October 14th, 2025

Two ideas from an old creativity research

Amabile, Teresa M. “A Model of Creativity and Innovation in Organizations.” Research in Organizational Behavior 10, no. 10 (January 1, 1988): 123–67. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/20000708825.

Here is how someone described where they were looking for inspiration: in variations and deviations

A quote that says: "I'm in a unique situation. For one thing, I generally get the funding I need. But, more importantly, my management has pretty much left me alone. I don't have a specific product area that I have to work on, specific deadlines, and so on. It is pretty much an exploratory area. I devise my own time commitments as I see necessary. I have a great deal of freedom. I don't have management standing over me giving me specific guidelines that I need to follow. Quite often I will be tinkering in something that management will have no interest in, yet when I start to develop it into something. there will be a lot of interest. If they had close reins on me, they would have killed a lot of projects at an early stage and nothing would have resulted." — Amabile, Teresa M. “A Model of Creativity and Innovation in Organizations.”

And then talking about their work environment they hint at something that I also talked in the past: there has to be slack time (and not time on Slack) during the work to be able to thinker with things without having the pressure of always making something that is directly productive: