Creating a Climate in Which
Corporate Designers Can Flourish
By Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman, Synectics
Corporation
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| Jeff Mauzy |
Richard Harriman |
Design managers face pressures every day that can kill their creativity
and the creativity of their people as quickly as the time it takes
to read this sentence. Whether they work in marketing services firms
such as ad agencies or in companies where design is a sidelight
to the core business, designers are subject to forces that can inhibit
their ability to take the risks that bring out their best work.
This is especially true when difficult economic times force companies
to do more with less, while having to execute better and faster.
Design managers are not altogether at the mercy of such corporate
pressures. By understanding and managing four dynamics of creativity—motivation,
curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and
evaluation—they can increase the chances that their design
professionals produce truly valuable work. As well, design management
can nurture the right "climate" for these activities to
exist. By climate, we mean the common collection of behaviors and
expectations within an organization.
Over the last 43 years, our firm has worked with hundreds of companies
to spur the creativity of people from all corners of their organizations—from
designers and new product developers to marketing strategists and
even efficiency experts. From our experience with these companies
and from researching other firms in the development of our book,
"Creativity, Inc.," we believe that these four dynamics,
when operating in the right corporate climate, determine whether
or not an organization generates and executes great ideas.
Great design ideas require designers who are motivated, especially
intrinsically. Motivation is the measure of the emotional investment
it takes for people to break their natural inertia. Intrinsic motivation,
doing something for its own sake, is more important than extrinsic
motivation (doing something for external rewards like fame or money).
Harvard professor Teresa Amabile, in studying the effects of both
intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, has found that intrinsic motivation
spurs most creative work. She found that extrinsic motivators, in
fact, usually diminish the quality of creativity.
Intrinsic motivation comes from someone's natural affinity, what
they find fun and have passion about. For example, a consultant
at Jack Morton Worldwide, a major experiential communications company,
represents the firm to about 80 clients. But the clients she spends
the most time on are those with "an interest that touches me."
It's on these projects, she believes, that the firm does some of
its best work.
Curiosity and fear are also important to creativity. Fear reduces
one's ability to take the risks that lead to new thought. Fear exists
to some degree in almost every business climate. But leaders can
mitigate it by conscious attention. A company that promotes curiosity
lets people experiment with their work and explore unknown possibilities;
it leads them to unplanned discoveries. But these discoveries, and
the journeys through the unknown that lead to them, are in their
own turn often fearful. Because creating something new always incurs
risk, managers must provide an experimental, safe environment for
people to play with new possibilities.
Breaking and making connections is where most of the work of creativity
gets done. In business, as in the rest of life, people form patterns
of remembered association between connections. With sufficient use
and trust, the patterns establish themselves as knowledge. People
then decide what to do based on the patterns of connection they
trust. But if one only follows the same patterns as before, he or
she produces nothing new. New ideas come about after people break
out of their reinforced patterns to establish new connections between
disparate patterns.
Evaluation is the fourth dynamic of creative thought. How
a company decides whether or not to adopt new ideas has a huge impact
on whether those ideas arrive in a flood or a trickle. Resistance
to undertaking a new concept can be enormous. Reverberations from
the public humiliation of failure can end careers that have even
slight association with the creative attempt. Companies that excel
at creativity use concerns arising in the evaluation process as
focus areas for more creative work rather than as reasons to abandon
the work. Providing the time to multiply, reinforce and verify new
connections until a radically different idea fulfills its promise
is the key to successful evaluation.
Great new ideas, whether for corporate logos or more-efficient
logistics processes, do not occur in a vacuum. They need a sympathetic
environment—a climate—that nourishes and protects people's
ability to be creative from the indifference or hostility of the
larger climate.
The case of Hallmark Cards Inc. shows how design management can
create a climate in which the foundations of creativity—motivation,
curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and
evaluation—can prevail. When David Welty became corporate
creative director of Hallmark's Specialty Creative Division in 1994,
he faced a formidable challenge. "From the 1940s to the 1980s
life at Hallmark was good," says Welty. "We were profitable,
and our richness allowed an experimental climate. Creativity just
came out naturally."
