For web designers (and really most anyone in our economy of knowledge work) creativity is our capital. Customers choose us to provide creative answers to their business challenges. With a steady stream of work coming in, staying at our creative peak is essential. Here at Element Fusion, we’re each constantly looking for ways to keep ourselves in that creative frame of mind. Organizationally, we want to provide an environment in which our designers and developers can thrive. I have written before about ways to break a creative block on an individual level, but sometimes it is helpful to take a step back and think about what we know about creativity and how we can use that knowledge.

Several years ago, Fast Company published a great article entitled The 6 Myths Of Creativity which detailed the results of an exhaustive study of creativity in the workplace. The article was written by Teresa Amabile, head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Creativity has been on my mind recently, and I found this article in some old bookmarks. It is full of great ideas that may change the way you think about creativity both in your personal workflow and in your organization. I’d recommend that you read the entire article when you have time, but I've summarized what I consider to be the highlights below.

1. Myth: creativity comes from creative types

The first myth is one of the most disappointing. It is unfortunate how many organizations compartmentalize creativity to the marketing and design departments. Creativity should be fostered by all workers at every level. Creativity isn’t just about aesthetics and design. Creativity is ideas. Novel ideas, inventive solutions, and out-of-the-box thinking can be useful in every part of your work, by every employee. Pixar, one of the most successful movie studios ever, regularly encourages creativity in every part of their business. Their Pixar University concept lets employees spend a few hours each week in on-campus classes, and this includes all employees. Receptionists might take a drawing class. Food services staff can learn about color theory. The idea is that the more everyone knows about what Pixar does, the better they will be. Creativity is everywhere.

2. Myth: money is a creativity motivator

The study concluded that money was rarely a motivation for most workers. Instead, feeling appreciated or valued and being challenged were more conducive to high creativity. Creative workers want to be deeply engaged, challenged at a level appropriate to their skills, and they want to work on projects that they care about and are interested in. Even if you’re a freelancer working from home, you should be working for more than just money. Seek out projects that are personally interesting to you — projects that are challenging that you can invest something of yourself in.

3. Myth: time pressure fuels creativity

The old adage that “I work best under pressure” was found to be unlikely by the study. While working at the last minute or under pressure of a deadline may remove some distractions and make you feel productive, you might not be doing your most creative work. I found this passage particularly enlightening:

People were the least creative when they were fighting the clock. In fact, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover — when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down not only on that day but the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem.

I often try to separate my work from “the clock." It isn’t uncommon to get stuck on a creative problem, and I have learned that trying to brow-beat a solution by simply forcing yourself to work on it or throwing more time into it never works. It is only after I take a break, work on something else, or take a walk that my mind is able to restore the calm and come up with something new. Countless times I have worked on a tough problem all afternoon only to have the obvious solution hit me in the car on the drive home.

4. Myth: fear forces breakthroughs

Here, the study challenges the "tortured artist" whose miserable existence is the fuel for creative expression (sorry, Dashboard Confessional). The study, which monitored the journals of a set of workers found overwhelmingly that creativity was more positively associated with happiness than sadness or anger. In fact, they were able to observe that workers were happiest when they had come up with a creative idea and that being happy one day often led to creativity on the next. This suggests a cycle where creativity fuels more creativity.

5. Myth: competition beats collaboration

Competition may be a motivator, but it might not promote the most creative solutions. When workers compete, their natural tendencies are to close up and keep ideas to themselves. Workers who collaborate share openly and this sharing can lead to discussion and ideas that the individuals might never arrive at alone. Agile development promotes the power of small, focused, and creative teams that shuck the restrictions of old business to work quickly, efficiently, and to focus on the customer in ways that individuals cannot.

6. Myth: a streamlined organization is a creative organization

The final result applies more to monolithic corporations than your typical web design shop, but the base conclusion remains the same: a negative, unstable, and fearful environment is a detriment to creativity. Workers only motivated to keep their jobs are not going to produce creative results.

We live in an interesting time where we are finding that many of the things we learned growing up about what constitutes hard work and productivity can be impediments to the very environments these “rules” proclaim to foster. We should all be looking at ways to encourage our own creativity and how we can encourage more creative thinking in every part of our businesses.

At Element Fusion, we are always looking for ways to foster creativity in our work. We’d love to hear about how you’re making your work and company more creative. Tell us about it in the comments.