Creativity is nourished by conflict - by Scott Belsky - LI9
- Marko Svetlicic
- Nov 18, 2016
- 2 min read
Scott Belsky shared an article on Medium where he expressed his thoughts on how creativity happens. Is there something we can do to kickstart the process of creative thinking? Or, is it that people are born creative? Belsky believes that creativity is nourished by conflict and argues that this both applies to individuals and teams. In this specific article, Belsky presented the story from Rachel Platten who now has an album at the top of the iTunes charts.
She has struggled for years without any success which destroyed her both financially and mentally. At that break down point she did not stop writing and recording and that is where the conflict yielded something valuable. Her song climbed up the charts and made her famous, but can truly be defined by many ‘no’s’ and ‘you are not good enough’s’. There are numerous other examples including Robin Williams who fought with depression, Alanis Morisette who had a devastating brake-up, and so on. These stories define individual lives and make people question: Is conflict good in organisations where more than one individual is involved?
According to Belsky, the leader’s role with teams is to channel conflict to fuel the journey. Leaders should seek to resolve conflict, but at the same time not restrain it. The tensions are the magic touch that forces people to question themselves and explore the full terrain of possibilities. The tensions keep members of the team uncomfortable enough to keep trying until the solution is found. Healthy competition can indeed yield tremendous results and leaders should hire people that are willing to fight as well as resist passivity ruthlessly. Belsky argues that if you believe and care about something, you will be willing to fight for it being that an idea, a business or someone you love.
Critical thinking can be inspired by conflict and lead to creative ideas. Therefore, leaders should encourage group work, case study discussion and competition. For example, I took part in the course about leadership and one of the first tasks was to split into two big groups and pick one famous person to defend from the other group. My group had Donald Trump (this was before he started running for the president of USA) and other group had Angelina Jolie. The set out of the exercise included conflict and both groups were trying to find ways to make their person shine as well as defend him/her if needed. The exercise proved fruitful and we all realised that both Donald Trump and Angelina Jolie have positive and negative things about them. The only difference was that we managed to find much more information about them than it was usually presented by the media. So, why is that relevant?
In order to be able to make credible conclusions which could lead to some great ideas, we need to be able to identify all features of the problem. Also, to be able to identify different features of a problem we needed more independent thinkers who can give their own view on the situation. This exercise thought us how teamwork, competition and conflict can be crucial for the organisational success. Leaders, therefore, need to tailor conflict in order to be able to initiate critical thinking and creativity.
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