Cultivating Creativity

“The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” said Alex Osborn.

We, the M3 staff, firmly believe in creativity and desire to cultivate talent, vision, imagination and originality within our workplace. We have our own ideas as to how this is done but we are always looking into ways to become more creative, collaborative and effective as a team. This week our internet marketing director stumbled upon an article printed in the New Yorker from a year ago that discussed research regarding the effectiveness of brainstorming. So of course, our staff immediately started reading and looking for practical ways to apply these concepts. Many of the ideas were compelling and even surprising. This is what we learned:

1. Brainstorming is only effective if we follow this rule. Has anyone ever told you ‘If you can’t say anything nice…don’t say anything at all’? Well turns out criticism and negative feedback are essential components to productive idea cultivation. Now we aren’t saying ugliness is permissible…but don’t keep quiet if an idea needs a little work.

2. Turns out we were spot on with our workplace design…Intimate space is important! We recently underwent construction to bring our designers together in one workspace. We wanted our creative team to be able to consult one another, encourage ingenuity, and build close relationships. But this isn’t our only workplace win. We have 16 in house staff members consisting of designers, producers, account executives and administration. We force them to interact at the watering hole, in the kitchen and even in their walks to the bathroom via our office space.

“The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together,” said author, Jonah Lehrer.

3. This leads to another fascinating concept. Teamwork has increased…duhh! But why? Well Lehrer found that the teamwork increase is due to an increase in specialization. People have become more specialized because the remaining problems in the world are incredibly hard! So it is more important than ever to be a team that is in sync.

4. Now this is where it gets really complicated. For this whole team thing to work out…we must be close relationally to collaborate but not too close because then our ideas will be the same and innovation will be lost. We must be near to one another in terms of physical proximity but we must simultaneously induce conflict to stimulate new ideas.

“It is the human friction that makes the sparks,” said Lehrer.

We are always learning at Mass Media Marketing.

Source:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all