Although organisations often make creativity in the workplace difficult, there’s a lot we can do to overcome our own mental and emotional obstacles to finding creative flow.
10-Second Summary
Creativity, or finding states of creative flow, is something most of us want in our work and lives, and many organisations also recognise the importance of creativity in their workforce.
Relevant knowledge and skills are important for creativity, but our mindsets also matter. Often we inhibit the flow of creative ideas by prematurely judging our output or introducing other emotional obstacles that slow us down.
The equal-odds rule is a striking finding from the research on creativity - that highly creative people generally produce a greater quantity of creative output. In practical terms, this means quality tends to be the product of quantity. The greater volume of output, the greater likelihood we have of discovering something valuable and impactful.
We can improve the quantity of our creative output by paying attention to our mindsets, maintaining the flow of ideas, keeping our initial ideas simple and practising patience with our first drafts.
Mindset matters
I still remember the first time I witnessed the effects of my mind on creative work. I was 17, taking music as a subject in my final year of school, and waiting to perform two piano pieces at a public recital for music performance students. It was a high stakes event. The concert hall had just been constructed - an amphitheatre my friend told me was shaped like the inside of a viola to maximise acoustic resonance. It still had that new building smell. The lighting was dimmed in the tiers where the audience was seated, filled with other nervous high school students, their parents and music teachers, but luminous down on the stage below. A spotlight was trained on the grand piano, a Steinway and showpiece of the hall, which was positioned slightly to the left of the stage centre. Hard to imagine a more intimidating setting for insecure adolescents to perform in.
I had always struggled with public piano performances. I could get lost in the beauty of music on my own, and sometimes find these states of flow with my teacher during a lesson, but the anxiety of public performances would tend to cloud my mind. I would obsess over making a mistake or, worse still, entirely forgetting a passage, freezing and being unable to continue. Even though these nightmares didn’t usually unfold, I would exude apprehension during the performance - it must have been like watching a novice walk a tight-rope without a safety net. An alarming and unpleasant experience for performer and audience alike.
This evening I had two pieces to perform, a Debussy prelude and a Brahms intermezzo. I must have played each one over a hundred times throughout the year. But, despite the preparation, I couldn’t quell the image of fingers slipping, mind blanking and hands freezing mid-passage. My friend, who was a much more experienced performer than me and aware of my difficulties, must have sensed my apprehension growing as my time approached. Just as they were calling my name, and I was preparing myself to walk down to the stage and sit at the piano, my friend nudged me. On a piece of paper he’d scribbled: “Just relax, breathe and take your time”. It was simple advice. But one of the most affecting things anyone had ever told me, because it was delivered at just the right time.
I took his advice when I sat down, and waited for the silence to arrive - in the room and in my body. I didn’t really understand this back then, but there’s a special kind of silence that precedes a musician before they play, at least when a performer and the audience are attentive to it. It’s not simply an absence of noise, but a rich silence, pregnant with anticipation. You can sometimes spot skilled performers waiting for this silence to arrive before they begin. I experienced it for the first time in that hall. The dimming hush and then the synchronised stillness. And then breaking it with the first chord. Playing as if listening to the music, like another audience member, rather than the one responsible for it. Playing like you’re simply appreciating the music itself. Just as surprised and delighted as the audience at how beautiful a piano can sound.
On a surface level things went well that night. The performance was good, several people came up afterwards and commented on how much they liked it. I felt proud of the work I’d put in and the recognition from others was a nice affirmation. But these things don’t matter that much in the long term. The deeper lesson was the realisation that in order to improve as a musician, I needed to explore this relationship between my state of mind and what I was creatively working on. Focusing on technical improvements - spending hours on scales, arpeggios and rehearsing pieces - are necessary activities, but not sufficient to actually perform well when it mattered. I also started to reflect on how this relationship between mind (and body) and the success of creative activities would likely apply to other areas beyond music.
Creativity at work
Creativity is at the heart of the human story. From the earliest stone tools to ChatGPT - tinkering, playing, discovering something new, interesting and useful has been one of the key things we do that distinguishes us from other animals. You can see how natural these instincts are by watching young children play. Creative tinkering with the objects around them comes effortlessly, and at the core of how they learn about themselves and the world. And yet, as we grow up creativity often becomes fraught. Instincts even stronger than our desire to freely explore novelty take effect. The desire to fit in, avoid appearing stupid, not be laughed at, not feel vulnerable or exposed in front of a group.
