrong

    The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here).  It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative — all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog. 

    I do however have a major quibble.  At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work.  He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established.  But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.

    I once devoted way too much time to the question of whether this research shows that brainstorming is useless. In the name of full-disclosure, please note I am a Fellow at IDEO and also a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, which both use brainstorming a lot. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful method, and I have often said that the d.school in particular should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight. (And if you want evidence that the d.school believes in more than just brainstorming, look at their Bootleg.)

    But please consider several facts about the brainstorming literature, at least as it stood about 7 or 8 years ago when I last reviewed it carefully and which is consistent with a more recent paper from The Academy of Management Review (Here is the abstract, which is quite short):

    1. Nearly all brainstorming research is done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. In fact, there is at least two studies showing that, when facilitated properly, the so called productivity loss disappears. Check this 1996 study and this 2001 study.  To me, these two studies alone call into question the approach taken in most brainstorming studies, which don't use facilitation.   In other words, the conculsion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins.

    2. As Keith Sawyer's comment implies, nearly all this research looks at only one measure of effectiveness, how quickly people can produce ideas.  Because people in groups have to take time to listen to each other, it slows the idea generation process. Most brainstorming studies compare the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups. In fact, if creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies, I once figured out that people are exposed to substantially more ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming — and I would argue that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

    3.A key part of face-to-face brainstorming is building on and combining the ideas of others.  This comparison is impossible in most brainstorming studies because an individual working alone is not exposed to the ideas of others.

    Indeed, one of the very first posts I did on this blog in 2006  dug on this issue.  As I wrote then, "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." I also wrote about brainstorming here in BusinessWeek and they started with this setup.

    The upshot of my research and my reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior. But if you look at the range of positive effects has at a place like IDEO — spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what,  providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done — none of which have not been examined in those simple experiments.  If so, those findings about pure efficiency may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating brainstorming in organizations that use it routinely.

    In short, I believe that Lehrer's statement that brainstorming "doesn't work" is too sweeping because it has not been studied adequately in real organizations or with people who have real brainstorming skills. Again, I would describe this as a quibble; the article in The New Yorker is otherwise excellent.

    P.S. for the true nerds, here is the 1996 academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote:

    Download ASQ Storming

  • Creative People Must Be Stopped! Dave Owens’ Great New Book Published Today

    Book-image-suit_red

    Dave Owens was one of my doctoral students about 15 years ago. He always amazed me with has range of talents.  He was not only remarkably well-read and a great field researcher, he could build or fix anything.  There was an interesting moment when he was doing an ethnography at a now defunct design firm.  Dave met with me to complain that he kept going to one meeting after another where the development team brainstormed and argued and argued and talked and talked about what the prototype should be.   It was driving Dave crazy because he had worked at IDEO as a designer for several years and has a masters in product design from Stanford — so he couldn't stand seeing talking as a substitute for prototyping.   He told me had had the parts in his garage and could build a prototype in a day, two at most, and asked if he should.  I discouraged him from doing so because it would compromise his objectivity and neutrality as an ethnographer.   As I have looked back at that advice over the years, I still wonder if I was wrong.  Indeed, the product development team was shut down when pretty much the same product they had been talking about hit the market. If Dave had built that prototype, they might have had a shot at getting to market.  I also have wondered since then if there really is such at thing as an objective or neutral ethnographer. 

    In any event, Dave has taken those skills and gone on to quite career. He has been teaching creativity and innovation at Vanderbilt for years and students love him.  He has worked with many organizations — from Dell to NASA to LEGO — as consultant and even took a break from Vanderbilt to serve as CEO of Griffin Technology.  Dave has wrapped all that practical and academic knowledge into a great new book , Creative People Must Be Stopped. I love the cover.  Dave has put together an information-rich  website for the book.  Dave does a great job of showing various impediments to innovation and then offering tactics and strategies for overcoming them in the book– he has an "Innovation Constraints Survey" you might check-out.  The whole book is fun and useful, but perhaps my favorite chapter is "If it is such a great idea, why isn't our competitor doing it?"  I can't tell how many times I have heard that creativity killer inside of large companies where people are punished for pressing original ideas.

    Let me know what you think of the survey and the book.  I read it in galley form and loved it, and i just ordered a copy from Amazon — I think Dave is sending me one because I did a blurb but I like to support my former students!

     

  • Wisdom from Stanford’s Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools

    There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506.)  The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it. 

    March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us.  For example, he does a lovely job of arguing — using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great — that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful.  But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :

            We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

    March laments on page 503 :

    My experience with business school students is that those who possess an instinct for joy, passion, and beauty often learn to suppress their expression by virtue of a sense that such instincts are unwelcome both in business schools and in business, thereby making the sense self-confirming.

