‘Globally Employee engagement is at an all-time high of 23%’ (10% in the U.K) - Gallop 2023

The title of this blog Prescription-less Creativity is kind of an oxymoron statement but to say employee engagement is at an all-time high is encouraging but is 23% something to be proud of? Why so low we may ask. I have a perspective and I know that correlation doesn’t infer causation but perhaps there is some linkage to lack of employees being able to express their true creativity.

Personally I found it very sad that not many people are engaged at work. In my 3 decades plus in industry, my experience and as a highly empathetic person I saw this constantly across many businesses both small and large. I regularly had a visceral feeling that most people were not happy in their working environment, albeit they ‘appeared’ outwardly content.

To be or not to be: Purposely inauthentic to ‘fit in’ and be valued or liked

Speaking to many people over the years it seems they wear a metaphorical mask to ensure they are seen as a team-player, crushing it or whatever societal description one would choose preference over. These are not ‘bad’ people but genuine people who are trying to earn an honest living, not wanting to get fired and perhaps to just simply get by in life and do the best they can to support others, themselves and their families.

Getting back to the topic at hand and the title of this post…

Prescriptions

Prescriptions are mostly mechanical, logical, structured and sequential processes and what scientists term left-brain activity dominant. I am not saying prescriptions do not work, obviously when wanting to learn something technical, for example how to build a Lego set, how to repair your car, learn to code or operate a sewing machine etc then prescriptive solutions in the form of manuals or videos are extremely useful.

Creativity

This requires experimenting, iterating, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesising of information. These artistic traits tap into the right-brain and involve more emotional, intuitive and artistic traits, which are majorly under-utilised in today’s environment. Here is some evidence.

NASA’s Creativity Potential Study

There was a study commissioned by NASA on ‘Creative Potential’ conducted by George Land, which has been dubbed the longest study in history. The study involved 1,600 children between the ages of 3 to 5 who were enrolled in a head start program crafted for potential NASA recruits that tested creativity levels.

At ~5 years old 98% of those children were classified as creative geniuses.

At ~10 years old of those same children only 30% were classified as creative geniuses, and

At ~15 years old, only 12%

As Adults only 2% maintained their creative genius

Growth Opportunities

Interesting study you may ask, but what does this have to do with employee engagement? If we encouraged more creativity in the workplace what would that do to employee engagement? A recent Gallop survey revealed that people are not finding their work meaningful. Growth opportunities were the major reason people were not engaged in their work. Growth can mean a number of things such as learning new skills ****growth, a sense of purpose and motivation, resulting in greater quality work and innovation.

The Paradox of Lean / OpEx: Are employees autonomons?

The dilemma with Lean / Agile and OpEx is it ultimately drives a more prescriptional approach to peoples work by way of creating standards, whether for office or manufacturing processes such as SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures), SWCS (Standard Work Combination Sheets), SWS (Standard Work Sheet) and Percent Load Charts etc.

People are required to work to these standards, usually within a time restriction. For example; Complete a Sales order in X minutes, Customer Enquiry in 48 hours, End of month finance reporting in 36 hours or a manual build of a manufactured item in so many seconds.

The paradox is Lean drives the standardisation / prescriptional processes which provides more efficient and robust processes therefore leaving employees to work on more creative endeavours such as continual improvement of various processes.

I have an intuition, experience and theory, cannot quantifiable prove that a lack of creativity correlates directly to the way employees perform in the workplace, however a recent Gallop survey revealed that, globally employee engagement is only 23%.

The main reason suggested

‘Employees are not finding their work meaningful’

however in this modern-era of information overload and those annoying click-bait social media headline grabbing-attention techniques; 10 ways to achieve X, The 5 secret steps to do Y, and 10X your profit in Z weeks, it is easy to get side tracked and drawn into quick prescriptive solutions, which mostly use cookie-cutter short-cut techniques. Do these cookie approaches work in the true reality of the business world?

So what is your point you may ask, these prescriptions and techniques you said work? Yes, to an extent, but are they effective, sustainable and do they allow for optimal human creativity? No, in short. They cannot.

Many people have read biographies of famous successful people, for example on Amazon alone over 50,000 people have bought Elon musks books; do we see even 1 person achieving a tenth of what Elon has achieved through reading his books?