The Creative Dilemma
By: Paul Myers Mba
Tags: This Happened To Me, Ideas, Advice, Personal Development, Creativity

Motivation

If our work is unsatisfying, but the reward is motivational, then creative problem solving is a hope, at best.

Those only motivated by rewards tend to do the minimum. What’s necessary to get the reward, and no more.

Even if creativity is the reward, those who are not engaged in their work are less likely to connect insights necessary to innovate or invent something new.

Intrinsic Motivators

Internal motivation is crucial for creativity.

Creativity fulfills a need beyond material things, like a promotion, accumulation of money, or things. Creative people have a deeper sense of their being. As such, they have more influence over their environment and their lives.

Creative minds learn more about themselves. They explore their ability to think differently, innovative thoughts, and take action to make it happen. The creative activity is a motivator. It’s a source of pleasure, satisfaction, and enjoyment — it is the reward.

Creativity is a source of happiness.

This is true. Deep focus is an opportunity to do our best work. It’s a source of self-expression, freedom to make a difference. It's intrinsically rewarding.

Extrinsic Factors

At work, superficial influence is not good enough. Leaders or managers that deny others the freedom to fail to create something, is fundamentally depressing for the creative mind.

Also, if people are interrupted continually, it makes it harder to get into a flow state to thoroughly enjoy the creative process, to take pleasure from their work.

If we believe that someone or something will prevent us from doing our best work we lose faith. We can stop trying due to sheer frustration.

We think, what’s the point. Why make the effort if our efforts are arrested, our time wasted.

Just like in business, if we’re falling behind, or churning out sub-standard work, we should look at what’s blocking creativity instead of assuming that things outside us are the problem.

The environment, process, or culture is often the problem.

External rewards lead to conformity. This drives people to fit in more than the desire to do creative work.

Photo by Matthieu Comoy on Unsplash

Constraints

Creative people are less likely to accept the constraints of conformity. Their minds pay more attention to the task as opposed to how they compare to the people around them.

The business world compares people based on conformance, therefore bleed creative minds at an alarming rate because most can't measure creativity.

The greater the opportunities for creativity, the less emphasis we place on conforming. In a group environment, if people are convinced that the environment encourages creativity, ego, and politics vanish.

The more we’re encouraged by intrinsic rewards, the potential to make a difference, the more creative we are. The possibility of experiencing a creative high or attaining a deep flow state is highly motivational. It unlocks our creative ability.

Blockers

Extrinsic reward blocks creativity, if exclusive. Thinking about what others might say about us, or what reward we may get for our effort, diminishes our creative urge.

Inventors, writers, designers, marketers, or anyone who focuses on external critics, struggle to deliver their best work.

Seeking out safety, following tradition, or doing what you think others think you should be doing is a creative passion killer.

A mistake.

Why? Because our attention is divided between the demands of meeting expectations, the task itself, and the reward on completion. This makes it hard to find creativity because for every step forward we tend to take a step back.

That said, external rewards can be beneficial, as long as rewards build trust. In this environment we can relax, focusing on ideation, solutions, and creative problem-solving.

People are motivated to take steps towards a creative goal if the rewards are clear. The problem is that a lot of creative work must happen before we can even know the questions to ask or figure out the type of reward befitting the creative outcome.

Why? because many aspects of the task exclude solutions that haven’t been considered — they could not be conceived without the creative journey.

Extrinsic rewards are therefore only effective as a creative reward when unknown-unknowns are part of the recognition.