    I found this depressingly accurate for too many students, who often seem to lose their spark.  It doesn't just happen in business schools, to be clear, it is a danger in any school or institution that has strong norms, where people are in close physical proximity, and they have a lot of contact with each other (Indeed, Apple especially needs to guard against this now).  I do believe that the d.school — at least at its best — sometimes serves as a countervailing force, as the best teachers and classes there do encourage joy and self-expression.  But as much as I love being a professor, I do think that Jim raises an implicit question that every educator needs to keep asking him or herself:

    "What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

    I am not saying that conformity is all bad, but too often we teach it unwittingly. I am curious about your reactions to March's point.  Is he (and I guess me) too hard on the educational process?  What can be done to educate people without turning them into emotionally repressed and joyless clones?

    P.S. BY the way, after I posted it, I realized that March's comment actually is another example of the issue I raised in my last post about how roles can change what do and believe so much.

  • Evidence that “Retail Therapy” is Effective

    Just as I feared!  BPS Research reports a recent article containing a series of small studies that shows "retail therapy" does work — at least in a sample of young American consumers.  And they found little evidence of regret or guilt after the purchases.  Here is the description of the third and most compelling of the studies:

    "Lastly the researchers had 69 undergrads complete two retrospective consumption diaries, two weeks apart, documenting their purchasing behaviour, mood and regrets. All the participants admitted in the first diary to having bought themselves a treat (mostly clothes, but also food, electronics, entertainment products and so on). Sixty-two per cent of these purchases had been motivated by low mood, 28 per cent as a form of celebration. Surprisingly perhaps, treats bought as a form of mood repair were generally about half the value of treats bought for celebration, reinforcing the notion that retail therapy is constrained, not out of control. Moreover, according to the diaries, the retail therapy purchases were overwhelmingly beneficial, leading to mood boosts and no regrets or guilt, even when they were unplanned. Only one participant who'd made a retail therapy purchase said that she would return it, given the opportunity."

    I better not show this study to my teenage daughters.  They love retail therapy and I have never seen a hint of guilt from them… only the motivation to do more in the future!

    The citation is: Atalay, A., and Meloy, M. (2011). Retail therapy: A strategic effort to improve mood. Psychology and Marketing, 28 (6), 638-659 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20404.

    P.S. As I have said before,  BPS Research Digest is one of my favorite places on the web.  Check it out.

     

  • Guest Column for CNN: On The Virtues of Drinking at Work

    I have been getting emails now and then from the folks at CNN.com asking if I would like to do a guest column.  I have not been blogging anywhere much because I've been traveling a lot (I did a workshop on design thinking in Singapore a couple weeks back and just got from giving speeches in Brazil on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Good Boss, Bad Boss)  and using my available time to focus on the scaling project with Huggy Rao. 

    As often happens to me, however, I ended-up writing something fun when I was "supposed to" be doing something else.  I was thinking about drinking in the workplace because I had been interviewed for Bloomberg about the subject where, although I was quoted as talking about all the evils (and there are nasty evils), I had actually spent much of the conversation with the reporter talking about how sharing a drink with colleagues can sometimes strengthen the social glue in a workplace.  This is an experience that many of us have enjoyed. And. more broadly, there is some interesting academic research here as well, notably a charming book called Drunken Comportment by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, which uses anthropological and other evidence to challenge to notion that drinking always changes things for the worse.

    The final motivation to write the column came after I had a lovely time sharing a drink with some colleagues one Friday afternoon a few weeks back.   So I wrote this little piece from CNN called "Drinking at Work: Its Not All Bad," which just came out today.

    Here is how it opens:

    At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.

    We talked about an array of topics — a sick friend, kids, a cool wireless speaker the IT guy had set up and our preferences for different brands of Scotch. Then we went our separate ways. I was struck by how much the brief interaction affected me. I felt closer to my colleagues, more relaxed from the great conversation and the Scotch, and I felt good about working at a place that allows employees to take a prudent drink now and then.

    That little episode illustrates the role that alcohol plays at its best. In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    You can read the rest here.

    I am curious to hear your reactions to this idea.  What are some of the other advantages of drinking at work? What can a company or boss to do maximize the virtues and minimize the dangers?   It is one of those complex subjects that, while there are times when it is clearly dead wrong (like when airline pilots drink on the job), there are many other times when complaints about imbibing some more like misguided morality plays than constructive objections. 

