DailyDirt: Ingredients For Creative Environments

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Jan 29th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There are many, many studies on creativity and possible ways to improve the creative output of a group. Monetary incentives are often presented as a way to get people to produce more ideas, but some studies show that money isn't actually a great motivator. Obviously, there are a lot of factors that can influence how creative people are, but it would be nice to isolate a few and see if we can eliminate some practices that are downright detrimental to creativity. It would be great if we found out what really could inspire people, but maybe we shouldn't put too much pressure on the researchers... because that might dampen their productivity.

Do "politically correct" rules in a workplace stifle creativity? An experiment asked people to brainstorm in groups, with some groups doing a politically correct exercise (and control groups that did not), and mixed gender groups with politically correct training seemed to be more creative. [url]
If you think alcohol gives you a little creative boost, there's some research that says a blood alcohol level of 0.075% is the sweet spot. You could self-medicate with any alcoholic beverage, but there's a beer brand that has figured out some of the math already -- so you can just drink its "Problem Solver" beer and get to your creative peak with less hassle. [url]
Will a culture that is more individualistic produce more creative people than a society that favors collectivism? Another brainstorming experiment showed that individualists might come up with more ideas, but collectivists came up with higher quality ideas. [url]

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Filed Under: alcohol, beer, brainstorm, creativity, culture, ideas, incentives, insights, inspiration, politically correct, problem solver, productivity, workplace

8 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jan 2015 @ 5:39pm

How does anyone really measure creativity? Seems like bogus studies.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jan 2015 @ 7:03pm

collectivists have higher quality ideas? by whose standards?
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- Anonymous Coward, 29 Jan 2015 @ 7:55pm
  
  Re:
  It's easy enough to track down the original paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296314002872?showall%3Dtrue%26via%3Dihub), and your question is answered in their method section. If you have access to an academic library (or if you're willing to give money to the slimeballs who run Elsevier) you can read it for yourself.
  
  Or, of course, you could just continue to snipe and whine from a position of ignorance.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 30 Jan 2015 @ 3:53am
    
    Re: Re:
    Because COMMUNISM
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  - GOP, 30 Jan 2015 @ 2:28pm
    
    Re: Re:
    "Or, of course, you could just continue to snipe and whine from a position of ignorance."
    
    Thank you, that's my favorite method.
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- timmaguire42 (profile), 1 Feb 2015 @ 4:08am
  
  Re:
  I think they're referring to the famous ability of communist countries to out innovate market-based countries and better cater to their population's needs.
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sparkydoc (profile), 31 Jan 2015 @ 5:55pm

political correctness study
The problem with this study is that the first exercise: thinking of examples of political correctness, is like a creativity warmup. I wonder what the results would have been if they compared to a group thinking of, for instance, where signs should be posted on campus.
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- timmaguire42 (profile), 1 Feb 2015 @ 4:11am
  
  Re: political correctness study
  This one I could actually believe--hollywood was much more creative under the old censorship regime. Those shackles require creativity to get the message out.
  
  But who in their right mind would rather live under that system?
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