The beauty and the beast – on the creativity/project management encounter
The Authors
Rolf A. Lundin, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the creativity/project management (PM) encounter in TV production.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is prompted by several questions. Does the project work form constitute a threat to creativity, inventiveness or innovation in problem solving? Is it also indirectly a threat to development? Is PM the beast killing off much of the creativity, the beauty that exists in the world? Is it the other way around? Or what is the character of the encounter? Is there even an encounter? An ongoing study of TV production companies provides empirical illustrations to our reasoning.
Findings – First, the PM focus on time performance in TV production can trigger innovative and creative responses to challenging targets because deadlines are good inspirations for creativity when time has to be compressed. Second, developing formats for TV production programs and series requires different PM creativity skills. Third, strategic development might be helped by a more strictly formulated PM procedure in order to activate attention to strategic issues in the turbulent industry.
Originality/value – It is rare to obtain deep insights of the lived experience of PM in the TV industry in general and more recently evolving TV cases such as in Sweden. This case study adds to our knowledge base in a PM sector viewing itself as highly creative. It also introduces readers to the idea of developing TV formats as a project product and contrasts creativity in design or TV shows with creativity in producing them. Considering the ongoing “projectification” and the commonly held views on the needs for creativity in project work, the questions are more than relevant and need to be explored further and beyond mere lip service.
Article Type:
Case study
Keyword(s):
Television; Project management; Creative thinking.
Journal:
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
Volume:
1
Number:
2
Year:
2008
pp:
206-215
Copyright ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:
1753-8378
Introducing the theme
Creativity is sought after in virtually every context, not least in projects and temporary organizations. In projects there are two aspects of creativity of special interest. One is related to the outcome of the project and the way the outcome solves the problem set out to be solved. If there is a customer involved – is the customer happy with the solution? The other aspect concerns the project work form itself. How can one renew the project way of thinking and working for those involved?
Creativity and innovativeness are of major concern in our times. It is particularly important for individuals who ask how they can liberate themselves from traditional action and thought patterns to improve upon their creative talents. But it is just as important for organizations preoccupied with notions of how to promote and foster a high degree of creativity in their own organizational context. At the same time, project organizing of work is prevalent and there is a real worry that project work and the instruments of project management (PM) inhibit creativity. PM might not be fostering creativity and innovativeness even though the project work form sometimes is conceived to be and described as a very open one when it comes to innovative developments. Thus, some people contend that PM in fact promotes creativity. So what happens at the interface and what is the nature of the creativity/PM encounter? To begin with what is in the literature?
Creativity in project-related literatures
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English “creativity” is defined as “the ability to produce new and original ideas and things”. An alternative term mentioned is “inventiveness”. However, in spite of the frequent use of the word creativity among project professionals in describing their project work efforts and ambitions, that theme is not so prevalent in written texts. If you Google for articles or books with PM and creativity in them you will get more than 100,000 hits. But the vast majority of these, the direct connection between PM and creativity is not taken up. If you take a look in general books and articles related to PM and there are only few and isolated instances where creativity is connected explicitly to PM. In the Handbook of Project Management edited by Pinto (1998) creativity is treated in a six line piece of text where the message is that creativity in projects in general is fostered if you bring “different” people together. In a similar way Jessen (1998) hails creativity especially in the early stages of project work (arguing that creativity involves the future). He also alludes to circumstances for creative work by comparing the situation of a painter who can react instantly if he/she gets a good idea for being creative, whereas an engineer might have to apply formally for research money in order to get started – several weeks later. The message seems to be that creativity involves some kind of urgency so that in project contexts creativity encounters special difficulties. A Danish handbook (titled Ways to get Music into the Project edited by Fangel, 1999) does not explicitly bring up the theme of creativity but many of the contributions concern participant motivation and incentive systems for performance seemingly related to creativity.
All three books might be regarded as textbooks. The Kupferberg (1996) effort is different. It is a thesis and about project work in an educational context where the goal is that project participants are there for the sake of learning. Thus, the project is exclusively a vehicle for learning and the results of the project should be evaluated in terms of individual learning rather than anything else. A “creative chaos” in the project work is said to be of advantage to the individual learning. As an exception it is interesting in its handling of “chaos” and for being so systematic.
