Have you ever wondered what research really says about what creates the high-quality creative outcome in knowledge work? Companies that understand and incorporate these insights, benefit from better organizational output, not just soft factors like how you feel at work.
Let’s dive in to it.
Teresa Amabile studied this and published the findings in the paper “Componential Theory of Creativity” What she found is that the result is the intersection between five factors. (In her paper she articulates four. For clarity, we have extracted one key factor mentioned: part of “the social work environment” which often gets overlooked as the fifth).
The big idea is that output is generated in the intersection of these system factors – so they work as a system. That means you cannot take away one factor, keep the other four and expect better output. You need to embrace them all.
This explains why simply copying an organization’s process, or hiring the key manager of your competitor won’t yield the significant performance improvement in the near term. It’s because you are only fixing one or two of the cogs in the machinery, out of the combination of factors required for creative performance. You are not addressing the system’s conditions, you are rather expecting a quick fix.
Let’s have a look at the factors.
Domain relevant skill
First: You need to have domain relevant skill to do the work. No huge surprise here 🙂
Motivation & Purpose
People produce their best work when driven by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and personal challenge rather than extrinsic pressure. In a nutshell: People are driven by the desire to solve problems, and the best solution emerges when driven by intrinsic motivation, where we resonate with the purpose and feel we make a difference.
Experimental Mindset
This has two components, the first is “self-discipline” – our ability to focus and stick with it to get the job done. The second is willingness to take calculated risks. Both are essential ingredients of innovation and product development speed.
Let’s clarify how this insight can be used. A simple way to gauge if your organization is capable of innovation, or capable of product development at speed, is if knowledge workers are taking calculated risks. On the contrary, if people in our product development areas are more concerned about avoiding failure, for example, overly focused on conformance, the learning pace will be too slow
The social work environment
This factor encompasses “Autonomy and freedom of how to solve the problem”, “Psychological safety” and “Teamwork”.
This is not the first study that has come across these factors. For example, Google’s famous Project Aristotle study of “what creates high performing teams” clearly outlines “Psychological safety” as a key factor of team performance.
Leadership style
Does leadership style make a difference? The answer is “yes”.
As already stated, the leadership style needs to allow room for people’s own thinking, for people to take on problems. It’s neither a “hands-off” leadership style nor a “command and control” one. As David Marquet puts it – “eyes on, hands off”.
This means that the task of leadership shifts from detailing solutions, to setting a direction with purpose that generates drive. A shift from operations to strategy. These shifts aren’t easy, but they are necessary.
These insights can be used to shape the organization, its process and the way you lead them. Rightly used, these factors articulate the principles and the “why” behind organizational design.
Without a clear intent, organizational structure easily gets geared towards detailed command and control.
This creates the wrong type of accountability: where accountability of details always exists, but no one has value accountability, for example, what makes up an awesome customer experience or delivery on time.