The Typical Investment Personality 61Hang on a minute, though. Okay, so creativity is desirable. But
who says we’re creatively challenged? Where’s the evidence for that
statement?
A study presented by Chic Thompson (in a speech entitled,
“Being the Change You Seek in the World,” Feb. 28, 1996) tallied
behaviors of different age groups. On a given day, 44-year-old adults
average 11 laughs and 6 questions. On that same day, a 5-year-old
will average 113 laughs and 65 questions. Little wonder, then, that
a survey on creativity given to the same groups revealed that, of
the 5-year-olds, 98 percent had access to their full creative poten-
tial—for the 44-year-olds, the number went down to 2 percent!
When I ask workshop participants why this happens, I get a list
of influences from school regulations (“color within the lines”)
to critical parents (“don’t take risks, just do the right thing”) to
corporate time constraints (“quit staring out the window and
get it done!”) to cultural norms (“people won’t like you if you’re
different”).
Teresa Amabile, a Harvard professor in innovation, believes
that creativity in the workplace gets killed much more often than
it gets supported (“How to Kill Creativity,” Harvard Business
Review, Sept./Oct. 1998). She has studied this phenomenon for
20 years and has developed ways to measure if a workplace is
creativity-friendly. She summarizes the creativity killers as follows:- Surveillance and negative judgment by managers and co-
workers. - Lack of freedom (no control over one’s own destiny).
- Indifference (lack of support by managers and coworkers).
- Competition (political problems that shut down collabora-
tion between coworkers). - Time pressures that are externally imposed (and therefore
feel stifling). - Rewards as bribes (if workers feel manipulated by them).
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