| 4. It is being disciplined: Creativity without discipline is chaos.
An overriding characteristic of effective games developers was that they
were disciplined. Ineffective developers tended to complain about discipline.
"I need freedom to create. I can't have any limits. I don't work well
when people try to manage the process."
Creativity is at its best when there is reasonable structure, limits
and/or deadlines. Most people recognize the truth of this - which is
why we wait until the night before to write the paper. Then there is Japanese
Haiku, an extremely disciplined form of poetry that is highly creative.
The successful strategies are:
1. Take time away, do unrelated tasks: This is critical and speaks
directly to faith in the unconscious mind's capability.
This is difficult for ineffective managers to deal with. They insist
that their people "stay focused," not realizing that they
are part of the problem; that their insistence on staying focused
is slowing things down and making it almost impossible to solve the difficult
problems that we run into during the development of new products.
2. Seize the moments of inspiration: Creative people know their
moments of inspiration and seize on the ideas that come at those times.
I often have my moments in the early morning hours when I am making the
transition from sleeping to waking. Sometimes it feels like I had a dream
and that was where the inspiration came from. Other times, it's like an
idea flashed in my mind and woke me. When do you often find inspiration,
ideas, coming to you?
3. Embrace surprises, coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity:
A book could be written about the multitude of major discoveries that were
accidents, surprises, or the result of coincidences. Learning to accept
and embrace the unexpected is a critical strategy for enhancing one's creativity.
We become so focused on our plans that we miss the unplanned opportunities
that if acted upon would make the realization of our ultimate goals so much
easier. |
What can effective leaders do to create an environment that encourages
and enhances the natural creativity of their people?
We identified four
specific things which made a significant difference in how creative the
environment was perceived to be:
1. Celebrate the moments of creativity experienced by both individuals
and the entire team.
2. Encourage those working on significant problems to take a break,
think about something else, tackle another, issue, anything to get their
mind off the current problem.
3. Ask enabling questions, "Why does it work that way?"
"What if we tried this?" "What are we trying to accomplish?"
Ask questions that come from your own curiosity, your own need to discover
what's going wrong, and not from a list of "Questions to Ask When Your
Engineers are Stuck."
4. Discover your team's passion and encourage it. Do this for
both the individuals and the team as a whole.
5. Face your greatest fears: the things that can happen that can
destroy all of your plans. Most of the time we want to ignore these larger
issues.
As effective leaders, we must encourage ourselves, our team, our organization
to face our greatest fears. The unvoiced fear is a block to creativity,
the faced fear, a stimulus.
Doug Henning, the world famous magician said it this way: "When
we're little kids, we're filled with wonder for the world - it's fascinating
and miraculous. A lot of people lose that ... Magic renews that wonder."
We need to apply the curiosity and wonder we all feel. We are all
naturally creative. |