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Key points
- Creatives jostle the status quo, often making them targets for workplace bullying.
- Creatives have paradoxical qualities that allow them to transcend the world of dualities in order to engage in deep innovation.
- The paradoxes within a creative personality include introversion alongside extraversion, and passion mixed with objectivity.
Creativity will get you in trouble. It takes you on a winding path away from convention and a “we have always done it this way” kind of thinking. It will have you disrupting the hierarchy as you reach out across departments and disciplines to forge new understandings. Your curiosity will make you uniquely positioned to offer innovative solutions to entrenched problems, but it may also make you wildly unpopular. Trust me, I know. So who are these creatives at work?
Creatives are paradoxes, rich in ambiguity, difficult to classify and confine to a specific drawer. In the right environment, creatives thrive and expand, stretching their organization to explore new projects and adopt a fresh lens for untangling institutional conundrums. In the wrong environment, they take one in the teeth, as the keeper of the status quo and the top dog in the hierarchical game of power get worried that the creative’s unorthodox ideas will threaten their reign.
These naysayers are easy to spot. They are linear-thinking, controlling, micromanaging task-masters whose comfort and confidence are derived from watching their subordinates work quietly on the assigned task, in the assigned way, in the assigned location, and on the assigned date and time. In these limiting environments, creatives become exasperated and deflated as they are asked to play smaller than who they were born to be. In addition, they often become targets of workplace bullying, shutdown, and are degraded by the people pulling the puppet strings. So how do we spot these creatives and recognize the value they bring to the workplace and world?
Creatives Are Paradoxes
Creatives are playful but disciplined, smart yet naive, introverted and extraverted, risk-taking yet traditional, passionate yet objective, success-driven but content with failure, and sensitive while remaining stoic. It is creatives’ fluidity that compels them to construct something new, for they have studied the rulebook and run introspection in preparation to jostle between realities and expectations on their way to innovation (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
# 1. Playful but Disciplined
Creatives notice the blades of yellowing grass in the front yard and the chirping of birds invited by spring. They are gleeful as they work in their labs, offices, and schools — greeting colleagues and onlookers with interest and joy, delighted in what each has to offer. You may find a creative dancing in her living room or curled up in her bedroom nook, laughing while reading.
Creatives see the beauty in the now and are entertained by the everyday, though they also maintain a regimented work schedule. Creatives often rise before dawn to work or purposely reserve their energy for twilight, knowing they hit their peak productivity after the midnight hour. Whatever their approach, they show up and get things done, pushing past the lure of procrastination that dogs their less generative peers. As play researchers, Brown and Vaughan (2009) contend, creativity “eases our burdens. It renews our natural sense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities” (p.4).
2. Smart but Naive
Creatives are intellectuals, smart, but retaining corners of childhood naivete, enabling them to look at problems with fresh eyes, envisioning possibilities just outside what others think is achievable. Within that "shoot for the moon" mentality, exceptionality arises as they remove obstacles others claim to be immobile. Their childlike view of the world is often on display as they enter states of flow, playing inside their work, enjoying the process as much as the product (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Kelley & Littman, 2001).
3. Introverted and Extraverted
Though the myth of the lonely artist persists, creatives place themselves inside the bustle of conversations and interactions that invite them to test out their ideas, challenge their assumptions, and grab onto new insights only available through discourse and experience. These outward moments are often sandwiched with deep concentration and solitude, where thoughts are consolidated, rearranged, and formed into something unique and new (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feist, 1999).
4. Risk-Taking Yet Traditional
Creatives are risk-takers and rabble-rousers who stand knee-deep in tradition, for in order to twist and turn the rules, they need a rich understanding of what came before. Creatives, by necessity, possess foundational knowledge of the literature that frames their current conundrums, and they have often risen through the established ranks of the organization, gifting them insights into the institution's playbook. This familiarity with yesterday equips them to see the holes and constraints tripping and holding people back. Next, they pitch ideas that may ruffle the feathers of the old guard but behold possibilities only available when the hierarchy tosses their blinders and releases the safety brakes (Westwood & Low, 2003).
5. Passionate Yet Objective
Creatives enter the work they are compelled to sit with. Often they will tell you they have no choice: They must write, act, cook, or construct. Creatives are driven by passion, emotionally moved by engaging in their craft. However, creatives learn to be the best first and last readers of their drafts, hearing the bumps, noticing the inconsistencies, and recognizing the lost opportunities.
Acclaimed writer and teacher of writing, Don Murray (2004), put it this way: “The writers of such drafts must be their own best enemy. They must accept the criticism of others and be suspicious of it; they must accept the praise of others and be even more suspicious of it. They cannot depend on others. They must detach themselves from their own page so they can apply both their caring and their craft to their own work” (p. 421).
6. Success-Driven but Content With Failure
For creatives, failure is always an option, and that is just fine because the bruises and missteps reveal what doesn’t work and make room for new possibilities. The gratification of the process is not connected to the outcome. The act of writing that book, even if it flops, is joyful and transformative.
As Csikszentmihalyi (1996) shares, “When all goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success. What is remembered are the high points: the burning curiosity, the wonder at a mystery about to reveal itself, the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible. The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of new knowledge. But even without success, creative people find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery” (pp. 4-5).
7. Sensitive While Remaining Stoic
Creatives, according to Sternberg (2012), buy low and sell high, meaning they construct and throw out ideas that bounce against the trends of the times, often causing discomfort and unrest in their professional communities. Most people relax into the status quo, for it offers no surprises as it remanufactures ideas, structures, and hierarchies year after year with little wonderment or innovation. Creatives’ willingness to drop the new in the middle of the expected makes them at times targets of opposition and even smear campaigns.
As Csikszentmihalyi (1996) shared, “Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also makes you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares” (p.73).
The pushback at best and exile at worst is emotionally jarring for the creative, yet she is so dedicated to the cause, giving voice to the ideas and people who have been silenced for so long, that she volunteers to play target, standing in her ideals, convictions, and stoicism. Communities that are willing to sit with the discomfort of creation will often reap the rewards of the “selling high” part of the equation as the creative’s new ideas take root and electrify organizational stagnation (Epstein, 2019; Sternberg & Lubart, 1992).
To be a creative is to be a shapeshifter, a paradox, an unopened box soon to be discovered. To engage in deep innovation, creatives must transcend the world of dualities and float amongst diverse ways of being, sometimes all within a single day.
References
Brown, S. L., & Vaughan, C. C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. Harper Collins Publishers.
Feist, G. J. (1999). Autonomy and independence. Encyclopedia of creativity (Vol. 1, pp. 157–163). Academic Press. The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) (p. 368). Cambridge University Press.
Epstein, D. J. (2019). Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Riverhead Books.
Kelley, T., & Littman, J. (2001). The art of innovation: Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America's leading design firm. Currency/Doubleday.
Murray, D. (2004). The maker’s eye. In B. Ballenger (Ed.), The curious writer (pp. 421-425). Pearson.
Sternberg, R. J. (2012). The assessment of creativity: An investment-based approach. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 3-12.
Sternberg, R.J. & Lubart, T. I. (1992). Buy low and sell high: An Investment approach to creativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1 (1), 1-5.
Westwood, R. & Low, D. R. (2003). The multicultural muse: Culture, creativity and innovation. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, 3(2), 235–259.
