Six Ways To Frustrate Creative People | BTalk Australia

Nigel Collin

(Episode 341; 13 minutes 06) Creative people think differently. Their talents can be essential to the success of your business, provided you utilise them well. Business expert Nigel Collin says there is a creative gap, where business fail to harness these skills effectively. In fact, there’s every chance that the way the business operates could be putting a cap on this creativity.

Nigel Collin suggests there are six things businesses are doing that could be hindering the creative process. He explains what those six are on today’s edition of BTalk Australia.

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• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie. Welcome to BTalk Australia. Today six ways to frustrate creative people, although I’m not really quite sure why you’d want to do that.

Now, we have to have creative people in our business, don’t we? But they do tend to be difficult, don’t they? I mean they often think differently which can be a good thing but boy do they have a temper on them. And sometimes they can just be plain awkward so how do you deal with them? Well Nigel Collin is a business expert who believes creativity is at the root of sound business success and he’s got six rules for dealing with creative people. We’ll go through those in just a moment. But Nigel, first of all, bad tempered and awkward, am I stereotyping creative people just a little bit too much do you think?

Nigel Collin: You’re probably being a bit extreme, yes. Although I have seen a few bad-tempered creative people, I think that might be a bit of a stereotype I’m afraid, Phil.

Dobbie: Right, so I guess the obvious question then is why do we need to treat them differently to anyone else?

Collin: Well, that’s a very good question. Mainly because they think differently from everybody else, which is why they’re creative. And as a result, the creative process means that people who are creative tend to work differently and behave differently than say non-creative people. We have to be a little bit careful here though, Phil, with a demarcation line of who is and who isn’t creative.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Collin: We can fall into a trap of us and them, which is a wrong thing to do. So creative people do think differently, but I don’t think we need to silo creative people because creativity works on all different levels.

Dobbie: So the rules are not because you’re going to make life easier for yourself and you’re not going to stop them throwing themselves into a flaming temper? The rules are so that you engender that creative team; get the best out of them.

Collin: Absolutely. It’s about utilising the talents, the creative talents of people, of your creative people. We recently did a survey on this and 90 percent of businesses see a value in creativity or creativity needs to be valuable but only about 16 percent of them fully utilise the talents of their creative people and the reason I believe for that is this sort of creativity gap if you like on knowing how to ooze and harness the talents and genius of these creative people.

Dobbie: Right. So six simple rules, these are pretty straightforward. Where do we start?

Collin: I think the first one is, if you want somebody to be creative and come up with a solution to something, don’t tell them how to do it. Tell them what to do. Tell them what the problem is or what the opportunity is and let them figure it out. I think as soon as you walk up to somebody and go this is what I want you to do, they’ll just close down because what you have in fact done is capped their creativity and told them what it is they’re going to do and not let them discover it.

Dobbie: You’ve turned them into an administrator in effect haven’t you?

Collin: Basically yeah, and that’s not the idea of the game. The idea of the game of creativity is to find different angles, to find new possibilities and the only way you can do that is to let somebody go off and discover things and so therefore we need to go, look, it’s a bit like the new leadership model. A leader now doesn’t take his group and be at the front of them and say they climb the mountain. The new creative leader will sit there and go right, we need to go over there and let the group go.

Dobbie: Right. I’d say it’s easier for the leader these days, like I’m not even going to climb the mountain you figure it out yourselves.

Collin: Exactly right.

Dobbie: Now respect is important to these people as well, isn’t it?

Collin: You know that’s one of the biggest frustrations of creative people which I find very interesting is a lack of respect. Oh yes they’re just creative guys or you know yeah, yeah, yeah just give us that idea we’ll work it from there. Interestingly, I had an email the other day from someone who went, you know what, that’s not just a common sense rule for creative people that could work on all employees. And you’re kind of yeah, it’s pretty obvious but I do think at times that there is a lack of respect. So we need to be aware of that.

Dobbie: They just want to be loved basically. So that’s number two. What’s number three? What else should we avoid?

Collin: For the creative process to work you need to have a fair bit of freedom around you and so if we start bogging creative people down in red tape, in other words productivity reports or PERT charts that they have to make sure they hit every level, as soon as we start bagging the person down with a lot of red tape we start inhibiting the process. So I think to put it simply, red tape is another thing we need to be careful of. If there is a lot of administration to go on then we need to have support for that. We need to basically clear the plate for our creatives so that they can do the creative thing and not get focused or bogged down on other stuff. So red tape is a major one and it does tend, especially in small businesses, where everybody has to be a jack of all trades, it can wear down the process because quite frankly your head’s in another space.

Dobbie: Yes, so it’s difficult to switch on the creative part of the brain just with the flick of a switch, isn’t it? Now they can also be sensitive to criticism, can’t they?

Collin: Yes and it’s an interesting thing because there’s constructive criticism, there is feedback. One of the biggest mistakes I feel a lot of organisations make and I certainly know this again can sort of serve as a major frustration of creative people is not being able to work in an environment that tolerates failure or tolerates mistakes. And let’s face it, to explore a new idea or to come up with a creative solution, you are going to stumble in truth and make a lot of errors and make mistakes and put stupid ideas on the table. And so we need to offer an environment, and this comes down to workplace culture in a lot of ways, we need to offer an environment where it’s OK to make a mistake, it’s OK to put a stupid idea on the table, it’s OK to try something and fail because that’s where we find the gold. You know that old analogy of to come up with an ounce of gold you need to sift through tonnes and tonnes of mud. It’s the same thing with creativity and as soon as we start putting a culture in place that doesn’t allow mistakes to happen, especially nowadays, people are a little bit reticent about taking credit at the moment because of the GFC or whatever. Then we really start constricting the creative process because we’re not allowing our people and ourselves to explore all the different possibilities. In order to do that we need to make mistakes.

Dobbie: Yes.

Collin: The other thing about mistakes is I think the mindset needs to change. We need to look at mistakes as a process of learning, as a process of getting closer to our goal. It’s a bit like good old Edison with his light bulb. You know he failed, depending on who you read, 1000 odd times and he didn’t look at each time as a failure he looked at each time as learning what doesn’t work and so he’s a bit closer to his goal. And one of the innovative companies that Business Week lists, Tata Group, which make the world’s smallest car, the cheapest car for the third world, actually we’re talking about a policy of failure innovation where if someone does try something and fails, they look at it and they share it and they learn from it and it becomes a lesson which gets them a step closer to perfection. So tolerating mistakes is huge. And that comes down to criticism. I think if we are going to tolerate mistakes, we need to be constructive about it.

Dobbie: And I think almost anyone in business who is successful would say that yes, they’ve been through a period where they’ve made mistakes in their life and that’s where they got all their learning so tolerating mistakes.

Collin: Yeah, I think everyone would be able to say that.

Dobbie: Yeah, I think so. Just in your life in general really. Absolutely. So not tolerating mistakes doesn’t make sense. That’s number four. What’s number five?

Collin: This comes down again to process. We just spoke a little bit about culture. This one comes down to process and that is basically having the process that is open-ended, that will allow you to turn on and off the creative device. And what I mean by that is a lot of organisations in their quest to make something about creativity and their quest to understand it, put these processes in place, these step-by-step plans on how we’re going to do this, and all that does is restrict creativity. Creativity needs a bit of freedom. So we need to have a process, yes that directs creativity because obviously it has to have some sort of commercial value otherwise it really is a waste of time in the business sense. So we need to be able to direct it. We need to be able to control it but we don’t want to inhibit it so we need a process that will allow the creativity to do its thing, that will be open-ended, that will not be a finite cookie cutter process because all that does is restrict us. We need a process that allows us to go and play and to explore, to make mistakes and then once we’ve done that then evaluate and then start honing those ideas and those possibilities towards real tangible business outcomes. So I think a big mistake we often make is becoming too finite because business likes tangible, business likes concrete results, and creativity doesn’t always work that way. So we need a process that has that balance.

Dobbie: And I guess the opposite of a creative person is that person who likes designing processes. You know? Those people exist whose whole nine-to-five routine is all about creating processes and if you don’t slow them down, they’ll create a process for everything.

Collin: Look, absolutely. But on the other hand, you need a process otherwise it just goes AWOL and can end up anywhere. But it’s really interesting you said that, Phil, because I’m a big believer that most business looks at creativity as this big intangible beast that is unstructured. But the truth is creativity thrives on structure. That structure though just needs to let it do its thing. And if you look at one group of incredibly creative people, I would put as engineers, whether design engineers or construction engineers, who work under incredible parameters and incredible processes but within that can bounce around and become incredibly creative.

Dobbie: Absolutely. Well yes, you can imagine them as excitable people having that halleluiah moment where they think of a great idea. Absolutely. Number six. All about work hours and you mentioned flicking the switch of creativity. I mean, creative people can be creative any time of the day or night, can’t they? It’s difficult to tell when.

Collin: Yes, and often it’s not their choice. Often creativity finds them at the most obscure hours. I was out on a bike ride with my kid yesterday and ideas just popped into my head on a Sunday afternoon. So creativity unfortunately doesn’t work nine to five and so therefore we need to understand that and let our creative people have a bit of flexibility of time but when the creative news does strike that they can work or they need to go for a walk or they need to take an hour to go into a bookshop and ponder through some books. Do we allow them to do that because that is the way that creativity works? Deadlines are an interesting one as well. I think by putting in deadline pressure on creatives, that can inhibit the process as well and I know that we do working deadlines but what we need to do is be a little bit flexible or allow enough time leading up to the deadline to let creative people do their thing. So the rule there is creativity doesn’t work nine to five so don’t force your creative people into a nine-to-five role because you’re just not going to get the most out of them.

Dobbie: How often are these rules broken do you think? I suspect a lot of the time for a lot of companies.

Collin: Yeah, pretty much. Again, there’s probably behind these are a whole lot of sub-rules and a whole lot of other areas that we could look at but unfortunately I don’t think business is very good at understanding them or adhering to them. Mainly because it goes against our traditional business model, if you like. If you look at the greater business over the last 100 years, it has been that regimented sign in, sign out, nine to five, here’s the process, rah, rah, rah. And so as a result of that, yes the rules are not so much broken I think they’re just not understood.

Dobbie: You’ve certainly helped to explain things today. Listen I think these rules, we’re not going to get these passed into legislation but I don’t think we need to. I think a smart business is going to look at these and say OK this makes a bit of sense, a bit more breathing space for our creative people and we might get better results at the end of the day.

Collin: Absolutely, and it really just comes down to common sense when you think about it. None of those rules stand out, as oh my God, that’s revolutionary. You kind of look at them and go oh yeah, that makes sense. The trick is to actually implement them and to understand them in reality and actually do them I suppose.

Dobbie: OK, Nigel Collin, thanks so much again for your time.

Collin: Thank you very much, Phil.

Dobbie: There is a very creative Nigel Collin.