Last week I had coffee with a friend who’s just started a stint at a scale-up. She described the culture like this:

Everything’s driven by “done” statements. The whole organisation operates by whether the things on each team’s list are done yet. It’s often not clear why each of those things needs to get done, but everyone’s running hard anyway.

It’s easy to get caught up in that kind of busy-ness because it fits our idea of being productive. Ticking tasks off in sequential order looks and feels like measurable progress. It’s perfect logic for an assembly line, but it’s much less useful for integrative problem-solving or broader innovation.

If, like my friend, you’re trying to do the second, the assembly line mindset isn’t helpful. Working on tasks that lack a clear ‘why’, especially while under excessive time pressure, is a recipe for killing off creativity.

Creativity takes more time than we usually give it, because it isn’t linear and the activities that go into making it happen often don’t feel “productive”. We’re social animals so when everyone around us is running hard, it’s often easier just to run too. Instead, here’s what really works:

understand the creative brain

Research points to three brain networks that interact to produce successful creative endeavors: the default mode network (DMN), which is active when nothing much else is occupying your attention (it’s in charge of daydreams, rumination, and pondering); the salience network, which draws the attention of the executive network to anything important that needs a conscious response - including things your DMN might have come up with while daydreaming; and the executive network itself, whose job it is both to select useful experiences and information for the DMN to mull over, and to decide which of its ideas are worth pursuing.

If you’re stuck in an efficiency-first environment where you still need to be creative - which will be more and more of us as AI takes on the less creative tasks, while organisations still struggle to move on from assembly line management techniques - there’s a good chance it’s going to be stressful. It will help to make time for the following things. They won’t feel efficient, but they’re effective.

widen your view

High-quality daydreaming puts unlikely things together, splits apparently singular things into parts, reverses figure and ground, and travels into the past and future. The more variety you can give your DMN to work with, the more material it has for novel recombinations that fit into these categories, and the more likely it is that something useful will emerge.

Taking a different route home, reading in a field or genre you haven’t visited in a while, talking to someone in a different part of your organisation about their work - none of these activities will feel particularly productive, but they’re all good ways to vary your DMN diet.

allow time and headspace for incubation

Undue time pressure can kill creativity in two ways: it short-circuits the incubation time required for the DMN to do its daydreaming work, and it occupies attention in precisely the wrong way. Conversely, mastering mindfulness may not help you either. While mindfulness is great for managing the stress of time pressure, it’s too focused - too much executive network, not enough default mode - to support creativity.

The DMN does its best creative work when it’s just occupied enough - when you’re neither completely at rest, nor attending to something in particular - in the shower, say, or while out walking… more activities that can feel unproductive.

learn to love ambiguity

The executive network’s job is to pick up the default mode’s great ideas and short-circuit the rest. This can be a subtle task. If you move too quickly into resolving ambiguity, ideas that aren’t obviously good at first glance can end up in the reject pile before they’ve had time to develop. Again, allowing unresolved ideas the chance to evolve may feel like a waste of thinking time, but it reliably pays off in more creative solutions.

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Creative work is reliably tank-filling. It’s more motivating than we generally acknowledge, there’s more potential value in it than ever, and at the same time it can be incredibly challenging in efficiency-driven organisations. If it’s hard to make time to widen your view, allow for incubation, and sit with ambiguity, try blocking out time for each, and close the loop by reflecting on unexpected ideas and insights. You'll quickly see that effective can be just as valuable as efficient.

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