How Negativity Affects Creativity (#1)

Outside of house plants, is there anything easier to kill than creativity?

Many things come to mind: an egg, flowers, the ego of a Hollywood celebrity.

None of these have less resiliency than creativity. How unfortunate, because creativity allows us to create or do something new and different in our lives. Even more so, an act of creativity prevents us from falling into a mundane pattern and routine.

Its frailty is even more acute for business because creativity is as vital to corporate health and success as accounting, operations and manufacturing. Peter Drucker took it one step further, famously arguing that business has only two real functions:  marketing and innovation. I’d take it another step.

Negativity robs an organisation of its most valuable asset:  new and original thinking.

Surely we’d be violently agreeing that creativity and innovation are extremely important, and by extension, that brainstorms are important.  At the same time, there’s universal agreement that negativity is the single biggest obstacle to creativity.  More so, negativity in brainstorms – whether it’s a brainstorm in a conference room, or a spur-of-the-moment discussion over a desktop – frequently prevents us from being creative at work.  Why the contradiction between our belief and behaviour?  What causes negativity?  And most of all, what can we do about it?

Negativity is many emotions and behaviours together

Among them:

Pessimism

That won’t work

Adversity

Let me play devil’s advocate

Dismissal

We’ve already tried that

Disdain

That’s a stupid idea

Negativity can also be self-directed. We censure or criticize our own thoughts, using emotional and perceptual blocks to burden our creative thinking, such as:

• I’m not creative.
• I don’t feel creative today.
• I’m not as creative as him.
• I’m really uncomfortable when I have to be creative.

When negativity moves from individual to group dynamics, the problem is compounded by an even larger range and depth of emotions, mostly fear, such as:

• I will lose face in front of my peers.
• People will think my ideas are dumb or bad.
• I hate making public mistakes.
• I fear taking risks which might jeopardize (my job/my reputation).
• I fear exposing my weaknesses in front of others.

Other emotions are based on insecurity or chaos.

• I hate ambiguity.
• I can only evaluate in terms of how much something will cost.
• I must be highly efficient at work because mistakes are costly and wrong.

This is a three-part series on negativity and creativity.

Part 1:   (this article)

Part 2: 

Part 3: 

If this sounds like you, your team or organisation, you may like an article that looks at the differences between .

Why else do you think we tolerate creativity in business situations?  Feel free to add your thoughts and comments below.