Are Creative People More Dishonest? - Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge

Steve Jobs was theoretically channeling Picasso when he said ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal,’ but he may have been onto something. It turns out that creatives are more likely to cheat, according to new research by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely:

Francesca Gino

Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge

Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?

There certainly is, according to an article in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest,” the authors report that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, they show that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.

It’s a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking.

“In any organization, especially in contexts that are global and very competitive, there is so much focus on trying to be innovative and creative,” says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. “But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they’re doing is not morally wrong. So, Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior. Specifically, we decided to explore the idea that enhancing the motivation to think outside the box can drive individuals toward more dishonest decisions when facing ethical dilemmas.”

[…]

Overall, the researchers learned, the higher the creativity required for the job, the higher the level of self-reported dishonesty.

Then, through a series of experimental studies, the researchers tested—and largely proved—the theory that creative people are more likely to exhibit unethical behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.

[…]

“These were simple studies, but they were powerful in showing that our ability to justify things is significantly greater if we are in a creative mindset or when we are creative people,” Gino says.

That said, Gino is quick to add that she and Ariely are not suggesting that companies put the kibosh on innovation in order to keep dishonesty at bay.

“We’re not saying that creativity is bad,” Gino says. “But we are saying that it can lead to problems. And so the question from a manager’s perspective is: How do you get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad outcomes?”

While “The Dark Side of Creativity” doesn’t answer that question directly, Gino hopes that the research will remind innovative organizations not to give short shrift to ethics.

“As a manager, if you’re highlighting the importance of being creative and innovative, it’s important to make sure that you’re stressing the presence of ethics, too,” Gino says. “Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior.”

Perhaps the creatives’ world view involves a relaxation of the ‘principles’ that constrain people with other perspectives? What is they are inseparable? I don’t think you can chase away the devils of creativity without losing the angels, as well.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.

- Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color

I try to take walks everyday, to let the world wash over me and wipe out work thoughts for a while.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.

- Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color

I try to take walks everyday, to let the world wash over me and wipe out work thoughts for a while.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next? | Co.Design

Bruce Nussbaum hits the eject button on Design Thinking, saying that this movement — which arose from agencies trying to reach past the narrow confines of product or brand-related design and into the real guts of business — has petered out, it’s goals unmet.

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.

Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society. We face huge forces of disruption, the rise and fall of generations, the spread of social media technologies, the urbanization of the planet, the rise and fall of nations, global warming, and overpopulation. Together these forces are eroding our economic, social, and political systems in a once-in-a-century kind of way. Design Thinking made design system-conscious at a key moment in time.

So, the approach has failed to revolutionize business, but midwifed a wider scope in the minds of designers, leading them to think at a larger scale and about how the smaller is embedded in the larger.

Creativity is still hard, and hard specifically to systematize. Turning it around, I’d add that creativity is naturally averse to systems other than the messy cycle of trying things, and picking out what works for further experimentation. Process can’t smooth out the wrinkles in the fabric of the universe, or on the inside of our minds.

Read Helen Waters’ excellent piece, which should be titled Design Thinking Won’t Save You, for more on this.

Nussbaum is off on a tangent with another head-twisting term; Creative Quotient, based on the I.Q. model. Yawn. I won’t buy the book.

Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger. “The executives who’ve been there a long time, they grew up in Box 1,” he says. “You need voices in the room that aren’t vested in the past.

David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

Creativity Increased By Multitasking

I love stories that debunk conventional wisdom, especially cobwebby corporate wish fulfillment. In this case, a wholesale frontal assault on creativity training:

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Forget Brainstorming

Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together. In fact, according to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commercially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: it’s “garbage.” Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.

Bronson and Merryman do go on to make some concrete recommendations and observations:

  • Physical activity loosens up creativity muscles.
  • Throw away the suggestion box: it’s demotivating.
  • Don’t watch TV.
  • ‘Do something only you would come up with — that none of your friends and family’ — and co-workers — ‘would come up with.’ - Mark Runco

But the one I found most compelling is that multitasking seems to support creativity:

Take a break.

Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately. This corroborates surveys showing that professors who set papers aside to incubate ultimately publish more papers. Similarly, preeminent mathematicians usually work on more than one proof at a time.

Perhaps my bias toward multitasking is based on the nature of the work I do, and that I think is central to most professionals: it’s creative work. So putting something down when you have come to a halt, and turning your mind to something else for a while actually increases our capacity for creative thought.

Again, proof that we aren’t chairs, we are people.

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Mind Wandering

Scientists are discovering that our minds wander a lot more than we are aware of. And this is apparently a good thing, despite the bad rap it gets in the self-help section at Barnes&Noble.

John Tierney, Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

[…]

Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time, according to two of the leading researchers, Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

[…]

“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. [Jonathan] Smallwood [of the University of California, Santa Barbara.] says.

[…]

There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.

“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the “Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation”. “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”

Of course, it’s often hard to know which agenda is most evolutionarily adaptive at any moment.

[…]

To measure mind wandering more directly, Dr. Schooler and two psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh, Erik D. Reichle and Andrew Reineberg, used a machine that tracked the movements of people’s eyes while reading “Sense and Sensibility” on a computer screen. It’s probably just as well that Jane Austen is not around to see the experiment’s results, which are to appear in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science.

By comparing the eye movements with the prose on the screen, the experimenters could tell if someone was slowing to understand complex phrases or simply scanning without comprehension. They found that when people’s mind wandered, the episode could last as long as two minutes.

Where exactly does the mind go during those moments? By observing people at rest during brain scans, neuroscientists have identified a “default network” that is active when people’s minds are especially free to wander. When people do take up a task, the brain’s executive network lights up to issue commands, and the default network is often suppressed.

But during some episodes of mind wandering, both networks are firing simultaneously, according to a study led by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia. Why both networks are active is up for debate. One school theorizes that the executive network is working to control the stray thoughts and put the mind back on task.

Another school of psychologists, which includes the Santa Barbara researchers, theorizes that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task. That theory could help explain why studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity.

Mind wandering is so tightly linked with creativity that it is probably impossible to be — or act — creatively without your mind squirreling about for hours every day.

So, one thing to take away from this is that we might be better offletting our minds wander a bit, rather than slavishly forcing ourselves back to piecework when we are uninclined to do it. We are heeding a deep evolutionary imperative, to cast about in the wilds inside our heads, searching for meaning, clues, or distant analogies.

I am reminded of Rilke, the poet, who rejected treatment for depression, saying “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”

We need to drift in the cool caverns of subterranean thought if our actions and thoughts are to take definite shape in the hot light of day.

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Creativity = Runs With Scissors

One of the reasons that I have argued against people that denounce multitasking and the roving side of human intelligence is my deep suspicion that the wellsprings of creativity is involved. Recent studies of brainscans suggest that creativity is indeed linked to the receptors that filter and direct thought. The more creative people are, the more likely they are to be uninhibited about making connections that others do not. Somewhat like schizophrenics, it turns out:

Michelle Roberts, Creative minds ‘mimic schizophrenia’

Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.

Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.

He looked at the brain’s dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.

He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.

The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” said Professor Ullen.

Mark Millard UK psychologist

He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.

This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.

Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.

UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.

“Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes. Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.”

My sense is that those more given to filtering and controlling their thoughts cab get real benefits from that, and so when they are confronted by the more creative folks among us their natural response is to try to get them to stay focused, to stop making so many wisecracks, and get down to business. We are the ones that ran with scissors in art class, bursting with ideas.

However, creatives can’t control the D2 receptors in their heads, and so all the fervent efforts to single track the world just don’t work, or at least, not for very long. Before you know it, even despite our best intentions, we are looking out the window at the clouds, considering the world through very different eyes.