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Why Morning Routines are Creativity Killers ?

Everything about the way we start our day runs counter to the best conditions for thinking creatively

Brrriiinnng. The alarm clock buzzes in another hectic weekday morning. You leap out of bed, rush into the shower, into your clothes and out the door with barely a moment to think. A stressful commute gets your blood pressure climbing. Once at the office, you glance through the newspaper, its array of stories ranging from discouraging to depressing to tragic. With a sigh, you pour yourself a cup of coffee and get down to work, ready to do some creative, original problem-solving.

Good luck with that.

As several recent studies highlight, the way most of us spend our mornings is exactly counter to the conditions that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us promote flexible, open-minded thinking. Take that hurried wake-up, for example. In a study published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning last year, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks reported that imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we?re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made. Sleepy people?s ?more diffuse attentional focus,? they write, leads them to ?widen their search though their knowledge network. This widening leads to an increase in creative problem solving.? By not giving yourself time to tune into your meandering mind, you?re missing out on the surprising solutions it may offer. (If you happen to be one of those perky morning people, your most inventive time comes when you?re winding down in the early evening.)

Your commute filled with honking cars or sharp-elbowed fellow passengers doesn?t help, either. The stress hormone cortisol can harm myelin, the fatty substance that coats our brain cells. Damage to these myelin sheaths slows down the speed with which signals are transmitted between neurons, making lightning-quick ?Eureka!? moments less likely. And while we all should read up on what?s going on in the world, it may be better to put that news website or newspaper aside until after the day?s work is done. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science found that subjects who watched brief video clips that made them feel sad were less able to solve problems creatively than people who watched an upbeat video. A positive mood, wrote researcher Ruby Nadler and her coauthors, increases ?cognitive flexibility,? while a negative mood narrows our mental horizons. The segment that made participants feel worst of all? A news report about an earthquake.

The only thing most of us do right in the morning, in fact, is drink coffee. Caffeine not only makes us more alert, as we all know ? it also increases the brain?s level of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that influences feelings of motivation and reward when we hit on a great idea. (Nicotine does this, too, but I can?t in good conscience recommend an a.m. cigarette.)

So what would our mornings look like if we re-engineered them in the interest of maximizing our creative problem-solving capacities? We?d set the alarm a few minutes early and lie awake in bed, following our thoughts where they lead (with a pen and paper nearby to jot down any evanescent inspirations.) We?d stand a little longer under the warm water of the shower, dismissing task-oriented thoughts (?What will I say at that 9 a.m. meeting??) in favor of a few more minutes of mental dilation. We?d take some deep breaths during our commute, instead of succumbing to road rage. And once in the office ? after we get that cup of coffee ? we?d direct our computer browser not to the news of the day but to the funniest videos the web has to offer.

For decades, psychologists have manipulated the emotions of subjects in the lab by showing them short film clips. But now there?s YouTube ? and, in fact, the clip that made the participants in Ruby Nadler?s study happiest of all was a YouTube video of a laughing baby. Laughing babies and a double latte: now that?s a way to start the day.

Agency Recruiters Can Learn a Thing or Two From Corporate Recruiters

It?s round two in the battle of who can learn what from whom. The battle continues between corporate talent acquisition and agency and executive recruiters. It?s easy to sit back and say that corporate recruiters have it easy and that agency and executive recruiters have the only legitimate experience when it comes to ?hard-core recruiting?. Well, there is another point of view. If you manage an agency you may want to take note and use some of this information in your next staff training.

It is true that agency recruiters and executive headhunters are hungry and thus motivated to be better sales people when it comes to finding new clients and sourcing candidates. Their paycheck depends on their ability to sell to both candidate and employer. If they aren?t excellent at their job they just simply won?t make enough money to continue working as an agency recruiter or headhunter. Natural selection weeds out the weak, so the only ones left are necessarily pretty good at sales and negotiation. So, from the sales aspect agency recruiters will ?win? for having generally higher motivation, sales techniques, and negotiation tactics.

However, there are many business skills that excellent corporate recruiters have that a lot of agency recruiters don?t.

?Easy recruiting?- Agency recruiters are often called in to fill highly complex and difficult roles, whether specialized software engineering roles or sophisticated executive positions. Corporations will rarely pay 20% of salary to find an account executive, customer service agent, administrative assistant, or accounting clerk. Agency recruiters can easily dismiss this type of recruiting as easy. However, far from being easy, hiring these types of roles (especially in volume) requires finesse, careful planning, and thoughtful technical execution.

Do agency recruiters know how to handle 50 job applicants when most of the 50 are actually qualified? Do they know how to hire 100 positions or fill 10 different jobs in 4 different locations? How about hiring jobs with zero job qualifications except for having a good work ethic? These types of jobs without a significant level of talent scarcity pose their own unique challenges. Corporate recruiters must develop workflows and hiring techniques to deal with these issues. It?s a world that most agency recruiters don?t have to worry about.

