A culture of creativity

I've noticed that business school students often feel frustrated when they're taught strategy. There's a gap between what they learn and what they'd like to learn. Strategy professors typically teach students to think about strategy problems by introducing them to rigorous analytical tools assessing the five forces, drawing a value net, plotting competitive positions. The students know that the tools are essential, and they dutifully learn how to use them. But they also realize that the tools are better suited to understanding an existing business context than to dreaming up ways to reshape it.

To generate groundbreaking strategies, executives need tools explicitly designed to foster creativity. A number of such tools already exist, often in practitioner-friendly forms. They take their inspiration more from how our thought processes work than from how industries or business models are structured. Thus they can help strategists invent a genuinely new way of doing business.

Here I am sharing four approaches to a breakthrough strategy: 

1) Contrast: Identify and challenge-the assumptions undergirding the status quo. 

2) Combination: Connect products or services that seem independent from or even in tension with one another. 

3) Constraint: Look at limitations in an organization and turn them into strengths. 

4) Context: Consider how a similar problem was solved in an entirely different context.

There are downsides to perfectionism, but

also benefits. One largely unrecognized upside is how it boosts creativity. This happens in four ways: when perfectionists are bothered by evidence that runs contrary to their own or consensus opinion, so explore it; when their desire to understand everything pushes them to seek out new information; when their stubbornness leads to an innovative solution; when your competitiveness makes you hustle to keep up with others. Collaborating virtually actually has the potential to improve group creativity and ideation.

Perfectionism is a poor master but a good slave. It has downsides if you let it take over: you waste time on relatively unimportant decisions, you get excessively annoyed with yourself over small mistakes, which drains you, and, because you expect others to conform to your standards, you sometimes make collaboration more difficult.

However, perfectionism isn't all bad. Part of what lures people into its grasp is that it sometimes pays off, like a slot machine does. It's intermittently reinforced, and that pattern tends to be very sticky.

The most obvious ways perfectionism can benefit people relate to when 

1. cautious strategies prevent mistakes and 

2. highly competitive situations in which a tiny margin in performance is the difference between being on the right or wrong side of a cutoff.

Here's how, a largely unrecognized benefit of perfectionism is that it can enhance creativity:

1. You're bothered by evidence running counter to your own opinion

I'm currently writing my next book. Here's how that process typically goes: As I'm researching, I'll read a bunch of studies that back up what I want to say, and then out of the blue, I'll read one, or a snippet in a study, that runs counter to my planned argument. Part of me will want to gloss over this, but for my inner perfectionist, this is like having sand in my shoe. Whatever doesn't make sense will bother me until I go back and figure out a way to reconcile it with the other research I've done. But, when I have to figure out how to combine seemingly dissonant ideas, my thinking and writing become more innovative.

2. Your desire to understand everything pushes you to acquire more information

Curiosity is strongly linked to creativity. Curious people are more motivated by the possibility of acquiring new knowledge than they are by the prospect of solving specific problems. Many perfectionists also tend to want to understand everything, even if it's only very loosely related to the task at hand. Following these tangents can lead to a much more diverse set of ideas and information than a more narrowly focused approach.

3. Your stubbornness leads to an innovative solution.

Perfectionists don't like making tradeoffs or settling for reasonably good solutions. They want a plan that ticks all their boxes and they will work to achieve that, including coming up with their own out-of-the-box alternatives. 

Perfectionists are often the ones who arrive at amazing, creative solutions because all the standard options have something in their negative columns. Even when settling seems like a logical decision, they refuse to.

4. Your competitiveness makes you scrappy, hustling to keep up with peers

When a perfectionist sees a colleague racking up achievements they're not, it tends to bug them. They think "I should be doing that, too." This instant competitive instinct pushes the perfectionist to not only try to match their colleague's achievement but do so as soon as possible. They don't like the feeling of being behind anyone. This sense of urgency may lead them to devise creative routes to catch up.

The reaction is similar when perfectionists realize they've overlooked or missed deadlines. Many people would shoot off an email acknowledging the oversight and asking for an extension. Perfectionists are more likely to hustle to get the work done. They'll still give it their full effort, and the disinhibition and adrenaline of the short timeline may propel their creativity.

If you're a perfectionist, do you recognize yourself as having had any of the experiences I've outlined?

Creativity shouldn't be confined to just the "creative types" in your organization. As technologies and strategies change and customers' demands evolve, companies increasingly expect everyone at every level to contribute ideas. So how can you spark new thinking about products, processes, and problems?