The Prisoner's Dilemma: The Key to Creativity - August Turak, Forbes

"I was having lunch with one of my clients, the CEO of a rapidly growing mid-size company, when I casually asked for his job description.

He smiled and said, “Well, if you followed me around you’d probably think I do lots of things. But I only have one job. I build passion. Most people think talent is in short supply. Hell, the papers are full of stories about regular folks working miracles when something they really care about is on the line. Talent is not in short supply. Passion is. My job is showing people that what we’re doing is worth doing. I provide thewhys so our people can provide the hows. Once passion is in place,” he said with a big grin, “my job becomes insisting that people use their vacation and trying to stay out of the way.

In a previous article, 8 Keys to Innovation: Building Brands by Killing Frogs, I noted that prisoners are some of the most creative and innovative people. Turning toothpaste tubes into lethal weapons demonstrates their improvisational knack for engineering and product development; their creative selling skills, though usually manipulative, are legendary; and when it comes to applying the law in creative ways, jail house lawyers are second to none.

Obviously, education, training, prior experience, financial rewards, and traditional ways of measuring intelligence don’t account for all this creative achievement. So what does? More importantly if great leaders are creative leaders, what can we learn from prisoners?

The first secret is that prisoners have a high overarching mission that transcends engineering, product development, sales, or law. Whether applied to their fellow prisoners, prison regulations, or the prison itself the prisoner’s mission is freedom. Acquiring all the requisite skills is merely the by-product. The lesson here is that if we don’t have a galvanizing mission personally and organizationally all the skills in the world won’t spare us mediocrity.

Next, prisoners are not only emotionally committed to this mission they are in fact institutionally committed. Like Cortez burning his ships, they have no line of retreat. Freedom is not just a mission. It is mission critical. Prisoners live the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention, and they are living proof that great inspiration depends on some desperation.

Most of us are not creative because we fear commitment. We want guarantees that commitment will always produce successful outcomes, and since this is an impossible demand, we end up frittering away our creative juices “hedging our bets” and rationalizing that hedging represents a “balanced life.”

A high overarching mission coupled with commitment produces urgency. Urgency in turn produces the single minded focus that is the prisoner’s third innovative hallmark. While single minded, it is important to remember that his focus is anything but narrow. Instead the prisoner becomes a generalist. His world is gradually transformed into a vast box of jigsaw pieces that he continually sifts looking for the piece that might quench his thirst for freedom. What to us and the guards may look like a scrap of paper becomes for him a tiny piece of his ticket to freedom.

The fourth element is that prisoners are willing to pay the price. Innovation may end with eureka, but it is usually preceded by an incubation period that varies in length in rough proportion to the problem’s degree of difficulty.

As mortal human beings, time is our scarcest resource and this precious resource is the price that a prisoner is willing to invest. The prisoner is not just willing to invest time, he is doing time, and we usually fail to reach our own creative potential because we are unwilling to make time.

The fifth prison secret to creativity is patience. Patience isn’t just endurance or tenacity. We must be willing to tenaciously endure frustration. We often mistake frustration for a negative emotion because it is uncomfortable when it is actually a symptomatic by-product of the buildup of creative energy. To reach our potential we must make friends with frustration and this means resisting the temptation to “blow off steam” through distraction whenever we are frustrated..."

Link: Full Text, The Prisoner's Dilemma: The Key to Creativity, August Turak, Forbes