People, Institutions are Biased against Creative Ideas, Studies Find | Physorg.com
If you are a creative that has found a way to live, counter-culture, in corporate society, in a corporate job, or in any bureacracy that is public or private, this might just validate some of that long-suffering vibe about the climate for your creativity and innovation.
A rare few institutions have found ways to structure in ongoing creativity and innovation. Proctor & Gamble has innovation built into their plan for success. The Mayo Clinic holds a yearly innovation summit with 400 leaders and an social media infrastructure built in to share the summit with it's 50,000 organizational members. 3M and Google have famously built in "create" time into their work structures. A curation source for these institutions and innovation stories is here.
via flickr.com
On the other side of the fence, many creatives & innovators leave organizations to work for themselves, unfettered by "silence and eye-rolls" for creative ideas and plans, as most institutions attract those who value safety, security, and longitivity ~ or at lease the perception of those qualities in an institutional setting.
Excerpted:
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"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" ~ Jack Goncalo, Asst. Professor of Organizational Behavior and co-author of new research published in Psychological Science.
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Excerpted:
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers.
Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
The studies' findings include:
- Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
- People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical -- tried and true.
- Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
- Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.
To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias. ...Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as "vomit," "poison" and "agony."
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"The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."
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Goncalo said this bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality.
The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."
The study, "The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas," might validate the frustrations of creative people, Goncalo said.
Reference: Cornell University
From the commentary on this blog post:
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"People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas -- tried and true. Tell this to Ptolemy and Copernicus... and Galileo, Tesla, and Darwin. Oh wait... turns out they were ridiculed for their innovation. To death. And then some."
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