Creating Brand Identity- Corporate talent acquisition must work to create a world class recruiting brand that will ensure they receive a steady flow of candidates. They put to use their brand and marketing skills by having presence on college campuses and other outlets, succinctly creating messaging around their ?employer of choice? brand, and they have to fight any sort of negative publicity that may impact a candidate wanting to accept a job with them.

Think about how difficult a recruiter?s job is if the CEO was just fired for embezzling millions of dollars? What could a recruiter say to ?save? a candidate if a major lay-off had just occurred, or earnings were missed by a substantial amount, or an IP lawsuit had just been filed? Perhaps most challenging: what if the company is just kind of boring or is in a lackluster industry? A recruiter must block and tackle any negative publicity while building upon a positive brand identity and make sometimes boring positions sound exciting. They have to create sizzle, whereas agency recruiters are often recruiting on hard-to-fill and often already ?sexy? positions ? and corporate recruiters have to do this day-in, day-out for the same company.

Jack of All Trades- A Corporate recruiter has to learn a little about everything in their company. They must be flexible and quick to learn to a degree in order to be able to source the right candidates for those niche positions. They also need to sell positions in departments they may know nothing about and have little to no interest in. It?s only at the largest company?s where recruiters get the ?luxury? of specializing in a specific type of recruiting. Any company with less than 1,000 employees a recruiter is almost certainly recruiting for anything from an hourly admin, to a software developer to another HR person. That?s not easy! It?s involves expertise in the actual process of hiring and selection and not just specific trade or industry experience.

Mavens of Cost Containment- Let?s face facts. The corporate recruiting department isn?t generating any revenue. If a company has to look to cut costs and potentially outsource, the HR staff have targets on their backs larger than most other departments. They need to prove their worth and continuously improve their processes in order to justify their costs. This may mean putting up with an archaic recruiting database, being understaffed, and not having access to today?s best recruiting tools. If a company can?t justify additional costs to assist the recruiting team, they have to overcome those challenges and make do with what they do have. In parallel, the corporate recruiter has to constantly justify their existence and fight off hiring managers whims to hire outside consultants or agencies which could drive up the costs the recruiting department is try to curtail.

Operational Expertise- Corporate recruiters need to understand not only what positions and departments do, but how this fits into budgets and overall company operations. Agency recruiters will often master what particular professions do during the day and what makes a great candidate for that position, but they won?t develop knowledge of talent mapping and forecasting, budgeting, and turnover challenges. Knowledge of these internal processes by which hiring happens is an incredible asset ? it is often what distinguishes senior professionals. Corporate recruiters know everything that has to happen in order for a job to open and what happens after it is filled; agency recruiters are often knowledgeable only about what happens in between. In this way, corporate recruiters can often be said to have a better understanding of business, unless agency recruiters are involved with their own internal operations.

Compliance- Lastly, corporate recruiters are HR professionals. They must have a detailed understanding of employment law, and are furthermore often involved in employee issues outside of recruitment. In theory, agency recruiters should be experts at all things recruiting (which includes legal and compliance matters.) However, in practice, the focus on sales often takes precedence over HR issues, and many times, over ongoing education in general. If agency recruiters develop expertise in this area, they can not only impress corporate recruiters, but get more involved with positions ?higher up the food chain? that involve a sophisticated level of legal and compensation understanding.

The bottom line is that both corporate and agency recruiting jobs have their challenges and nuances which others can learn from. Agency recruiters can look at some of these areas and incorporate them into their ongoing education. When agency recruiters develop some of this knowledge and competence while keeping their ?killer edge,? they can go really far in the recruiting industry and experience a lasting high level of success and career progression.

People Are the Puck

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been" - Wayne Gretzky

The Great One's well-known words are often repeated in corporate corridors during discussions about understanding market trends. That is typically where the conversation comes to an abrupt end, because few can elaborate on how to anticipate these trends with any reliability and predictability.

The reality these discussions generally miss is that people are the puck. If you want to know how to be best positioned for business success, you have to understand where they are going. Everything else is secondary, dynamic, and highly arbitrary. Think about it. Technologies will change, distribution channels for content will change, usage environments will change. People stay more or less the same. They stay the same but are never simple. People (consumers) are both logical and irrational, motivated by opportunity and emotion, full of contradiction, impacted by economic conditions, and often difficult to define.

In spite of these realities, clarity can be achieved and cultural, socio-economic, and political differences mitigated by analyzing needs and aspirations of both individuals and groups. Needs and aspirations are a beacon to understanding what will attract and reward attraction. Whether developing a new venture, managing an internal corporate innovation initiative, or working to develop globally successful product and service designs (my profession), nothing is more important than understanding what people need and desire in context of what the competition is providing. Sounds simple, but the realities of sociology, psychology and politics ensure that what people think they want, say they want, and actually want can (and typically does) differ.

