What’s the Opposite of Creativity?

Dark:Light. Smooth:Rough. Beautiful:Hideous. Creative:…?

I spend a lot of time thinking about creativity within a team environment. For more than a decade I’ve built—in one fashion or another—creative teams. In that 12 plus years, I’ve grown a lot, and I’ve come to understand that the opposite of creativity is in fact, fear.

So, now I have to ask myself, have I been a leader who fostered creativity, or one who instilled fear?

Many of my early tries at being a leader were fraught with failure. People left hurt, they left beaten up and they left feeling that I had let them down. And I had. When I would start to lose control, my gut reaction was to threaten, to cajole, to push—hard. What a ridiculous thing it was to try and put the fear of… well, anything… into a team designed to be and charged with being creative.

Creativity is elegant. It’s finessed. It requires openness and honesty. Fear is brute force. It’s ugly and it’s jarring. It shuts people down and makes them shrink away.

Fear at 100% and creativity at 100% cannot exist in the same space. They are polar opposites. To gain one, you must sacrifice the other. Creative people crave environments where they are safe to try, to explore, and to fail, without the fear of dire consequences.

Creative people are also typically very emotional people. That’s where the great creative work comes from. It comes from those people investing themselves emotionally in their work. What they give you is a piece of themselves, bottled, signed, sealed, and delivered in that logo, poster, or web concept. That’s the magic. That’s what you’re paying for.

Here’s 4 ways that you may be subtly creating a culture of fear in your team:

1. Not standing up for the work. If you’re the one who is presenting their work to clients, you must defend the work. The client is the client, at the end of the day, but showing your creative people that you’re willing to go to bat for the integrity of their work lets them know that a client “not liking” their work doesn’t mean it’s no good, it means that clients have opinions that differ from theirs. If you’re willing to roll over the second a client says boo, creative people will respond by playing it safe to avoid having their work tortured.
2. Not understanding that the muse comes when the muse comes. Most people cannot be creative on cue. When you “crack the whip,” creative people will feel that their contributions are more about the hours they clock than the product they craft. It is in your best interest to provide breathing room for creative ideas to mature. Mature ideas are smarter, more useful and sellable ideas.
3. Expecting the first idea to be “the idea.” Most creative work is failure. Trial and error are the stock in trade for creative people. They require the ability to try and fail without feeling like they must have the right answer the first time. Reinforcing the idea that only through trial and failure are great things possible is a great way to encourage your team to take bigger and better risks. You’ll love the outcome. I promise.
4. Criticizing work. There’s a big difference between constructive critique—which asks questions, like, “why this approach?” or “did you think about…?” or “have you considered…?”—and criticism which states whether something is “good” or not. I’m not saying you have to walk on egg shells, but learning to critique correctly can completely change the response from creative people. Instead of it being a destructive process, it’s a constructive one that yields better results with each iteration.

I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I am constantly trying to improve my approach to team building and culture definition. And ultimately, I want to create a culture in which people feel free to do great and surprising things, which comes at the cost of a lot of failures along the way.

© Neil Gaiman

As Neil Gaiman put it in his commencement address at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia:

“Make glorious and fantastic mistakes.”

And always remember: fear and creativity cannot exist in the same space.

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