In general, PM books allude to creativity in quite a simplistic way and in passing by. The references you find through Google Scholar apparently have a similar bias as the textbooks alluded to above. In other words they are not very sophisticated and mostly not empirically based. There are some exceptions, though, covering also empirical studies in the field. Many of them are related to product innovation or product development. As an example of these, Ekvall (1993) has analyzed a major (high-tech) product development project. The study was based on a substantial empirical effort where the creativity climate was measured in the project group on different occasions
With the exceptions mentioned above (in several cases like Ekvall/1993/reported in the journal Creativity and Innovation Management) and some summary articles like the one on leadership by Rickards and Moger (2006), the search concerning uses of the creativity concept in project-related literatures has been quite unrewarding.
Focusing creativity: a brief account of creativity research
In order to face up to the task to illuminate the creativity/PM encounter, there is a need to look more deeply into the creativity concept per se and its development. When one delves into publications focusing on creativity looking for connections to PM one usually does not find connections at all made explicitly. One exception is Amabile (1996) who in her book on creativity from a social psychological view explicitly refers to the role of the project manager who might either be a stimulant or an obstacle to creativity in the environment of the individual employee. This is probably a finding that most of us would take for granted, not adding much to the understanding of the encounter.
Ericsson (2001) has written a learned exposition of the history of ideas on creativity that might broaden our views on it. Unfortunately, it is all written in Swedish which means that it is out of reach for non-Swedish speakers both from a dissemination and from a critical evaluation point of view. In any case, he finds that the word “creativity” appeared for the first time as late as in 1875 even though the notion of creation had been in vogue for a very long time, especially in connection with mythology and various religious faiths (one might compare with phrases on the theme “and God created the world … ”). The nexus of the different parts of his exposition is that the question on how to define creativity has a long and unfortunately also inconclusive history. There is a multitude of different ways to “understand” creativity. What are the characteristics of a creative product for instance? Where is the borderline between inspiration and imitation? In the history of ideas efforts to find a workable definition of what is creative thus play a leading role. It is also pointed out that by some creativity is regarded as closely related to madness.
Much of the interest is also centered on creativity as something that characterizes the individual either as part of the inherited personality (biological explanation) or as an acquired trait. Notwithstanding the view held on the basis for creativity, creativity and age have been connected in various studies with the more or less implicit assumption of a negative correlation but with inconclusive results. Intuitive abilities and the subconscious have been studied for the role they play in the creativity process. All in all, research results and their views on the creativity concepts have provided a basis for a myriad of creativity testing instruments (and most such instruments have been criticized with arguments similar to the ones used against intelligence testing).
In addition, economists have also studied creativity, mostly concentrating on the output side. Rather than worrying about the origin of creativity or the general manifestations of creativity, their attention is focused on measuring the impact of creativity. The wage of individuals is conceived as determined by the educational levels, by skills on the job and other conceivably obvious factors of importance to the wage. In such a context the effect of creativity is measured as the residual for each individual giving room for quantification in creativity research (Smith et al., 1984).
Early on, the creativity research arena was dominated by psychologists, but later there was also substantial interest focused on social psychology (Amabile, 1996, see above for instance) and on how different environments affect creativity. The interest in creativity has been widened to include sociological perspectives as well. But this is all concerning researcher efforts, so next we allude to beliefs concerning creativity in business practice.
Creativity in a contemporary business context – a case
Most major businesses are for profit. In a choice between profitability and creativity most top managers are likely to side with profitability. The value of creative solutions for a business lies mostly in the reputation the concrete instance of creativity provides for the firm. But most firms – especially in fast moving industries – often describe themselves as masters of creativity in their marketing efforts. The notion that creativity is something characterizing the business as such with effects on the benefit side only (costing nothing special for the customer) is conveyed as a main marketing message for many ICT-related companies for instance. That kind of marketing should possibly be regarded as a case of institutional advertising.