These almost contradictory drives can play out paradoxically in the workplace. Most organisations claim to value innovation (who doesn’t right?), and at least nominally recognise that creativity is an important part of this goal. But in practice, organisations develop corporate immune systems that identify and expel novelty by default. Not as a deliberate strategy, it’s more that no one wants to screw up, to look stupid, and KPIs are usually structured to incentivise conforming to what’s expected, routinized, already known. Genuine exploration, experimentation and discovery is costly - it takes time and energy, and uncertain - things often don’t work out. It’s generally easier and safer to do what’s expected, what’s already known. The problem is for many of us this is ultimately dissatisfying. And for organisations over the long term, the absence of creative renewal results in decline.
What do we actually mean by creativity?
In the broadest sense, most definitions of creativity involve two parts. First, for something to be considered creative, it must involve some kind of novelty or originality. Second, it must have some kind of effectiveness or usefulness to a specific domain1. Some even add ‘surprise’ as a third element of creativity2. It’s very difficult to make a creative contribution to a domain if you don’t have some knowledge and skill in it. Of course, this leaves open a question of who is judging a contribution to be original and effective. Often this is a two step process, a creator has to judge an idea as worthy of sharing, and then a community has to judge an idea or contribution as effective, useful or valuable. While the criteria of this judgement differs between the arts, science and business, this basic process of first the creator and then a community judging value is the same. But this process of initial judgement, and the anticipation of what others might think is where many of us get stuck.
Although novelty is critical, creativity rarely involves inventing something whole cloth, constructed of elements that the world has never seen before. Rather most of the time it involves novel combinations of things that already exist, and sometimes merely translating an existing idea into a new context. I’ve always liked the example of Picasso’s Bull’s Head to illustrate this idea. Picasso created this work by combining an old bicycle seat and a rusty set of handlebars that he found in a pile of junk. Picasso claims to have just stumbled upon this idea: “In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the Bull’s Head came to me before I had a chance to think”3.
[possibly insert an image of Picasso’s Bull’s Head here]
Some people, like Picasso, appear unusually gifted or predisposed to finding these novel combinations. But this basic process of “combinatorial play”, or experimenting with novel combinations of elements is something we can all do - in fact we do it every day when we use language. More importantly, it’s also something we can improve at with practice, especially when we adopt a more supportive mindset towards the process. Part of the challenge is that much of the creative process happens unconsciously, when our mind’s are given liberty to play with unusual associations and combinations of ideas. Much of this associational exploration happens subconsciously - when our minds intuitively create connections between thoughts, observations, sensory inputs, memories and existing knowledge. It’s why good ideas often happen at unconventional, even inconvenient times - like in the shower or while walking. We experience such flashes of creative insight as being found by thought rather than us finding it4.
Psychologists of creativity sometimes use terms life ‘cognitive disinhibition’ or ‘defocused attention’ to describe this state of open receptivity to new ideas arriving. Another way of thinking about this is cultivating a sense of ‘vuja de’. We use the French expression ‘déjà vu’ to express the strange feeling of encountering a novel situation, but experiencing it as a memory, or that we’ve somehow ‘seen this before’. Vuja de is a playful recombination of this expression, freeing up our minds to view familiar objects or situations in a novel way. Like Picasso’s recombination of old bike parts into a Bulls Head.
The equal-odds rule: how creative quality is a product of quantity.
Many of us have the kinds of high-stakes performance experiences I described above at some point during childhood - whether in arts, athletics or even simply having to give a presentation in class. And while these real-time, live performances are qualitatively different to the slower, asynchronous process of writing, composing, painting or even working on a new business idea, the common thread is that our cognitive and emotional approach to the tasks can inhibit the flow of creative expression. When it comes to creative output, we often get in our own way, become our own worst enemies. If our minds are filled with self-concern, worried about what a real or imagined audience might think, we crowd out the possibility of listening for the music to arrive, or of discovering something different or new. In fact, this kind of fear can cause us to freeze, procrastinate or produce much less than we’re actually capable.
