Creative People Must Be Stopped by David A Owens

assembling a car more quickly and cheaply or educating schoolkids in bulk, the goal is maximum output for the least amount of input. If routine production is the goal, this approach may work, as it preserves resources and minimizes waste. However, for groups pursuing innovation, valuing efficiency above all else will severely constrain them. In groups dominated by a culture of efficiency, members will want to get any needed learning over with and move toward implementation as quickly as possible.
    Common strategies are to use a solution from a problem that we have already mastered or to find an expert who already knows how to do it. Maybe it’s not innovative or even ideal, but at least it makes us feel as though things are moving. For one-time projects performed under time pressure or for problems that don’t require a new approach—for example, organizing a mailing list or reporting financial performance—these strategies can work well. However, for a group seeking a new approach and desiring to build innovation skills, these tactics don’t help. Not only do you lose the actual learning, but you lose out on improving your process of learning as well.
    To overcome this tendency, reframe your group’s view of learning and progress. Don’t think of progress as being a move from ignorance to mastery, and of rapid progress as an even faster move. Rather, consistent with the ideas of James March (1991), consider that your group starts in an exploration mode, where you are focused on gathering information, testing relationships, and developing understanding. You are not “ignorant”; you are rigorously exploring the space. Next, you engage an exploitation mode, taking advantage of your insights to develop a highly efficient and effective system. You don’t end in “mastery”; you develop an effective and efficient way to exploit the ideas and insights you have gained.
    Rapid progress is not achieved by getting from the start of the project to the finish as quickly as possible. Rather, it comes from the group’s ability to know how and when to move back and forth between these mutually reinforcing modes, as the project requires.
    Prize New Problem-Solving Methods over Traditions and Taboos
    In the course of a study on R&D teams, I observed as a group of hardware engineers (people who design circuit boards and microprocessors) grappled with a particularly hard problem in the design of a computer. At one point, one of them offered that maybe the problem could be better addressed by software. If the group passed the problem to the software engineers, she proposed, the problem would be solved more efficiently than it would be if the group insisted on solving it using chips and circuits.
    The other members of the team just looked at her incredulously. Even though they could see that she was correct, passing problems to “those guys” was obviously not an acceptable solution in the culture of the hardware engineers. She got the message, and the group continued struggling to solve the problem in hardware.
    Taboos like this can be good if they prevent bad or dangerous decisions, like the taboo I grew up with against eating the wild mushrooms that my uncle had picked. However, unless you are a fraternity or a gang, when the taboos in the group serve only to reinforce turf claims or become a test of loyalty for members, they do nothing but close down alternative sources of ideas and insights that might apply to your problem.
    As any anthropologist will tell you, it is extremely difficult to determine your own group’s cultural traditions and taboos, but there are ways you can flush them out. Enlist someone not trained in your field to sit in on a meeting of your group and ask him or her to report some observations afterwards. You can also learn by consciously observing your team at the next meeting with “those guys.” See if you can determine whether any points of