3 Factors That Impact Your Creativity
Knowing them is key to better thoughts.
In 1999, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, was named manager of the century by Fortune magazine. His leadership style, Rank and Yank, became the embodiment of corporate America in the 1980s and 1990s. Welch’s strategy was simple: rank employees from best to worst, reward the top twenty per cent with hefty cash bonuses, fire the bottom ten per cent. Repeat each year.
This approach sounded like a badass strategy until employees’ performance and earnings took a hit. Ironically, under Welsh’s leadership, forty per cent of General Electric’s earnings came from its financial services division and not from the more obvious tech side of its business.
Here lays a crucial lesson: chasing performance and innovation through psychological and financial pressure is a costly mistake. Yet, many managers, organisations, and individuals still follow such a strategy. Psychologist and author of The Eureka Factor, John Kounios, warns that pressure and other factors impact the way you think, make decisions, and develop creative ideas.
But how does pressure impact the way you think? And what other factors play a critical role in shaping your thoughts and creative power?
#1 — Pressure
In a ground-breaking paper titled The Blues Broaden but the Nasty Narrow, neuroscientists Eddie Harmon-Jones and Philip Gable revealed how pressure constricts creativity. First, they showed each participant a picture of either a delicious dessert, rotting food, or a table. Then, after each image, they flashed a letter and asked participants to say it as quickly as they could. Each letter shown was, in fact, made of smaller letters (see example).
M
M
M
M
M M M M MThe letter L made of smaller letters M.
Surprisingly, those shown desserts or rotting food didn’t notice the big letters at all. On the other hand, those shown tables noticed the big letters instead of the smaller ones.
The reason for this disparity, argues Harmon-Jones, is the brain’s motivational system. The “reward part” pulls us toward a goal, such as a delicious dessert or a promotion. The “threat part,” however, protects us from danger. And whether it’s rewards or threats, the effect on the brain is the same: our focus narrows on the thing we crave or fear.
Since neutral objects neither trigger the threat nor the reward system, participants who saw tables had a broader insight. And it’s this broader insight — seeing the forest instead of the trees — that is critical to creative thinking, argues Harmon-Jones.
When you work within high-stakes situations that involve rewards or punishments, your creative insight takes a hit. Reflecting on these findings, Kounios says:
“Money, deadlines, and promotions can lure people to do more work, but they can’t make them have breakthrough ideas. Prospects of financial gains and losses don’t have the same power over creativity the way they do over non-creative behaviours.”
#2 — Creative Imagination
Oshin Vartanian, a researcher at York University in Toronto, wanted to know if imagination boosts problem-solving skills.
In the first round of experiments, he scanned people’s brains while solving problems that required some creativity. Every time participants discover an answer, the front right side of their brain gets activated.
In the second round of experiments, Vartanian asked participants to imagine things, such as flowers or aeroplanes. But also, things that didn’t fit conventional reality, for instance, a talking helicopter or a flying giraffe. Now here is where it gets interesting. Vartanian saw the same brain parts lit up as before, but only when participants thought of objects that didn’t exist in real life. When they imagined reality itself, the regions stayed dark. Vartanian’s experiments send a clear message: creative imagination and problem-solving go hand-in-hand.
Of course, thinking of flying giraffes might not be practical to your cause. So how can you engage in creative imagination to solve real problems you care about? A great way, argues Kounios, is to use “the ultimate problem technique”. Basically, you think of problems that have no real answers. Things like “How could you make the sky a different color?” or “How can you possibly teleport?”
Kounios says coming up with virtual answers to impossible situations helps you spot hidden features and see things from new angles. Start-ups and organisations can find this exercise particularly useful, especially if they seek to disrupt an industry or create authentic products. “When tasks are open-ended, you generate a lot more ideas,” he says.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Vartanian’s experiments give this famous quote by Albert Einstein a whole new meaning.
#3 — Dysrationalia
Consider the following problem:
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not.Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?A) Yes B) No C) Cannot be determined
Pause and think of an answer.
According to cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich, more than eighty per cent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Think about it. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she is the married person looking at the unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person looking at Anne, the unmarried person.
This mental trap is known as “dysrationalia” — a tendency to make irrational decisions because:
- We haven’t considered all possibilities.
- We think we haven’t got enough data to make a decision.
The fact that Anne’s marital status is unknown tricks people into believing they can’t make a decision. IQ, Stanovich found out, is no guarantee against this shortsightedness — MIT, Princeton, and Harvard graduates were equally fooled.
Dysrationalia is not trivial because it permeates through critical decisions we make in careers and personal lives. Perhaps the most famous example of overcoming a mass dysrationalia is our global shift from combustion engine to electric cars. The decades-long argument against electric vehicles was that battery packs were costly to make. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, gave a good example of dysrationalia in an interview. Here’s what he said:
“People say battery packs cost $600 per kilowatt-hour and that’s just the way they will always be. Instead, you can break down the problem into its fundamental truths: what are batteries made of? What’s the market value of each material constituent? A battery has cobalt, nickel, aluminium, carbon. If we bought these things on the London Metal Exchange, it’s like $80 per kilowatt-hour. So clearly we just need to think of clever ways to combine these materials into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much cheaper than anyone realises.”
What’s the remedy against dysrationalia? Start from the fundamental truths: a person is either married or not; batteries are made of cobalt, iron, and lithium. Once you isolate the fundamental truths of the problem, examine all possible outcomes. This way, the right decision is easier to make.
Take Away
Your perception, the way you approach problems, how you make decisions, these elements play a critical role in the success or failure of your projects. Three factors play a critical role in shaping your thoughts and perception:
- Let go of pressure and high-stakes situations. See if you can tweak your environment to think more freely and broaden your insight.
- Engage in creative imagination. In the words of America’s top chef Grant Achatz: “Think of the impossible then chase it.”
- About to make a decision? Isolate the fundamental truths, then run through all possible outcomes.
Thinking about thinking is hard. But knowing how pressure, imagination, and dysrationalia impact your thinking might help you make small adjustments to how you work. Sometimes that’s all you need to make a big difference.
