The truth is, creativity isn't about wild talent as much as it's about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don't. It's a pure numbers game. More specifically, it's about variance. When innovation is the goal, organizations need massive variation in what people do, think about, and produce. Artistic geniuses don't necessarily have a higher success rate than other creators; they simply do more -- and they do a range of different things. They have more successes and more failures. That goes for teams and companies too.
Personally, I think failure stinks. But the fact is, every bit of evidence demonstrates that it is impossible to generate a few good ideas without generating a lot of bad ideas. The thing about creativity is that you can't tell at the outset which ideas will succeed and which will fail. So the only thing you can do is try to fail faster in order to move on to the next idea. Now, leaders pay a lot of lip service to the notion of rewarding failure, but few organizations hold failed effort on the same level with success. Often, they have a forgive-and-forget policy. Forgiveness is crucial, but it's not enough. In order to learn from mistakes, it's even more important to forgive and remember. The only kind of failure that deserves to be punished is inaction.
There's another unspoken truth about creativity: It isn't so much about original creation as it is about using old ideas in new ways, places, and combinations. Henry Miller said it best: "All geniuses are leeches." IDEO, which is probably one of the most purely innovative companies in the world, has designed more than 4,000 products and worked with firms in dozens of industries. Its designers are constantly importing, mixing, and matching a vast range of technologies, products, and design tricks to produce new solutions. One group got the idea to create a "slit valve" for a bicycle water bottle out of a heart valve that was made for a medical-products company. Another designer took a cheap motor from a Chatty Cathy doll and fitted it to a docking station for an Apple laptop.
The most creative organizations in any industry cultivate a vu ja de mentality of seeing old things in new ways. The ability to keep shifting opinions and perceptions is crucial to creativity. It includes a capacity to switch from foreground to background, to think of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive (and vice versa) and to reverse assumptions about cause and effect. It means switching off the autopilot and looking at every challenge, project, and task with fresh eyes.
The best way to bring fresh eyes to any problem is to bring in new kinds of people. When it comes to innovation, no one is too weird for the room. It starts with whom and how you hire. There are a few very effective methods for finding useful misfits who will increase variance in what people think, say, and do. First, recruit slow learners of the organizational code. Hire people with a special kind of stupidity, who ignore or reject how things are "supposed to be done around here." Second, hire people who make you uncomfortable -- even people whom you actively dislike. Don't seek out those who are rude, insulting, or incompetent. But if you find a candidate who seems talented yet has different beliefs, knowledge, and skills than most insiders, then negative emotional reactions are reasons in favor of hiring the person. Such people often scout out new trends and directions for the company.
A final point about slow learners, loners, and agitators: They only add value if you surround them with fast learners and managers who can protect them and translate them to the organization. Creativity is a social process -- it doesn't work without that interplay. Look at Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He had little interest in what others did or expected him to do. He wouldn't write any grants, and he refused to go to faculty meetings. A collection of his autobiographical essays was titled, What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. He only had the resources to focus on his own discoveries because his colleagues took care of all that other work.
When you know that you need to head in a new direction, but you don't know which road to take, sometimes the best thing is to do whatever is most ridiculous or random. Thinking up the dumbest and most impractical things that you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. When you get people talking about products, services, and business practices that they believe are misguided, dumb, or even destructive, it can help bring the beliefs of the group into broad relief and crystallize what the company should be doing. In my consulting work with a professional-services firm, we developed a list of the worst characteristics of several key competitors. In the process, the firm's leaders found that they exhibited some of those characteristics themselves, and they set out to change them. By the same token, generating ridiculous ideas can invite questions rather than give confirmation about what a company knows and does.
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