For the most part creativity is regarded as a professional asset pertaining to an individual rather than being a company asset. And in certain industries the need for creativity is regarded as more central than in others – in service industries and in industries where the development pace is regarded to be high, people tend to use the word more often in my interview experience.
One such industry is TV production which is regarded by insiders as well as outsiders as a very glamorous industry and where the use of the word creativity seems to be used to stress the glamour and the exceptional especially for insiders. The following is a brief account of some major characteristics of an ongoing – and as of yet unreported – interview study of independent TV production companies in Sweden (independent in the sense that they can have all broadcasters as customers and are not confined to one only). The focus in data collection was on how PM and related methods are used in the companies. Formal interviews were held with six persons in the industry (consisting of in total 27 companies). These formal interviews lasted between 1 and 2.5 hours and have all been transcribed. Informal interviews have been held with approximately 20 persons related in some way to the industry. All interviewees refer to the industry as very dependent upon creativity in general. And in particular, there are a few individuals in the company who are crucial for that company due to the requirements in the industry. Each company is dependent upon one, two or possibly a few creative stars.
The industry is quite young – the first companies were formed in the late 1980s when commercial TV was set free in Sweden
Essentially, companies in the industry make a business out of delivering TV programs (or series of programs) to broadcasters based on contracts with the particular broadcaster. From the broadcaster point of view this business form might be regarded as outsourcing since the power distribution is so uneven with relatively few broadcasters and relatively many TV production companies. From the TV production company point of view it is an instance of regular business-to-business with very close connections to the customer.
Many, if not most TV production companies are also into the market for so-called formats. Essentially, a format is a well-developed “manuscript” or set of detailed instructions for a series of programs
A format might be a very valuable property and should need to be protected. The saying in the industry is that there is a factual gentlemen's agreement that you do not steal good ideas from a competitor. The fact is, however, that international legal aspects of formats are less than clear at the present time, but the matter is of high priority for the independent production companies
Formats can usually be adapted to the international market, so for formats catching the interest of TV audiences world wide they might prove to be very valuable as assets for the companies involved. Formats can be sold either as options or as full format to other TV producers or to broadcasters. This is another instance of B2B.
As alluded to above, the history of the TV production industry in general is described as turbulent. At present, the industry faces an increasing competitiveness with many new companies entering the market and with fairly few broadcasters controlling the market in an oligopoly situation. Among TV production companies, the broadcasters
Furthermore, the future of the industry in terms of direction is said to be very uncertain. According to the interviews, aspects of the uncertainty pertain to audience preferences – the commonly held belief is that the audience is on the move both in terms of tastes and in terms of “will there even be a TV audience in the future”. The latter is due to other distribution forms (by mobile phones or by computers, or mobcom for short) and in the industry as a whole much attention is paid to audience counts and on how to analyze the figures available. The technical development is making other distribution forms possible and the implications this might have for financing the businesses are of major concern and discussed commonly as problems. The situation can be characterized as one of quite extreme uncertainty. The industry and the technical development can both be seen as push and pull factors in this obviously transient period. The movements we see presently in the sector with unexpected acquisitions and strategic action probably only constitute the start of a new and possibly more stable era.
Interviewees tend to talk about creativity in three different contexts aside from the widely held belief that creativity in general is something that characterizes the industry and the companies. The three contexts are: production of TV programs, developing formats, and the future of the industry.
Ad (1): Production of programs appears fairly straightforward. It is in many ways similar to projects in construction – well planned but with occasional disturbances. The difference might be that TV production companies have extremely few full time employees. Almost all personnel resources are acquired for the specific production. The relation between full time people in a project to temporary people might be as low as 1/100. This makes coordination and timing crucial and the kind of creativity mentioned in this context is about how to plan and handle such a situation with lots of opportunities for disturbances (a mini-muddling situation if you adhere to the Wilson (2006) terminology). Costs for production constitute a lion's share of total costs in a production company, and in the present situation – described as increasingly competitive – there is a need to be creative to find low-cost alternatives to old ways of doing things in the production phase. In other words this is an efficiency concern where creativity in planning is aspired as well as creativity in handling disturbances and deviations from the plans. Momentum is important if there are a lot of people standing idle unless disturbances can be handled.
