Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The Creativity of Anger
Wired.com: At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.
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Although this isn't that encouraging of an article for people in creative fields, (especially when he says "Their angst led to better art.) I do have to agree that at least heavy criticism, if not anger, seems to produce far better results than complacent reviews. An honest, harsh critique is always much much more useful than someone who does not care enough saying that your project is good or nice. Suggesting that anger is the best way to go makes me a little concerned, though, because I think that in the context of a critique it would be easy to mix up anger at the individual rather than anger at the project they have made.
This is very interesting. I think it makes a lot of sense about how anger can cause an adrenaline boost that causes a large amount of creativity that is uncensored. I think their is a fine line between making someone angry and shutting them down, and if anger can be accomplished without causing the person to simply resign from caring about a topic, such as Jobs making a team of people so angry as to work even harder on their project, then it can be a great tool. It is not a secret that many great artists were troubled and angry with life, and this inspired much of their creations. It makes a lot of sense for a content mind to think that its creative needs have been met while an angry mind continues to work even harder to discover what it can create. It is exciting to find out about all these new discoveries on the cognition of the brain!
Well this is depressing. But it does make a lot of sense. When we don't feel happy we tend to want to change that and a good way to change that is by creating something that we can feel good about. Also like they say in the article it is a little jolt of adrenaline and it does feel really good to yell at people sometimes, why else would we do it? I find that for me negative feedback mixed with positive always produces the best out come. In my 4th grade class when we were talking about other peoples projects if we were going to say something that was a criticism we had to say something that was nice about it too. I think this generally a good rule to go by, it shows people that you don't completely hate them so they want to work for you but then tells them what they can improve.
When someone is angry with me over poor quality of my work, I know that I want to prove them wrong. I think we often want to prove people wrong when they think badly of us, we want to be liked! I definitely know the feeling of the burst of adrenaline when someone makes you angry, but I think there is a very fine line there. I know that if someone has really really pissed me off, the burst of adrenaline is so great that there is no way i can think of good ideas, the only thing I can think about is my anger against that person. I don't know if this creativity of anger stuff will ev really take off, though, because brainstorming has worked for many years, and, well, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
I feel that regardless of the creative energy it brings, outward "anger" toward others is never effective.
That is not to say that anger can be funneled into a more creative mechanism. However, expressing your true feelings in the manner that you are feeling them is also good advice. It is always better to speak your mind, however, the reaction of the person you are emoting at should also be taken into account.
If the person will shut down because of how they are being spoken to, then it is not worth it and another way must be found. However, some people are fueled by this type of encouragement, and this will light a fire that will make better work.
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