What about highly creative people, are they doing something fundamentally different to the rest of us? One fascinating finding from the research on creativity that sheds some light on this question comes from Dean Simonton, from the University of California, Davis. Simonton studied people widely viewed as highly creative and influential across a variety of fields, spanning scientists, artists and inventors. The opening paragraph of one of his papers illustrates this point nicely:
“Albert Einstein had around 248 publications to his credit, Charles Darwin had 119 and Sigmund Freud 330, while Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents - still the record granted to any one person by the US Patents Office. Similarly Pablo Picasso executed more than 20,000 paintings, drawings and pieces of sculpture, while Johan Sebastien Bach composed over 1000 works, enough to require a lifetime of 40-hr weeks for a copyist just to write the parts out by hand.”5
After analysing the creative output of thousands of scientists, artists and inventors, Simonton discovered a striking pattern. Most of the people we think of as creative geniuses don’t simply produce more great works, they also tend to just produce more stuff in general, from the great to the so-so and even the bad. Moreover, the creators themselves are not necessarily able to accurately evaluate the quality of their contributions, to predict which article, invention, or work of art will be considered great. This pattern has come to be known as the Equal-Odds Rule, which Simonton described like this:
“Empirical research has shown that quality tends to be the consequence of quantity when it comes to creativity…those who produce more masterworks also produce more rubbish”6
The more ideas you generate, the more you’re likely to come up with something really good. The more arrows you fire, the more likely you’ll find a bullseye. Of course, like most findings in social science, this is a tendency not a destiny. There are always exceptions, like Harper Lee with her first and only book To Kill A Mockingbird, that find the mark on the first shot7, (and there’s likely others that keep producing stuff and never find recognition). But in general, quality tends to be the product of quantity. The more we produce the more likely we’ll come up with something significant.
Getting in our own way
If coming up with high quality creative output is partly just a matter of being prolific, why don’t we all simply produce more? Well, at least part of the answer is that we often get in our own way. We inhibit the flow of creative ideas by prematurely judging our output or introducing emotional obstacles that derail us from the task at hand (I’ve noticed myself doing this several times while writing this!). We tend to fret about our work or ideas not being good enough, judge the quality of the work too early and ultimately suppress our productivity.
What psychologists call ‘evaluation apprehension’ is the anxiety or stress that appears when we imagine judgement of our ideas or creative work - when our minds fixate on the question of ‘what will they think?’. This self-concern often crowds out that playful space of combinatorial rearrangement, placing our fragile egos at the centre of the process seems to slow hampers the natural flow of ideas and insights. If you observe them closely, the actual moments of creative insight are ultimately mysterious, almost impersonal. They happen to us as much as we create them, but only when we give them space and quiet to appear.
Graham Wallas, a pioneer of the psychology of creativity, developed an early model of this process that is still influential and helpful. Wallas separated the creative process into four stages - preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Preparation involves what we would expect in developing skill in or learning about a domain, from the decades of practice to the recent reading and thinking about a topic. Incubation refers to processes of playing with novel combinations of ideas and arrangements, on one level working through ideas in your mind, but much of this is also unconscious. Illumination is that ‘aha’ moment - when an idea appears to just arrive, often in a flash. Verification is the process of actually assessing whether the idea or work is valued by a community of others, which have different criteria of acceptance across science, business and the arts.
Getting out of our own way
So, is there anything we can do to support creative work? Here’s four ideas that work together:
Mindset matters: We should pay attention to our states of mind when creating, especially attentive to signs of judgement creeping in too early in the process or other emotional roadblocks that slow us down.
Don’t stop the flow: We need to discover and nurture the mindset where ideas flow quickly. Most of our mental (and bodily) activity is unconscious, and much of the creative process relies on these unconscious associations. Practising these states of flow, and resetting when we catch ourselves overthinking, is a vital part of learning to produce more. The critical, analytical, judgemental mode of thinking is also extremely important, but largely once we’re in an editing and refining stage, rather than producing.
Keep it simple: One of the things that slows us down and inhibits creative flow is adding unnecessary detail when working on something. Architects and designers distinguish lower from higher fidelity drafts. ‘Lo-fi’ drafts are often preliminary sketches, used to generate ideas and elicit feedback. Keeping things simple like this can help maintain the flow of ideas in the early stages of formulating ideas. Higher fidelity can then be added later, once the inherent uncertainty of the early phase is passed.
Practise patience: In order to do this though we must be patient with these initial sketches. Writers sometimes talk about embracing the horror of ugly first draft (TUFD). First drafts are often bad at first, and only become good through the refinement of editing. The trick is not to let the initial encounter with a rough draft trigger a spiral of self-doubt, procrastination or perfectionism.
Of course, these principles are much easier to write down than to consistently apply. But I find it helpful to periodically remind myself of them when engaging in creative work. So the next time you’re preparing to work on something creative, keep the equal-odds rule in mind. Keep it simple, practise patience and maintain the flow of ideas. Because the more you produce, the more likely you are to come up with something great.