Balancing Efficiency with Creativity

The Jakarta Post, Features, July 29, 2007
Published as "How to balance efficiency with creativity"
Dewi Susanti & Kayee Man


Any company or institution needs to have a workable system in order for the organization to function properly. For most of us, our first instinct is to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in such a way that productivity and therefore profit-making can be maximized.

As part of planning, and in relation to the future projection of what we aim to achieve, we often need to create a plan along with a system that organizes people and supporting instruments to nourish the plan. We maintain that people and instruments of support should abide by this system in order to achieve the goal.

But we should be aware that the system, rather than serving to support the plan and the goal, often turns into rules that become set in stone. This means that adhering to the rules to achieve a goal becomes more important than the goal itself. As such, it doesn't provide enough room to accommodate changes, to respond to opportunities that we find along the way and, more importantly, to encourage creativity to occur during the process.

Through this article, we aim to discuss how a rigid system could also mean not taking advantage of the ability of human resources to be creative and to make decisions. We will give several examples of work systems that undermine or encourage human capacity, and invite suggestions for how we might strike a balance between creativity and efficiency.


Efficiency vs. flexibility

In the past three years, Dewi has been thinking about going back to school. She started applying for scholarships and, last year, passed the application process and was nominated as a candidate to receive a scholarship for a PhD program. She applied for several, and was accepted into a master's program at a top university of her first choice. Assuming that scholarship programs were created for giving suitable and motivated candidates an opportunity to study, Dewi appealed that her scholarship application fund the master's program.

She met with the executive director of the institution administering the scholarships and was informed that the scholarship she had been nominated for could not be used to support the master's program and that the institution had little authority over the decision-making process for the scholarship program.

She was advised to reapply for the scholarship program, which could specifically be used for the master's program. The application process would take another year. While she realized that the system must have been made in order to avoid individual bias over a candidate, the institution's role had been diminished to the rigid administrative processing of the applications.

The system not only undermined the thinking abilities of the people who work for the institution, but also wasted resources unnecessarily.

The advice to reapply entailed that the institution would have lost its human resources time and a considerable amount of funding that had been used to help Dewi get into a university. Multiply this by the hundreds of candidates that have been in similar conditions with Dewi over the course of decades and you will get a picture of the huge loss that could have been used to fund more scholarships instead.

A system designed for effectiveness in this case had resulted in a stifling of individual contribution, wasteful use of resources and, in Dewi's view, missing the aim of the organization for which it was established.

This example represents one of the many traps that are often encountered at large companies and institutions. How do we create an accountable and efficient system while allowing individual contribution and flexible decision-making?

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3M is another example of how growth can stifle individual contribution. The company is well-known for its inventiveness. Many of its products, like Post-it notes, masking tape, Scotch cellophane tape were products that 3M literally stumbled upon, rather than invented out of purposeful and planned strategy. 3M's inventiveness is often attributed to its rule that allows employees to allocate up to 15 percent of their time to projects that are a product of their own interests.

Yet, a recent article in Business Week Online (June 11, 2007) indicated that even 3M stumbled on hard times when it came to remaining innovative in this highly competitive world. In the past decade, the company has not produced anything that could justify its legacy. The article reported that it was due to a different shift in the management of the company, and the introduction of Six Sigma as an attempt to make 3M more efficient.

This more efficient system apparently also stifled creativity at 3M. Indeed, effective and efficient systems do not seem to go along well with encouraging individual creativity and decision-making.

How, we wonder, may we bring the two together?
The answer seems to be counterintuitive: loosen up the system.


Creativity can boost effectiveness

We shall illustrate this with the example of the architecture of Stata Building, the center for Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry who is most well-known for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Architectural critic Robert Campbell recently wrote about the building with lots of unprogrammed (unplanned for) space: " ... an efficiency expert would call it a total waste," and pointed to the incoherent organization of the corridors that causes people to get lost in the building.

But most of the occupants seem to love the incoherent organization of the corridors that put them into chance meetings with people from different departments, and for the many unprogrammed spaces that allow informal chats and meetings to happen across the disciplines.

In an interview with Frank Gehry, Campbell revealed that the architect intended for the seemingly obscure organization of the corridors and spaces because the brief specified: " ... there are seven separate departments that never talk to each other. [But] when they talk to each other, if they get together, they synergize and make things happen, and it's gangbusters." (Business Week Online, June 19, 2007.)

This brings us to the point that creativity can provide effective solutions to problems. The process of getting there and the outcome often do not take us through the most efficient way, but if it effectively solves the problem, should we not give more room for creativity?

Effective and efficient systems would, as in our effective and efficient building example above, see unprogrammed systems and spaces as wasteful, and accordingly, decisions would be made for what is seemingly optimally and financially more viable.

But as we have seen from both 3M and the Stata Building examples, if anything, it is the unprogrammed spaces and systems that provide buffer zones for creative ideas to happen.

Allowing time for employees to come up with new ideas has been shown by research to be an essential element for creativity to occur within an organizational context. Yet again, this is counterintuitive to the efficient systems espoused by highly organized workplaces.

The challenge is how to create a system that allows enough room for flexibility and creativity while at the same time ensuring that the system is not so relaxed that efficiency and productivity are undermined. This challenge also lies in finding the appropriate laxity within a specific culture.

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In the first four years since the founding of our company, Kayee set out a company policy for flexible working hours. Anyone could come in late or leave early as long as deadlines were met and meetings started on time. Realizing that people have different productive times and sometimes have to take care of personal matters, the aim of this policy is to cater to individual needs while still tapping into their productive and creative hours.

But over the course of the years, it became harder and harder to maintain such a system, because people came in late even when meetings had been announced in advance, and deadlines were not met.

What Kayee realized in the end was that it would take a high level of self-discipline and individual respect for the system and everyone involved for the system to work. In the end, to her great dismay, Kayee abolished flexible working hours.

An overly rigid system stifles individual creativity. We are still searching for the organizational formula for the laxity needed for creativity in an efficient system, within an Indonesian cultural context (or is it our company culture?).

How might we create a buffer zone for creativity within an Indonesian context? All suggestions are welcome.