Psychologist Janet Evans explains how to create the right environment for development

 Our industry depends on individual creativity, but can it sometimes be hostile to it? As Sophie – a TV drama producer - says: ‘As far as you can you have to protect your creative from everything else going on round them. You need to make a little bubble of encouragement and support and keep your creative in it, so that they can do their magic’.

What can psychology tell us about how to provide the right conditions for creativity to flourish?

Creative ideas involve making links not made before: whether they are paradigm-changing scientific discoveries and technical innovations, intriguing new content, or the many smaller insights we have in our daily working and personal lives. By connecting things in novel ways, we build a new perspective on the world.

The originators of Who do you think you are? realised that they could simultaneously explore an engaging personal story - the ancestry of a celebrity - and the great historical movements of the last two centuries. The producers of Bridgerton reimagined the Regency world of the books with twenty-first century dialogue, colours and music.

There are two mysterious aspects to this process. First, though frequently precipitated by an outside stimulus – noticing or learning something new, or a change of scene- the act of creation involves taking components already available in the creator’s existing mental store and reassembling them in a new way.

Secondly, the process takes place at unconscious level, out of the creator’s awareness and control.  We experience a minor version of this phenomenon every time we wrestle fruitlessly with an issue, put it aside and sleep on it. We often find that things are much clearer in the morning. Our unconscious minds have been busily sorting overnight, things have fallen into place and the salient points have emerged. The ‘aha moment’ when a new idea or insight springs into your conscious mind is a product of the same sorting process on a larger scale.

Our unconscious minds are always working beneath the surface, continuously reorganising our knowledge to accommodate new information, and trying out new combinations of ideas.  Neuroscientists believe that this processing takes place in a particular part of the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN flip-flops with the Executive Network (EN) which you use for focusing on a task: when the EN is on, the DMN is off and vice versa.

So, the broad associative thinking of incubation happens during periods when your mind is at rest, and not when you’re thinking about your to do list, answering emails, listening to colleagues’ conversation, or sitting in a meeting.

Ideal conditions are when you are relaxed, dozing or taking a shower or a walk, or doing something mundane like cleaning the house. Lots of new ideas surface after holidays too.

Nor do you have any direct control over this unconscious sorting – it will take as long as it takes, and some ideas are slow burn. The worst thing you can do is to try and short-circuit it. If you try to capture a new thought before your unconscious mind has finished assembling it, it will simply evaporate.

So, what can you do to nurture the creative process in the workplace?  Here are some key points, many of which run counter to the ‘hurry sickness’ which infects so many of our working lives.

You can only create if your unconscious is well stocked with relevant ideas, information and vocabulary - so reviewing others’ work and audience trends is not a waste of time. But incubation takes place in an individual’s mind, not in meetings, and it requires time free of distractions: presenteeism and meeting-oriented cultures, whether digital or actual, are hostile to the development of new ideas

Nor does incubation happen to order. Our unconscious minds will only latch onto an idea if we are interested in it and relaxed. Micro-management – unnecessary deadlines, constant progress chasing - is the enemy of creativity; as is impatience.

And finally, creative people tend to have certain personality characteristics, which you need to understand and accommodate if you are get the best from them.  I explore this in my next piece for Broadcast.

Janet Evans is a psychologist and coach who has worked extensively in the creative industries.