Influences on Challenges

THEE Note: As explained, the organizational context affects both perception of challenges and their handling. In terms of this Creativity Framework, various considerations come into play. Some are suggested here.

RG5: Dynamic Equilibrium affects Perseverance

Determination, justification and motivation remain important regimens in organizations, but they are no longer about personal vantage. You should press on with any challenge but at the same time, the organization requires you, like everyone else: ●to be socially predictable, ●to work cooperatively with others, and ●to complete essential tasks on time. This is not easy, but when it occurs generally, the organization is in a stable dynamic equilibrium. This allows it to move forward and innovate at a rate that avoids damaging mishaps and misunderstandings.

Perseverance leads you to stick tenaciously to the organizations's challenge despite delays, hardships or even costs, and despite failures. You may make a radical change of course or engage in lengthy workarounds. We are dealing with creativity so the process is not wholly under rational control.

Management, by contrast, expects all employees to persist with assignments, until told to desist. You cannot insist on delays, new approaches or altered targets. Your manager was probably not the originator of your challenge. He was following orders. So you know that an instruction may be given, at any moment, to desist.

Awareness that you may be told to drop a challenge is profoundly inhibitory to creativity.
Why?

You know you may be expected to just switch off one assignment and take on another, regardless of all your effort and commitment. Someone may decide (perhaps without consultation) either that you are unable to succeed, or that the challenge is too great, or possibly that the outcome is no longer wanted.

However much rationalized, you will experience such an instruction as an attack on your autonomy and on your judgement. This is so emotionally disturbing and personally disruptive that you need to protect yourself.

Past experiences of this sort and anticipation of such treatment by management leads people to keep their creative energies in check. In the worst cases, like the UK's National Health Service which is a political football, cynicism starts pervading management and clinicians alike.

RG6: Accountability affects Immersion

In the personal challenge, immersion is subject to your control. You start and stop ruminating or experimenting as feels right and feasible for you. You devote your precious time, money and attention as you choose, even if within constraints. It is all part of the responsibility assumed when you allowed yourself to become immersed in the challenge.

In employment challenges, you are assigned something specific and substantial by a manager. Your accountability to your manager takes priority over personal judgements of responsibility. Whatever work you do and whatever resources you expend must be accounted for. There is no way out: you must accept accountability and you know full well that colleagues, bosses and those even higher up do not always see things your way. Sometimes they seem really stupid.

(Issues of management and accountability are examined in much more detail within the Framework of Expectations and Obligations in Organizations.)

Accountability for meeting a challenge also relates to behaviour expected of you within the organization e.g. you usually must champion the issue. Also whatever you do about the challenge becomes inextricably entangled in judgements of your overall performance. As a result, the experience of risk includes many organizational uncertainties
including:

• Uncertainty about how long this assignment will be operative.
• Uncertainty about how you are being judged.
• Uncertainty about whether management will keep its promises.
• Uncertainty about the politics of the project.

It seems easy to map the creativity qualifiers on to championship (= preoccupation) and performance (=experimentation):

Championship involves:

• focusing inquiry meaningfully
• targeting change sensibly in the light of inquiries
• intensifying experiences shrewdly to maintain balance and win over key colleagues
• communicating reflectively about the challenge to foster cooperation
• adaptively highlighting relevant values and goals to keep work on track
• being deliberately willing to symbolize and drive the project.
  

Performance involves:

• deliberately pursuing relevant purposes
• communicating adaptively about the challenge to maintain morale.
• intensifying experiences reflectively to be aware of evolving situations
• targeting change shrewdly to maintain feasibility
• focusing inquiry sensibly to know what is needed and what is achieved
• taking action meaningfully to generate progress.

RG7: Necessity & Obligation affect Challenges

A mindset of obligation naturally flows from signing a contract (or making a compact). This leads you to use your willpower-G1 for the organization and release your creative energies generally in its service. This is healthy for both parties.

When assigned specific and difficult or undesirable tasks (i.e. challenge-equivalents) by a manager, you evoke necessity as well as courage, and experience an obligation to discharge the task-challenge with positivity.

Why not a genuine experience of «personal challenge»?

Many things in organizational life demand courage, but creative challenges are not usually numbered among them. A person who takes on any so-called «challenge» knows that it belongs to the organization just as the risk and the benefit do. Any direct personal benefit is primarily focused on career advancement.

Accepting an assignment, however nicely communicated, entails bowing before authority. Some mavericks do seek out peculiarly difficult assignments without permission, and deliver spectacular solutions, usually by breaking rules as they go. They do not usually last long in organizations, except as the leader.

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Next: 

• Look at the release of creative energies in an organization.

Originally posted: 17-Feb-2012