     

  • Stanford Magazine Story on the d.School: David Kelley as Founder, Jedi Master, and Cover Boy

     

        CV1-d school_FINAL_no-bleed
    The new Stanford Magazine just arrived and it has a fantastic story about the d.school called "Sparks Fly" and a nice sidebar on the efforts by Rich Crandall and others to teach design thinking in schools via their K-12 initiative. I am biased as I have been involved with IDEO (which David also founded) for over 15 years and with the d.school from the start.  As I wrote in a recent post about David's 60th birthday, he has had a huge effect on many people's lives and, I would argue, on bringing an engineering inspired (but appropriately flexible) perspective to problems as diverse as designing better radio shows, to improving company meetings, to launching new companies, to developing a cheap and portable alternative to incubators for premature babies in third world countries. 

    I especially liked how the magazine called David a "Jedi Master" as he has a rather magical and weird ability to mentor people, to give them strange and useful advice (like his reaction to my complaint that the d.school was out of control, when he advised that creativity was a messy process and would never be clean and pretty), to take time to give personal advice and help friends (David and his brother Tom Kelley played a big role in helping me make my decision last year to have surgery at the Cleveland Clinic rather than Stanford), to providing a perspective on leadership as striking a balance between love and money ( a perspective consistent with a lot of research, but stated oh so much better), to doing things that are just plain fun from giving me a singing fish to telling absurd and usually self-deprecating stories.  David is the rare leader who doesn't just talk about empathy, he has it in spades.

  • The Power of Observing and Talking to Real Humans

    Although Good Boss, Bad Boss focuses more squarely on the relationship between bosses and their immediate charges, one of the main themes of the book — following a design-thinking view of the world — is that the best bosses go to great lengths to develop empathy for both the people they lead and the customers served by their teams and organizations.  Managers and executives sometimes tell me that just looking at sales statistics, aggregated demographics stats, and — now and then — reading compilations of customer complaints and compliments is all they need to do to understand their customer's needs.  There is no need to go out and waste their time watching and talking to customers or potential customers first hand.  

    I am all for quantitative data, but there is a story in Chapter 5 of  Good Boss, Bad Boss that I believe shows there is no substitute for the power of first hand observation:

    When bosses make concerted efforts to understand what it feels like to be a customer, it is remarkably useful for making gaps between knowledge and action vivid and identifying possible repairs.  To illustrate, SYPartners (SYP), an innovation firm based in San Francisco and New York, worked with up-and-coming executives from a big company to develop new financial services for immigrants. The executives arrived with armloads of binders packed with data-rich PowerPoint decks –and were excited about how well they had mastered the charts and statistics.  They got nervous when SYP told them they weren’t going to use that stuff, and instead, would be shadowing customers.   

    SYP broke the team into trios, assigned each a Spanish-speaking translator and Spanish-speaking undocumented worker, and sent them out into the Mission District in San Francisco.  Each team was asked to cash a check in a bank, wire money to a Central American country at Western Union, and observe the undocumented worker do the same things.  Before the observations, these executives knew from their quantitative data that these untapped customers represented a huge opportunity.  But their impressions of what these customers wanted – and would happily pay for – were far off the mark. The shadowing, hands-on efforts, and discussions with undocumented workers provoked them to transform and broaden the offerings they suggested to their firm.  One executive called it “life-changing” and said he would never look at a marketing opportunity the same again.  The executive who initially felt most uncomfortable about following around an illegal immigrant came away most transformed  – arguing adamantly that reams of data aren’t enough, that you need to understand what your customers do and how it feels to do be them.

    In other words, the best bosses know what it feels like to work for them and what it feels like to be one of their customers too!  The closer you can get to an unvarnished and uncensored perspective of the humans that you lead an serve, the better you can understand their needs and what you can do to feel those needs.

    P.S.  Toward that end, a couple years back I was talking to an executive from a major airline about how crummy the experience was of flying coach — how everything from the legroom to the rude staff made it an awful experience. He dismissed my complaint, but eventually admitted that it had been years since he flew coach on any airline.   Perhaps that is one reason that Southwest has stayed so successful for so long — there are no first class seats for their executives hide in!

  • More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential

    Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts.  My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck).  Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

        1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

         2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

        3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

        4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

    I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

    "Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

    I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity — actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies — just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?"  The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic. 

    This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work.  It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups.  As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: “What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"' 

    The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: “How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?”, “How much control over the team’s activities would this member exhibit?”, “I think the applicant is an effective leader.” (α = .86).

    The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed.  Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

    BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer: 

    'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity.  But when asked to describe a creative person, words like “quirky,” “nonconformist” and “unfocused” often take their place right alongside “visionary” and “charismatic.” Says Mueller: “The fact is, people don’t just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them.”'

    Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think — and there is evidence to show — that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders.  In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky.  That is not the boss that most of us want.  It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential.  It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey. 

     This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma — "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person — articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others. 

    On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities — Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others — Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that — especially at this moment in history — we need creative people even more.

    To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful — especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding  yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people — unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

    I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good.  If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

    Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology