Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It

By Jennifer Mueller

“This book completely changed the way I think about creative innovation. . . . A must read” (Cal Newport, bestselling author of Deep Work).
 
Business leaders say they want creativity and need real innovation in order to thrive. But according to startling research from management professor Jennifer Mueller, these same leaders chronically reject creative solutions, even as they profess commitment to innovation.
 
Mueller’s research reveals that it’s not just CEOs but educators, parents, and other social trendsetters who struggle to accept new and creative ideas. Mueller parses the tough questions these findings raise. Do we all have an inherent prejudice against creative ideas? Can we learn to outsmart this bias?
 
Creative Change combines analysis of the latest research with practical guidance on how to shift your mindset, and offers a wealth of counterintuitive recommendations to help you embrace the creative ideas you want.
 
“If we all crave creativity so much, why do we reject new ideas so often? Jen Mueller’s smart new book unravels this puzzle.” —Daniel H. Pink, New York Times–bestselling author of When and Drive
 
“Mueller, an accomplished scholar in the management field, has developed a well-formulated argument for creativity. Her ideas and research need to be available to academics, business practitioners, and, really, everyone.” —Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780544703131

Jennifer Mueller

Jennifer Mueller is a writer based in Washington, DC. She has worked on issues related to campaign finance and political participation as an attorney, academic, and consultant for more than twenty years. She is the co-author (with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse) of The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (The New Press).

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Mueller

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Names: Mueller, Jennifer, date, author.

Title: Creative change : why we resist it . . . how we can embrace it / Jennifer Mueller.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036403 | ISBN 9780544703094 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-328-74566-8 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability in business. | Creative thinking. | Change (Psychology)

Classification: LCC HD53 .M84 2017 | DDC 658.4/094—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036403

Illustration on page 5 courtesy of Katharine Mueller

Cover design by Michaela Sullivan

Cover photograph © Getty Images

eISBN 978-0-544-70313-1

v3.0618

FOR STEVEN

Preface:

The Seeds of Our Uncreative Destruction

In 2016, a group of eminent scientists—the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—including several Nobel laureates, rated our current global predicament as being three minutes to midnight. This means that, according to the smartest people on the planet, the human race is about as close to annihilation as we were during the Cold War, a time when a nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed like a distinct possibility.

To echo scientist and best-selling author Carl Sagan, humans may not survive our technological adolescence. We have serious problems to solve: global warming, terrorism, pollution, nuclear threats, and more . . . And we need solutions. Tick tock.

How do we find solutions? Creativity.

We believe creativity will save us. Scientists bet on creativity to save our species. And scientists aren’t the only ones who care about creativity. If you are a businessperson, no matter what company you work for, no matter what your industry might be, you will pray for creativity if your company starts to falter and your job is threatened. If you are an entrepreneur, you pray for creativity every day. If you are in the military, creativity is just about the only thing that will help you win a losing battle. If you are an educator, you hope to teach your students to be more creative so that they can solve the complex problems we face, or at least so they can compete in the world.

I believe this eternal hope for what creativity can do for us is part of the reason behind our fascination with creativity and our endless love of it. Most cultures associate creativity with all things good (e.g., joy, beauty, the divine). So the advice has always been to generate more creative ideas! The more ideas we generate, the better, because the sooner we generate the right idea, the sooner we will be able to solve our most pressing problems. Right?

And we have been following this advice. We have been generating lots of ideas. In fact, we know a lot about how to generate creative ideas. With minimal instruction, any student can generate several good ideas in an hour. With a crowdsourcing website, you could potentially generate thousands of ideas in minutes.

So what is holding us back from a better world? As a species, why are we on the existential brink of annihilation? Why are people and corporations and communities and nations still struggling to be creative?

In the case of companies, you might think that they are not doing enough. True and unique creativity is very rare! So perhaps to find that one creative solution that solves our problems, we need to generate many more. Invest in more inspirational idea-generation programs and brainstorming initiatives for groups. Increase your R&D budget. Empower your employees to generate more ideas faster. Take your people on brainstorming retreats and buy brainstorming software.

For nearly twenty years I’ve devoted my professional life to studying creativity. This dialogue around generating more and more-creative solutions is starting to scare me. That’s because my work shows that this dialogue is addressing the wrong problem—a problem we may no longer have. From where I’m sitting, I’m not at all convinced that if someone generates the idea that has the potential to save us all, or to save your company, that it will matter for our society, or for your business.

I’m writing this book to disrupt the dialogue we’ve been having around the concept of creativity. We need to change this dialogue, and we need to change it fast. Why, you might ask? What problem are we trying to solve? Both good questions. This book is dedicated to answering them.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: I think we have developed lots of great methods to help us generate new ideas and solutions. The problem is, however, that our ability to recognize and to embrace creative solutions is, to put it mildly, dysfunctional. The sad irony is that we are more likely to reject an idea because it is creative than to embrace it. If our ability to generate creative ideas far outpaces our ability to truly embrace them, then it doesn’t matter if you generate a lot of ideas, because they won’t make any impact. Great ideas will be left in the file drawer unimplemented. The solutions that can save us won’t have a chance to develop and thrive even though someone, somewhere, took the time and effort to generate them.

In short, right now in our timeline, our problem isn’t the idea-generation part of creativity. Our problem is our inexplicable inability to get out of our own way, to disrupt our unproductive thinking, and to embrace the new and the bold. You may have heard of creative destruction, a term that economist Joseph Schumpeter coined to describe how new technologies can destroy old markets. Well, I’m suggesting that the choice not to embrace creativity will result in another kind of destruction—uncreative destruction—sticking to the status quo when urgent and pressing problems require that we embrace creativity immediately.

You might say, Yes, yes, yes, we already know this. We already know that people resist change. To which I will counter, Yes, you are right. And if that’s true, now do you see the irony around our spending so much time and effort generating the very kinds of ideas we are most likely to reject?

My colleagues and I believe we can explain this curious puzzle—why we desire creativity so very much, but usually reject it in the end. My goal in the pages that follow is to unveil our best thinking for you about the underlying cause of this hidden barrier.

Here’s the good news: We are three whole minutes from midnight, not two and not one. It isn’t too late. But it is time to disrupt the dialogue.

Creativity is not magic; I believe we can engineer how we create creativity. And in fact, there are many terrific books and resources to help you generate creative ideas. But this book is not one of them.

Rather, this book contains solutions for how we can embrace creativity, which is a vital process that is, oddly, not often discussed or even acknowledged. I believe that we can engineer our ability to embrace creative change. Once we enhance our tendency to embrace the new, then generating lots of ideas will make sense again, because they will have a fair shot at making impact.

To start, you might ask, aren’t creative ideas new but also useful? If so, why would people reject them? Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the scope and scale of the problem.

Specifically, Chapter 1 defines creative change and unveils what I will call the hidden innovation barrier to explain why companies can desire creativity, generate many creative ideas, but still undergo uncreative destruction. In doing so, Chapter 1 asks a surprising question: we know that people love creativity, but could they also hate it?

Chapter 2 describes how our hatred of creativity is not a given but is driven by the situations we are in and the resulting mindsets we use (and have been trained to use) when evaluating ideas. This chapter identifies how our mindsets can turn our love and hate of creative ideas on and off.

Chapter 3 delves into the science behind why we hate creativity and the role our mindsets (and expertise) can play. That chapter raises the possibility that a dislike of creativity is something that people will not easily admit. Instead, it is more like a knee-jerk reaction that may operate beneath our conscious awareness.

Chapter 4 provides you with a four-step process and a lifeline to help you self-disrupt your maladaptive mindsets and more accurately see value in creative ideas. This chapter explores how some of the world’s most brilliant minds and inventors evaluate creative ideas and aims to provide you with strategies to manage your own negative knee-jerk reactions to reject them.

Chapter 5 flips the coin, providing you with strategies to help others disrupt their thinking and see value in creative ideas. Because creative ideas have unique properties, some influence strategies can backfire and harm your ability to effectively sell them. To combat this, I’ll present the FAB framework: fit, aha, and broaden. The FAB framework is built specifically to help you cogently influence others to like and to use creative ideas.

Chapter 6 discusses creative changes in your own organization and raises a controversial and troubling question: Could the very fabric of how most organizations (universities, companies, institutions, governments) are structured in our current day and age evoke a real aversion for creativity—even when we say we desire it? If so, how can we overcome our situational and institutional dislikes? This chapter offers several solutions to help you structure your organization to actively promote, rather than inadvertently deter, creative change.

Chapter 7 spearheads our difficulty recognizing true creative leadership. This could explain the looming creativity crisis—research shows that millennials scored lower on creativity tests than prior generations, and modern-day leaders who make it to the top may lack creative-thinking skills. This chapter suggests that the cause of both problems could be linked, and it provides solutions to help us avert this impending community crisis and recognize true creative leadership.

Chapter 8 issues a call to action: stop generating so many solutions and start making creative change. Just about every book on creativity will tell you to generate more solutions, because more is better than fewer. But is it? What if generating more solutions could actually make it harder for organizations to innovate? What if generating more solutions evokes our hatred of creativity rather than our love of it? This chapter provides research data to address these questions and presents solutions for how we can generate ideas without sacrificing our ability to make them count.

In sum, the first half of this book chronicles why we resist creative change, and the second half chronicles how we can get ourselves and others to embrace it.

1

The Hidden Innovation Barrier

Within the first few months after starting my new position as an assistant professor at Wharton, I met with a group of vice presidents who worked for a large global company. For the sake of confidentiality, I’ll refer to that business as Company Z.

The VPs had determined that their company was struggling with how to be more creative, and they asked me to present my perspective on why this might be the case. I was extremely excited about this meeting, in no small part because I knew the literature cold—backward and forward. So like any good academic, I presented a summary of the research about how hard it is to generate creative (novel and useful) ideas and then actually implement them.

I will never forget the look on the executives’ faces after I finished my talk. I expected nodding heads, grunts of approval, or at least some expressions of curiosity.

What I saw instead in their eyes was confusion and disappointment. Finally, one executive looked at me with skepticism and said, Yeah, but that isn’t it.

Another executive was more patient with me. He explained in detail the problem Company Z was having with creativity, and it honestly had little to do with the material I had presented to the group. I wouldn’t say that we struggle with generating creative ideas, or that implementation is the problem, the executive explained. We can buy our creativity. We buy companies with breakthrough products, but these products rarely get to the implementation phase—and not because we don’t know how to efficiently bring a product to market. Our problem is that once we buy these companies and integrate them under our umbrella, over time, they aren’t creative anymore. Their pipeline dwindles and so we sell them off. But suddenly, only a short time later, those same companies that were vanilla are now developing creative products again.

He concluded: "If you want to help us figure out how to be more creative, figure out how to solve this puzzle, because, as far as we are concerned, that is the billion-, no, trillion-dollar question."

After this comment, I was rendered speechless (which, I can tell you, is a rare situation for me). The executives didn’t agree with my traditional academic account of why creativity was so uncommon—it just didn’t mesh with what they were experiencing. But if generating creative ideas wasn’t the bottleneck, and implementation concerns weren’t relevant to their situation, what then was the problem? This company didn’t appear to be resistant to change—they were investing billions of dollars in creative products. So why were they struggling?

I soon learned that Company Z was not unique. Other companies—large, small, and in between—were struggling to be creative as well. Executives called and asked me to provide their organizations with training on creative-idea generation. Senior managers would tell me that creativity was a strategic priority for the company, but that their employees just weren’t coming up with creative solutions.

Time after time, I conducted these trainings only to discover that most of the participants had already received training on idea generation. I would hear story after story of how employees had developed terrific ideas—which management promptly ignored. One participant even showed me a large stack of white papers she had written to document her many ideas—now in the file drawer. When I asked her why the company rejected her ideas when corporate leaders told me they were desperate for more creativity, she told me something I found quite surprising. She said, Executives here don’t actually want creative ideas.

That didn’t make sense to me. Why would top-level executives at the very companies that were hiring me to help them be more creative spend a ton of resources to cultivate internal creativity, only to reject their employees’ creative ideas? At best, it seemed like a blatant waste of money and other resources. At worst, it seemed like the essence of hypocrisy. Maybe all this talk about creativity was just lip service? I thought back to my meeting with Company Z—there’s no way those busy executives would waste their time listening to consultants and spending billions of dollars on new companies if they were just pretending to want creativity.

Would they?

One thing was certain—executives wanted real solutions, and academics like me had spent decades identifying solutions. A quick search on the ABI Informs database (a database of business articles) shows that roughly 30,000 articles on creative idea generation—and 150,000 articles on implementation—have been published since the 1990s. Why, if we have all these solutions for how to generate and implement creative ideas, were companies still having a difficult time being creative?

If our best solutions weren’t solving the problem, then maybe we needed to redefine the problem we were trying to solve. Was there an invisible third barrier to innovation beyond idea generation and implementation? If so, it must be so big that it could harm innovation, even in companies that were great at generating ideas and incredibly efficient at implementing them. Not only that, but it would have to be invisible to the decision makers whose job it was to innovate new solutions and convert opportunities into wins. So what was this invisible barrier?

As I pondered this question, I again considered the case of Company Z. Executives there told me that generating and implementing ideas was not the bottleneck they faced—they were certain of that. Instead, they believed that the companies they acquired became less creative over time. If this was indeed the case, then one possibility was that Company Z bought companies and then squelched their ability to generate creative ideas, perhaps due to loads of bureaucracy and paperwork. The problem with this logic was that Company Z was buying small companies that made medical devices, products that typically develop very slowly. From the time these companies were acquired to the time they were sold off, their products probably didn’t change much at all.

I was on my own. I didn’t have any answers, but I had a problem I was passionate about solving. I wanted to isolate this hidden barrier to innovation. And I had a hunch: maybe the executives at Company Z perceived the companies they had acquired differently over time not because the products had changed, but because the way executives evaluated the products had changed.

Were all of us operating using a false assumption? That is, we assume that any expert in a specific industry can accurately assess creative opportunity. We know that experts do a terrific job of evaluating products or processes that are familiar to them.

But what if creative ideas are so different from familiar and proven ideas that experts have a difficult time assessing them?

What if our fundamental assumptions about how we recognize and embrace creative opportunity are all wrong?

REVEALING OUR PARADOXICAL FEELINGS ABOUT CREATIVITY

How could familiar ideas and new ideas be different? To understand, consider the following problem. Imagine that you are in a room with two large urns (see Figure 1). The urns are opaque, so you can’t see inside them. But you know the urn on the left contains fifty white marbles and fifty black marbles. The urn on the right also contains one hundred marbles, but the ratio of white to black marbles is unknown.

Here’s the game: If you can draw a black marble in one pick, without looking, you win $100.

Which urn do you draw from?

Figure 1. Two Urns.

One CEO told me that most of the decision-making team in his innovation group chose the urn on the left. In fact, when Daniel Ellsberg, formerly at the RAND Corporation, described this problem, he also found that most people chose the urn on the left. Chances are, you did too. Why?

Most people say that they chose the left urn because they felt this choice was a less-risky bet. But was it? The ratio of black to white marbles in the urn on the right was unknown, which means every ratio is as likely as any other. So the urn on the right could also have contained all black marbles, making your bet a sure thing. If you were to calculate the actual probability of drawing a black marble from the urn on the right, you might realize something surprising: the chance of picking a black marble from the urn on the right is 50 percent—exactly the same as picking a black marble from the urn on the left.

So if you chose the urn on the left simply because you thought it was a less-risky bet, then you didn’t make your choice based on a rational problem-solving approach. Why then did you make this decision? Probably because you wanted to make your choice quickly, but also wanted to avoid uncertainty or a feeling of not knowing. Daniel Ellsberg identified an interesting paradox: even though both urns have the same probable payout, he found that people preferred the urn on the left because it allowed them to avoid ambiguity.

Amos Tversky, a professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford University, and Craig Fox, a professor of psychology at UCLA, found a fix to the Ellsberg paradox. If you evaluate each urn in the Ellsberg paradox problem separately, this ambiguity aversion goes away. It’s only when you compare the two urns that you will become aware of ambiguity and so reject the uncertain option in favor of the seemingly more certain one. In other words, our aversion to ambiguity is not a given. Instead, it can come and go based on how we structure a problem.

In many ways, familiar ideas are like the urn on the left. We know a lot about them and how they operate, so we can calculate the risk of their functioning in the way we expect. But creative ideas are more like the urn on the right—we don’t know a lot about them. That, however, is where the analogy ends. If you remember back to beginning algebra, you may recall a simple premise: If you have one known unknown in an equation, you can solve for X. If, however, you have two or more unknowns in a single equation, then calculating for X is impossible. And creative ideas tend to have many unknowns. We don’t know exactly how creative ideas may benefit us in the future, or whether others will view us positively if we endorse them.

In the Ellsberg paradox, the uncertainty was knowable—you just had to take the time to do the mental math. Even this small amount of uncertainty feels pretty unsafe when compared to an easily knowable option. Now think how it might feel to encounter the kind of uncertainty you deal with when evaluating a creative idea where you can’t know what you don’t know.

Former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also