This is often the reason why thoughtful quantitative analysis that incorporates macro-economic trends, market share, competitive strategies, retail analysis and technological assessments so often misses the mark. Remember also that that most macroeconomic and corporate financial data provide only a snapshot on where things have been. MBA finance majors learn early that trying to anticipate equity and commodity markets with such data is like trying to drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Much the same can be said of the quantitative data most business managers are forced to use while trying to make important investment decisions, or while analyzing and benchmarking in a 'gated' product/service development process. In short, when you're relying on suspect data and looking backwards, your 'hit rate' is always going to be significantly diminished. So what do you do?

In hockey if you know generally where the puck will be heading and how fast it will travel you're well on your way to victory through tactics. The same is true for your business initiatives. General heading and speed are sufficient to enter the market with offerings that will be embraced by consumers, and advocated in the age of social media and our experience economy.

Get your headings by understanding consumer needs and aspirations, establishing emotional engagement, and ensuring consumers feel represented and understood with your offerings. Better predict speed of consumer adoption by understanding the behavior changes required, and by focusing on motivations ? not demographic history in dissimilar categories. React to inevitable competition by understanding cultural values, then convey a clear value proposition understood on both intellectual and emotional levels. Finally, in much the same way that players can focus intently on the goal during the heights of competition while tuning everything else out, reliable market success requires that you step back and put people at the center while ignoring all other 'distractions.' Only then can you truly evaluate the offering, brand, and competitive dynamics in proper context.

I'll part with five quick tips for better understanding where the puck is headed (understanding people):

1. Ask the right questions, in-person wherever possible: Knowing what you need to ask, in the manner that provides the most insight, is a function of experience, but anyone can see from divergent and inaccurate political polling that 'garbage in is garbage out.' Cultural understanding is about personal familiarity or immersion. Ensure you have the requisite cultural understanding at the outset, or find a trusted partner who does.

2. Benchmark the emotional engagement and dynamic interactivity of products and services as a lens to understand how well they are meeting the needs and desires of consumers. A simple method I've developed utilizes an X/Y mapping grid that measures emotional engagement on the vertical axis and interactivity on the horizontal. This methodology is utilized quickly by professional teams, and lends significant insight to more traditional competitive analysis techniques. It is a process I use frequently and call Psycho-Aesthetics mapping.

3. Understand that consumer needs and aspirations are both hierarchical and grow in complexity over time. My firm has modified Maslow's hierarchy of needs to analyze and categorize these varying levels of basic, enriching, and fulfilling consumer needs. A general rule of thumb is that people want more. They want more, but in this incredible age of technology they don't necessarily want greater 'speeds and feeds' (think printers). Sometimes they seek greater value in terms of simplicity, time, fulfillment, emotional reward, ease of purchase, etc. So, 'more' must be properly interpreted or you'll surely be misaligned.

4. Empathy is the key to being able to change all the variables - industries, objectives, offerings - and still work the process from the eyes of the target audience. Empathy is a function of understanding, and understanding a function of experience. Find people with the right framework and experience for a given initiative. Also realize the value of rigorous debate while analyzing the inherently subjective topic of consumer needs/aspirations within a group setting. The more perspectives speaking intelligently to and for the given audience, the better.

5. Universal needs like self-affirmation and social acceptance can provide value to global initiatives while unifying branding, marketing and related messaging. The common emotional needs we all share, like wanting to be accepted, respected, and loved, change very little with culture and time. While attempting to incorporate emotional engagement into product and service offerings, remember that universal emotional needs can add simplicity while building consumer loyalty. I've learned over time as a design CEO that with emotional engagement, it's not how you feel about the design or experience, but rather how they make you feel about yourself.

Work brings some people intrinsic joy. These people feel in control of their work, feel good about themselves while working, find their work to be in harmony with their other activities. Pscyhologists describe these folks as having harmonious passion. But there's another kind of passion: obsessive passion. Those who are obsessively passionate feel an uncontrollable urge to engage in their work, feel more conflict between their passion and other areas in their life, and their work forms a large part of their often unstable and negative self-concept.

In my last post, I summarized Robert J. Vallerand's distinction between obsessive passion and harmonious passion. In the comment thread that followed, I noticed a couple of questions emerge: Is obsessive passion ever helpful? What should you do if you recognize that your passion for work is not harmonious, but obsessive? I'll address both of those in this post.

