Why Play Produces Better Ideas Than Pressure.

The surprising link between creativity, productivity... and having a laugh.

When Charlie Curson and I run our creativity workshops, we start with a bit of a ridiculous exercise.

We ask people to turn each other into statues – in just 20 seconds.

First, they have to create a really boring statue and give it a title e.g. “Plank of Wood in the Garden.” Then they create a silly statue e.g. “glamorous duck trampolining.”

Even the boring ones are usually pretty inventive. The silly ones meanwhile are often genuinely funny. The room fills with laughter, people relax, and the creativity starts flowing.

Then we give them a third set of instructions.

"Now make a funny statue that will make me laugh."

And in a nano second all that creativity disappears. There’s a sense of stress and borderline terror and the room turns to silence. When I ask people what happened when I said, “now make me laugh” -  they will mention fear, expectation and wanting to please me yet not knowing me. That even though I was much clearer in my instructions, it had actually killed the very thing we were aiming for.

What if many organisations are accidentally doing exactly the same thing?

We often assume the best way to get better ideas is to increase the pressure – carrot and stick. Bigger targets,  rewards and higher expectations.

"Come up with the breakthrough idea and there'll be a bonus."

"Solve this problem and we'll win the project."

It sounds logical. Unfortunately, creativity doesn't seem to work that way.

One of my favourite studies comes from MIT, where researchers Kudrowitz and Wallace asked different groups of engineers, product designers and comedy improvisers to generate product design ideas. 

Guess who consistently produced the strongest concepts (and these were blind tested by 50,000 people around the world)?  The improvisers – with zero product design experience.

Not because they knew more about product design. Quite the opposite.

They built on each other's ideas using the improv principle of "Yes, and..." They were less judgmental of early thoughts – they didn’t kill their ideas before they’d had a chance to breathe. And importantly, they weren't pressured into trying to be brilliant product designers – how could they.

They were simply playing.

Harvard's Teresa Amabile found something similar with professional artists. Some were commissioned to produce artwork. Others simply created for themselves.

When the work was judged blind, the commissioned pieces were technically just as good – but the uncommissioned work was consistently rated as more creative.

The artists themselves explained why. Once money entered the equation, the work became about pleasing someone else rather than exploring their own ideas.

The same phenomenon is also true  of open-source software developers who voluntarily spend evenings and weekends writing extraordinary code for no pay whatsoever. They do it because they love solving problems. Hours disappear because they're in a state of play rather than pressure.

None of this means rewards or indeed pressure are bad. If your goal is to get someone to work faster at a repetitive task, incentives can work brilliantly.

But in most modern organisations where our goal is innovation, problem-solving or fresh thinking, the wrong pressure can quietly become the enemy.

So if you want more creativity in your organisation, try three simple things.

First, make the process enjoyable. Create an environment where people can play with ideas rather than defend them.

Second, invite outsiders into the conversation. Sometimes the people who know least about the problem ask the questions that unlock the solution.

Finally, quieten your inner critic. Charlie calls it the hare brain—the part of us that sprints in, judges every idea within seconds and kills the interesting ones before they've had chance to grow.

The best ideas rarely arrive fully formed, they wander in usually while we're busy playing.