Insightology

Do you procrastinate? Have you ever told yourself that you do your best work if you wait till the last minute? You may not be as creative as you think, according to Teresa Amabile the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. A leading authority in the field of organizational creativity, she has conducted intensive multi-year studies to understand the nature of creativity in organizations. One of the findings that surprised even her was that time pressure was actually an impediment to creativity. Even people who felt they were being more creative under time pressure are actually less creative.

Other research she has conducted has shown interesting relationships between creativity and external motivation. Professional artists who received up-front contracts for work produced less creative art work than when they did non-commissioned or self-initiated work. Interestingly, actual rewards did not even have to be provided. In another study, creative writers were merely asked to think of either extrinsic motivations such as getting rich or famous, or think of intrinsic motivations such as simply enjoying the process of writing and then asked to compose some poetry. The writers in the intrinsic motivation condition produced more creative work leading to one of the main developments from her research - the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity.             

What is her advice on developing more creative thinking? Don't wait till the last minute. Start early and map out strategies for tackling the problem. After working hard on a problem set it aside and work on something else, allowing the problem to marinate in your brain. Quite often an answer will pop into your brain seemingly from nowhere. She has also found that when people are in a good mood they tend to be creative - that day and the next.

So, there you have it. Start early, put yourself in a good mood, take some time off from the problem and wait for the genius to show itself. It's as simple as that!