What is creativity in business, and does it matter? You’re about to learn how important creativity is for your business success.
A former architect described to me a creativity exercise. It’s one he had to take when he was an undergraduate. But, even though it’s an old school challenge, it exemplifies creativity. So, try this one on for size. Build a bridge made of straws, paper clips, and string. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
The problem comes with placing a brick on the “floor” of the straw bridge structure. It’s held up with the paper clips and string. And, keeping it from collapse is hard. It sounds impossible, but it’s possible. That is to say, many architecture students have figured it out.
When the architect was in college, he used to work nights. The night he before the challenge, he got home from work at midnight. And, he then spent the next eight hours through the night working on the challenge. As you might imagine, it’s tough to figure out how to build a bridge of straw.
What was the lesson in this architectural challenge?
Being creative so you can succeed means you have to fail fast and often.
As an entrepreneur, I understand that success in business is an evolutionary process. In the book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, written by Eric Barker, Barker illustrates why people, including entrepreneurs, have to be creative and fail fast and often to succeed.
Spaghetti Problem and Creativity
Peter Skillman, General Manager of Smart Things, Microsoft, created a game for workers at Microsoft. He named it the Spaghetti Problem. Teams received 20 pieces of dried spaghetti. And, they also got a single piece of string, a meter of tape, and one marshmallow. The challenge was to create the tallest spaghetti structure holding up the marshmallow.
According to Barker, hundreds of people participated in the challenge over five years. And, surprise, it included kindergarten students. Want to know who did the best? If you guessed the 5-year-old children, you would be correct.
Why Kindergarteners Beat Engineers, Managers and MBA Students
As Barker explains, the 5 and 6-year-olds did better than any group, including engineers, because “they just jumped in.” The MBA students, by the way, performed the worse of all groups.
I’m sure you’re wondering how just jumping into a task can relate to creativity and failing fast and often. The idea is startlingly simple. Usually, what happens is that business people overthink things. In other words, they wait until the conditions are “just right.” That’s a mistake. And, the most successful entrepreneurs and kindergarten children understand they have to jump.
When the kindergarten kids got started with the spaghetti challenge, they didn’t sit to debate. And, they did not deliberate how to go about achieving the goal. Instead, by jumping in, they accomplished something crucial for success.
Fail Fast and Often for Business Creativity
When they failed, they learned what does and does not work. In other words, they were creating a solution after another solution. This creativity allowed them to course correct. As Barker wrote in his book, “This was their system: prototype and test, prototype and test, prototype and test––until the time was up. When there is no set path, this systems y wins. It’s an old Silicon Valley mantra: Fail fast and fail cheaply. Research shows this method of trying lots of little experiments to see what works best also works for people over four feet tall. Like you and me.”
For entrepreneurial business success, this idea separates people who can grow and develop their companies. In today’s business environment, to the brave go the spoils. Meaning, that those who have the foresight to try things win. Those who pilot new, creative ideas achieve the most success. As a result, with every “failure,” there is an immense amount of learning that happens.
That’s one of the reasons why history is such an important subject in school. It’s not because history repeats itself. History doesn’t repeat itself, as is attributed to Mark Twain, it rhymes. When you have the experience of what happened in the past, including in a pilot or by trying and experimenting on something new, you create and learn. This learning helps to inform your future and the possibilities that you can create for improving things and making them better.
Creativity Matters for Your Business
In sum, if you’re considering a new idea, remember to ask yourself how to develop it creatively? Then, develop a creative solution to your challenge. Finally, if you want, pull out some straws or spaghetti. If nothing else, it’ll get you into a creative space. Just jump in.
© 2019 Wayne Elsey. All Rights Reserved