Killing Creativity

By Mike Syslo

It would be fantastic if all great ideas came from one single source. Then, all we would have to do is dial in and select the one we need for the appropriate situation. No sweat, no effort, just pick one and move on.

You know as well as I do that it doesn’t work that way. Great ideas, creative approaches come from various sources – often the ones you least expect. Creativity requires space. It requires the freedom to think and offer ideas. It requires encouragement and a willing ear.

Frank Goble wrote: The best way to kill creativity is to select suspicious, critical, insecure, defensive people as supervisors at every level. At their inception most ideas are delicate and fragile, and require careful nurturing. This is the reason, of course, that men experienced in developing organizational creativity stress creative climate…”

It is easy to kill creativity. It’s as simple as the way you react to the ideas presented to you. Charles Swindoll identifies what he refers to as “Killer phrases”:

  • It won’t work.
  • We haven’t the time.
  • We don’t have the personnel to pull it off.
  • It’s not in the budget.
  • We’re going to get too much criticism.
  • The board isn’t going to buy it.
  • We’ve tried that before.
  • We’ve never done that before.
  • We’re not ready for it yet.
  • We’ll lose a lot of high donors if we do that.
  • All right in theory, but can you put it into practice?
  • This could result in a lawsuit.
  • It’s too modern.
  • It’s too old-fashioned.
  • So and so tried that and failed.
  • We’re too small for that.
  • We’re too big for that.
  • It costs too much money.
  • People won’t accept it.

Guilty! I’m guilty! I’ve used those and many expressions like them in the past. I’m sure if we sat down and brainstormed we could come up with a lot more of these phrases that we have used.

One of our roles as managers is to come up with the ideas that make this organization work and prosper. We can’t do it on our own. We need to encourage our staff to come up with the ideas that we can put into use here and now.