Originality is a catalyst for change. It is subversive. It challenges conventions. It is discord. It is chaos. But we forget the following phase is normalising. The rebel becomes the respected and revered elder.

Ted Gioia reminds us that Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips were too much for American television in the 1950s. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were a clear indication of societal decay in the 1960’s. In 2021, let me introduce you to the establishment: Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jagger. Over time, the original and subversive become mainstream. It is a constantly repeating process.

It is difficult to be subversive and discordant in our workplaces and organisations. The social norms are more tightly defined and reinforced. The behavioural controls are more explicit. The shared spaces for dissent are few. And our freedom of movement to be different is greatly reduced.

The price of originality is disruption

Similar sentiments have been expressed in all types of human endeavour including exploration, science, literature, art. In these activities’ imagination is called out as critical to success, fame, and relevance. Borrowing and imitation have always been part of our understanding of originality.

The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively on his own resources […] What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account anything that strikes us […] Every one of my writing has been furnished to be a thousand different things […] My work is an aggregation of things taken from the whole of Nature: it bears the name Goethe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Critic Harold Bloom wrote that, ‘No poet can write a poem without, in some sense, remembering another poem’.

For Bloom, true originality is the struggle to distance our thoughts from the traditions of the past expressed as the practices of the day. William Blake, Bloom argues, distinguishes himself as poet through his attitude – visionary, wild, blunt, and angry. Blake is admired for his independence in thinking through and challenging commonly held ideas and traditions. 

In his poem London, Blake recognised the characteristic of most people to accept the limitations placed on them by others, and perhaps more disturbingly, forge their own restraints on imagination. 

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear, 

In every voice: in every ban, 

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

In today’s language, we find it easier to ‘rub along to get along’ than question, challenge, and disrupt.

The price of originality, imagination, and creativity is disruption.

To see the world differently, to distance our thoughts from tradition, is ideological. To deliberately break from the past is not rational or intellectual, it is emotional. 

The American author and educator, Neil Postman, recognised the reward for breaking from the past was to establish new rules, new traditions, and to lead people a new form of stability. There is no room for compromise with true originality. 

To be original is to create something new. It requires the ability to form and work with a mental image that is at odds with orthodoxy. It is not a pursuit that follows a straight and narrow path; rather, it is a winding and complex path that demands occasional leaps of faith. 

Originality does not have an evidence base. It starts with a feeling of dislocation, of ‘things’ not being right. Or maybe, it is an irritation with the routine and mundane. Or maybe, it comes from the anger that ‘it’ should be better. Originality is activated by curiosity and the willingness to explore.

Management education crushes imagination

But our professional management training instils in us a dogma of empiricism that steadily grinds down imagination. It does not acknowledge that to have an original thought, imagination must precede evidence. Imagination is required to see other possibilities.

Just because you have no evidence for a theory or imagining does not mean that evidence does not exist or has never existed. Focusing our attention on the available facts does not show you what you don’t have. At some point, imagination needs evidence but to be original evidence may be an impediment. 

For example, in 1958, Eugene Parker wrote a scientific paper for The Astrophysical Journal in which he coined the term ‘solar wind’. Parker theorised solar winds were caused by a stream of charged particles constantly released by the sun that flows into the solar system. Parker’s theory challenged the scientific orthodoxy of the time. 

The paper was rejected by two reviewers as idle fancy before being rescued by the journal’s editor. Over the next four years the theory was doubted until the existence of the solar wind was proved using data from the Mariner 2 mission to Venus. Since then, Parker’s work has become the standard in solar research. Indeed, it became the centre of future research and innovation. Eugene Parker went from outcast to mainstream.

Our workplaces do not tolerate those who challenge the mainstream. We grind out the irritation of creativity in the interests of efficiency. Practicality in the now that discounts the future is valued over possibilities that arise from seeing the world through different eyes. In our hearts, we want more of the same.

Managers ask for creativity but reward activity

Our managers expect the dividend from imagination, creativity, and innovation but are they prepared to pay the price that accompanies original thought?

In our workplaces, activity is rewarded. We are defined by crises and the immediacy of our response. We avoid the elephant in the room by finding and solving small problems. There is enormous satisfaction to be gained from little victories. We get a strong sense of achievement and we feel valued. And so, activity is preferred over imagination. Deepening the known is valued over imaging a better outcome. Efficiency becomes a core value.

To be original requires us to see beyond what is known. It is to live in a world of stories, myths, partial truths, and falsehoods while treating them as if they are all true. Management positions originality at the end of a rational thinking process. On the contrary, originality and imagination is always at the beginning of thought and it is agnostic of any practical outcome. It is the insight from which thinking starts.

We say we want the innovation that comes from imagination. We continue to encourage the workforce to be innovative in developing policy, products, services, tools, and techniques. But what we say we want challenges today’s way of working. It confronts patterns of culture, behaviour, power, and authority. And the experience of many is that the managerial mindset, culture and behaviours that pervade our organisations serve as the self-imposed restraints. They are Blake’s ‘mind forged manacles’.

In our organisations, words like innovation and creativity are so overused that they have lost all meaning. We can reclaim the meaning and value of these words but it will require a shift in what we value.