Ad (2): Developing formats and program ideas are influenced by the B2B situations. This area is where the creativity discourse is most prevalent in the interviews. All companies with the possible exception for the smallest ones have some forum or a think tank or development group working on program ideas. They essentially have two initiators for their work. One of them is that contacts with the broadcasters and data about how numbers of viewers of various programs are going to initiate a search for alternatives to programs with problems concerning audiences or advertisers. How can the available time slots at the broadcaster be filled with something with brighter prospects? In this instance some kind of focused creativity is needed. Another instance is the search for “good ideas” in general which might be useful according to the producer perception about where the TV audiences are going. In this case the development group either acts as a filter for what individuals in the company can come up with before more work is put into a new program idea. Alternatively they seem to spend time brainstorming at open-ended sessions. In particular, this is done when broadcasters invite producers to “pitches”. (A pitch is an occasion where the production company representatives present program ideas for the broadcaster possibly resulting in a contract.) In either case creativity is not regarded as part of a specified project – rather, creativity is a pre-project activity
Ad (3): The future of the industry was described in problematic terms by the interviewees. Items involved have been mentioned previously and they include uncertainty about technical developments and their implications for the industry, the over-establishment of companies in the field and pressures for cheap programs, financial squeeze due to changes in advertising behavior, unfaithful audiences, etc. At the same time, there is a tendency for a “demassification” of TV audiences (Küng, 2007). The response of broadcasters to that seems mainly to be creating special channels leading to even more fragmentation. The need for creativeness in the situation was mentioned repeatedly in the interviews with TV production people. In response to questions about what to do the discernible responses were: wait and see, keep an eye on the activities of the competition, keep an eye on where the audiences are going, etc. There was no indication of a well thought out strategy and no indication of any kind of strategizing group beyond the CEO and the chairman of the board. For the time being the strategy could be characterized as “follow the leader” of the members of the industry which certainly is a special form of industrial wisdom
The nature of the encounter
Judging from the example above, creativity and PM do not really meet. In the production of programs instance, the creativity asked for concerns the planning and the implementation of the production project. The mini-muddling aspect of that case might of course include minor adaptations of the final product, but on the whole this affects the way of thinking and working with projects rather than the product per se.
For the other two instances where the need for creativity was repeatedly made explicit there almost seems to be an intention to treat the creative elements as separate from a project-to-be. In the case of new program ideas, more or less formal projects are not set up until the task has been specified to something to be delivered. In the case of the strategy, there does not seem to be any project formulated. One explanation for the wait and see behavior might be that it does not pay to prepare too much for the future and strategize beyond simple worries, especially for the small TV production companies. The cadre of employment is extremely small with very little of heavy investments but the companies rely on freelancers, rental companies and other types of resources from the outside. Spending time on forming strategy might be regarded as a waste of time since so little can be gained by strategic procedures.
The reluctance to form projects to fit the needs for new programs and for a new strategy seems to be at odds with the ongoing projectification. In a way it might be a parallel to the “renewal paradox” described elsewhere (Ekstedt et al., 1999) and which states that even though project work easily can be renewed each time a project is started, this in fact never happens. Projects are most often treated as repetitive and even mistakes tend to be repeated. The parallel in this case might be described as a principle (or tendency) to “stick to established procedures”. Once a pattern for work has been established, it sticks to the minds of the actors. You tend to do as you have done in the past if nothing special happens. Not only do perceptions on how to run projects seem to be industry specific but so is also the choice of tasks/activities to be regarded as projects.
The roots of this division are probably to be found in past learning. In one sense, learning is a source for stability – stability in the way things are handled, projects or not – if one adheres to the flow and stock approach to learning and knowledge. If learning adds to the present state of knowledge, learning does not involve a complete brake-down of existing knowledge or attacks on what has been regarded as wise behavior in the past.