Some commentators argued that obsessive passion could be useful in the beginning stages of a new endeavor, such as when starting a new company. I disagree. Obsessive passion is rarely beneficial. It's not just that those with high levels of obsessive passion are committed, focused, and dedicated. Those who are obsessively passionate about their work are inflexibly, excessively and compulsively committed, finding it difficult to disengage. As such, they are setting up bad habits from the start, and risking burnout in the longer run. Note that harmonious passion is correlated withflow ? the mental state of being completely present and fully immersed in a task. Research shows that it's flow that is conducive to creativity, not obsessive passion. The positive emotions and intrinsic joy that is associated with harmonious passion is what propels one to greatness, not the negative emotions, compulsions, and unstable ego that is associated with obsessive passion.

All of us have at least a little bit of obsessive and harmonious passion for our work. The key for work productivity and for buffering against work burnout is to increase your harmonious passion while reducing your obsessive passion.

How can we turn down the dial on obsessive passion and turn up the dial on harmonious passion? Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of scientific research on the practical side of passion (a state of affairs I seriously lament). I can think of a few things, however, that might help. I think it's a two-part process: first it's important to recognize that you are demonstrating obsessive passion, and then it's a matter of boosting your harmonious passion.

There are clear warning signs that you are obsessively passionate about your work. Here are some tests:

1. Do you have enough energy? Do you engage in your work with positive enthusiasm? Do you feel enjoyment doing what you do?

2. Do you define yourself by criteria other than work? If your self is a pie, how big of a bite does your work take out of it?

3. Do you have a positive self-image? Obsessive passion is correlated with a negative image of the self, including automatic subconscious associations between the self and the concept "unpleasant."

4. When you work, is your interior monologue positive ? filled with words like "want to," "get to," and "can't wait to"? Or are words like "must," "need," and "have to" rummaging around?

5. Are you able to stop working when you want to? Recent research found that online gamers who were very harmoniously passionate about gaming felt positive emotions while playing, while gamers with obsessive passion felt more negative emotions both when playing and when prevented from playing. Do you feel a compulsion to work all the time, even when you really don't want to?

6. Do you get into a state of flow? Do you feel as though time has receded into the background, or do you feel the weight of pressure on your back? Flow is an enjoyable experience, whereas obsessive engagement feels more urgent.

If you're reading down that list and thinking, "no, no, no," these are signs that you may have obsessive, not harmonious, passion. If you do think your level of obsessive passion might be too high, there are some things you can do about it:

? Schedule real breaks. If you recognize you are obsessively passionate about your work, force yourself to get out of that headspace by scheduling other activities during the course of the day (like lunch with a friend, or a break to hit the gym). Block out time after work or on weekends for family, friends, and activities you enjoy. Having a schedule will keep you honest.

? Don't bring work home. If you can afford to, make it completely impossible to access your work once you leave work. Don't bring home your laptop. Leave those files on your desk. Keep separate email accounts for home and work, and don't check work email when you're at home (put up an out-of-office message if you have to). Obsessive passion is really just a bad habit, and habits can be broken gently.

? Change your thought patterns when you work. Fake the mindset of the harmoniously passionate person until you make it. For instance, convert thoughts of "must" and "need" to "want" and "desire." At first, this may feel awkward, but eventually the obsessively passionate mindset will dissipate, and so will the behaviours associated with it. A recent study suggests that changing your explicit thought patterns may increase self-esteem and harmonious passion.

? Commit to a new hobby. Often, investing too much self in one project is indications of a negative core self. The more additional things outside of work contribute to a positive sense of self, the less space your work performance will take up in your ego, and the smaller your chances of burnout.

If all of this sounds incompatible with success, consider a case study: A young, very talented musician is trying to decide whether to launch his promising solo career, or to put it off a little while to learn more about the world around him. On the one hand, timing is very important in the music industry. There are many talented artists, and they could get a head start if he decided to postpone his career. On the other hand, talent isn't everything in music. Audiences not only respond to talent, but also to many subtle influences like sensitivity, expression, and wisdom, fed by experiences outside the musical realm.

The musician's name? Yo-Yo Ma. In the end, he chose to defer his career to expand his sense of self. Ma compares those years to an "emotional bank account in which you must draw the rest of your life." To be sure, that path wasn't all clear sailing for Ma; he earned a D+ in his music history course at Harvard. But if those years of undisciplined learning were detrimental to his career, I am hard-pressed to detect it. Yo-Yo Ma is one of the greatest cellists of all time, noted not just for his incredible talent and dedication, but also the breadth of his accomplishments, his compassion, thoughtfulness, knowledge, and positive enthusiasm. In other words, his harmonious passion.

Passion is one of our most important vehicles for performance, creativity, imagination, and ingenuity. By no means do I want to discourage passion. But we rarely realize how other important areas of life feed into our main passion. When one's life isn't in balance, passion can become obsessive and counterproductive. When a person feels good about their self and the work they are doing, and is capable of disengaging, passion becomes a wellspring of long-term success.

By: ScottBarry Kaufman