But as the greeting card industry became more competitive, everything
changed. "The increased pressure was motivating for some of
our creative people and de-motivating for others," Welty says.
"I needed to build a creative climate inside a results-driven
business culture that would nurture a wide range of creative types."
Welty's first initiative was to wall off the Specialty Creative
Division from the rest of the corporate culture by convincing corporate
leaders to allow the division autonomy in its design process. To
ensure that autonomy did not threaten corporate priorities, he included
managers from outside the division in the process of evaluating
concepts. "We decided everything would be evaluated first by
us in creative, second by the customer, then by management,"
which, "reassured the business side enough that they felt less
need to control us."
Building this barrier between his group and the rest of the organization
allowed Welty the freedom he wanted to form a climate that differed
from Hallmark's prevailing environment at the time. He then hired
mid-level managers who could help create the supportive environment
he envisioned.
Mid-level managers were central to Welty's strategy because the
quality of relationship between managers and direct reports is critical
to staff morale and the subjective aspects of intrinsic motivation.
Mid-level managers "are the key enablers," he explains.
"They can help motivate or de-motivate people. They know how
to form the right team for each job. The best managers are like
orchestra conductors: they know their instruments, or people, and
play each according to their strengths for each performance. They
know that now it is time to bring up the brass, now to lower the
sound and hear the violins."
Finding that kind of manager was a challenge. Before Welty inherited
the department, its diversity had declined, resulting in a diminished
range of artistic sensibilities and weak management. Welty promoted
from within, using artists rather than professional managers for
critical managerial positions. "Promoting our own people gives
us leaders—the mid-level managers—who understand Hallmark,
creativity, and our people."
In his hiring, Welty evaluated potential staff for his department
according to sixteen personality types based on the Myers-Briggs
indicators. "When I came in, we had only introverted artistic
types in the group. Now I try to have all sixteen personality styles
in the division and a good distribution of them on each team."
The spread of styles this distribution has produced is great enough,
and the types of work in the division broad enough, that every individual
can find his or her own variety of challenge, while the department
as a whole generates wide artistic range consistent with good business.
Once his staffing was in place, Welty addressed the balance of
productive and fallow time that he had learned was essential to
the artists' productivity. He allocated 30 percent of the division's
time and resources to "recharging the artistic talent of our
people ... freshening the mind with experiences that can be purposefully
drawn on in later work." Employees could take paid sabbaticals
to pursue relevant interests. Research trips became common. "We'll
pay for trips to Vienna to study the masters and soak in the atmosphere,"
says Welty.
Closer to home, Hallmark operates a creative retreat center on
a farm which any employee can visit, and which offers classes to
augment or hone the tools of artistic expression. The company also
maintains a rotating art collection and a library with magazines
from around the world.
Welty segregated his division to protect it from the rough and
tumble of Hallmark's larger climate. Then he fashioned a local climate
to support, diversify, and sustain the brand of creative talent
Hallmark traded upon.
Nurturing and protecting the creativity of designers has been critical
to Hallmark's success. Other companies whose fortunes depend at
least in part on their designers' ideas should ensure that the dynamics
and climate for creativity exist.
Jeff Mauzy is a consulting manager and Richard
Harriman is managing partner of Synectics
Corporation, a Cambridge, Mass.-based creativity consulting
firm that has helped companies around the world, large and small,
to generate and execute path-breaking ideas that have turned into
blockbuster new products, powerful marketing campaigns, large-scale
efficiencies, and other competitive advantages. This article was
adapted from their new book, "Creativity, Inc.: Building An
Inventive Organization" (Harvard Business School Press; April,
2003).
This article appeared in the May 2003
eBulletin.
Feedback on DMI Viewpoints and article proposals
are always welcome! Please email jtobin@dmi.org.
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