Manage the Conditions

From Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire, “Creativity and the Role of the Leader”, Harvard Business Review, October 2008 (vol. 86, pp. 100-109). The piece distills a two-day Harvard Business School colloquium with creativity researchers and operators from Google, IDEO, Novartis, Intuit, and E Ink. The sentence frames the article’s argument: the leader’s job is not to produce ideas but to set up the conditions under which other people produce them. The authors lay out those conditions in the body, including tapping employees at every rank, asking the kind of questions that invite imaginative answers, championing promising ideas, clearing paths through bureaucracy, weeding out weak ideas, and making the organization actually learn from failure.

“Manage creativity” treats the output as the deliverable: schedule it, demand it, review it. The article’s claim is that the output is not directly controllable, and the authors point out that ordinary process management, the kind that works in operations, is the wrong instrument in the generation stage of creative work. A leader who reaches for it ends up applying deadlines, evaluations, and top-down ideation at exactly the stage where those tools do not fit. “Manage for creativity” relocates the leader’s job to the surrounding conditions: hiring, which questions get asked in meetings, which ideas get political cover, and the handoff from the people who generate ideas to the people who commercialize them.

The trap the line warns against is the leader who notices the output is missing and presses harder on the output.