Challenges and Constraints • 83
do so. Whatorganizations need to do is to produce what Peter Senge
refers to as “creative tension” by clearly articulating the mission and its
relationship to the discrepancies that exist in reality.
28
Consequently,
management oen embraces doing everything “by the book” because
of the advantages. It provides predictability. It reduces anxiety because
the outcome, if negative, absolves a person from responsibility. It can
also provide a roadmap for trekking through the unknown. Rules and
regulations for any organization are important for its survival because
they oer order in place of chaos.
However, if rules and regulations are taken to the extreme, they will
greet ideas with hostility through displays of intolerance and inexibility.
29
From a creativity standpoint, it can mean horror. A by-the-book attitude
makes it dicult to challenge assumptions, principles, concepts, and so on
when creating, thereby inhibiting a questioning perspective and relying
on intuition—two critical abilities for being creative. Allan etal. recognize
that such constraints restrict our ability to come up with creative and
innovative ideas.
30
Fortunately, failure from adopting a by-the-book
philosophy can, ironically, lead to greater creativity by seeing through the
failure to new ideas.
31
In the end, the desire for a compliant workforce
and adherence to a by-the-book philosophy results in methodism with
overemphasis being placed on compliance with a process, procedure, or
technique, at the expense of experimenting with something new. Pressure,
in other words, is to conform to the current way of doing business, almost
in a manufacturing-like setting. Naturally, any eort to break with the
process, procedure, or technique can bring retribution upon the person
or organization. Methodism is reective of what omas Kuhn refers to
as normal science, which is essentially puzzle-solving that does not exactly
encourage creativity. Kuhn says that normal science does whatever it can
to suppress novel ideas by requiring the use of accepted, known rules
and procedures. Under such conditions, creativity and creative output
are dicult to achieve due to conditioning of our thinking through
knowledge and experience, reinforced through the application of recog-
nized methods and procedures proven by past success.
32
From a creativ-
ity perspective, here are some ways to counter the aect and eect of a
compliant workforce:
• Allow for exibility when applying standards, procedures, and
techniques.
• Encourage team members to think outside the box.