Phenomena such as creativity and innovativeness might be regarded as the opposite to learning if one adheres to thoughts in line with the flow approach discussed above. Creativity does not add a new brick-stone to the edifice under construction but fosters divergent thinking. Creativity involves the unexpected and thus represents a road away from previous customs and behaviors. Creative persons are often considered as rule breakers in relation to the very fields they are working in.
This line of reasoning goes well with serendipity approaches to learning or the view of learning inherent in the Kuhnian scheme for paradigm shifts in science (Kuhn, 1970). A dimension of unlearning is added to the conception of creativity.
If we were to give advice to people in the TV production industry, the advice would be to ask them to experiment with the project work form in the areas just described. Since application of the project work form by definition restricts the activities of the actors involved it is easy to take for granted that the project work form inhibits creativity. Adding more restrictions to the solution of an optimization problem can never improve on the optimal solution, only make it worse. But behavior in projects concerns people, not mathematics.
In a study of product development (Brunsson, 1976) the author investigated propensity to change by the study of three companies in a specific industry. One major difference in the handling of the product development departments of the companies concerned the attitude towards what products to develop. To simplify things, one attitude was to say “come up with some new products – we do not really care which ones as long as they are good and imply a decent reorientation as compared to our previous lines of business”. The other way of handling the product development was for the company leadership to be very specific in the requirements on the proposals expected from the product development department – not only on what kind of products but also specifying details like durability, presumed markets, etc. The result of the study turned out to be that the “anything goes” attitude was not very successful. The attitude to be very specific was very successful (and thus, not in line with the mathematically inspired conventional wisdom). The things delivered were not always completely corresponding to the original specifications but nevertheless very successful. The explanation according to Brunsson (1976) is that the successful case implied commitment building on both sides and quite an active interaction between company leadership and the product development department. The specified requirements from the company leadership provided a basis for that interaction level.
My point should be self-evident. Rather than separating acts of creativity from the use of the project work form there are reasons to believe that there might be advantageous effect of including demands of creativity and creative elements into the project scheme. Thus, the recommendation is to experiment with the project work form in areas where it has not been incorporated yet.
Conclusions: the beauty or the beast
This paper is a conceptual one even though it is empirically based. It brings forward a discussion on creativity and innovativeness and how they relate in various ways to what is argued as important and/or crucial in a PM context. It does so by alluding to the story of the Beauty and the Beast. However, it is up to the reader to define what is beautiful and what is beast-like even though the popular thought is that creativity and innovativeness are neutralized by the demands for order and control prescribed in most PM settings. When asked the question whether creativity is counteracted by PM and by the project work form many people would probably say “yes” even though it is always wise for the cautious person to say “maybe”. And a brave person might even argue that it is more fruitful to allude to the “on the contrary” argument
The ambitions to illuminate aspects of creativity in relation to the use of PM have taken us to the treatment of their encounter in the project-oriented literatures and to the treatment of creativity in research. In the PM literatures, the main concern seems to be on how to make the project work or how to make it efficient (by for instance putting requirements on the project leader or by providing chaos). Creativity research seems mostly preoccupied with creativity as a human characteristic and with how to provide good measures of (individual) creativity or as a socially constructed and discernible quality.
The case presented serves to illustrate that there seems to be a tendency to keep acts and intensions of creativity apart from the project work form implying that in effect there are very few encounters if any. Why cannot creativity be structured? Walfisz et al. (2006) have outlined a scheme for how creativity concerns could be built into a project (on game development) and that scheme seems to be relevant also in the current industry.
One advantage reported for PM relative to less prescriptive approaches of running things is that deadlines provide good incentives not only for getting things done on time but also for cutting corners and finding better solutions or new ways to get done. Or put differently, necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, deadlines are good inspirations for creativity. As a parallel, it has been reported that in the strategy area, strategic development is most certainly helped by a very strictly formulated strategy – not in the sense that the intended strategy becomes the outcome of the strategy put into practice – but the strict formulation of a strategy is useful in deliberations about the implementation phase and of what the strategy should lead to in practice.
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Corresponding author
Rolf A. Lundin can be contacted at: Rolf.A.Lundin@JIBS.HJ.se