The Creative Benefits of Split Personalities

This post appeared originally on 99u.com

In his wildly popular 2006 TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson defined creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Aside from being wonderfully succinct, this definition implies that any creative enterprise requires two key phases:

Phase 1: Coming up with an original idea

Phase 2: Taking a hard look at that original idea and assessing its values

So to be a successful creative, you need to not only be a good generator, but also a good evaluator. The problem is that in practice, it’s remarkably hard to be both. And the reason for that has everything to do with your motivational focus – how you think about the goal you are pursuing when working on a creative project. One kind of focus heightens your creativity, while a different focus gives you the analytical tools you need to assess your work. The good news is that you can actually shift yourself from one focus to the other in order to bring your best game during each phase of the creative process.

When you see your goal as an opportunity to advance – to gain something, or to end up better off – you have what psychologists call a promotion focus. This focus has been shown to be highly conducive to creative insight. For instance in one study, when asked, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?,” promotion-focused participants were more quickly able to go beyond the obvious (e.g., pave a sidewalk, use as a paperweight) to the clever and original (e.g., use it to commit burglary by breaking through windows, or to turn off your TV – assuming you don’t ever want to turn it on again.) This is the focus you want when you heading into a job interview, or brainstorming options for a new ad campaign.

Promotion focus causes you to have a more exploratory information-processing style, and greater comfort with risk, which facilitate creativity. The promotion-focused worry less about every idea being perfect or even feasible, so they are open to more possibilities. Unfortunately, the downside of promotion focus is that while it may be great for creative idea generation, research suggests that it’s not well-suited to creative idea evaluation. So there is another kind of focus you should adopt to get that particular job done.

When you see your goals as opportunities not to gain, but to avoid danger and keep things running smoothly, you have what’s called a prevention focus. This focus makes you more analytical, more cautious, and more sensitive to potential flaws or weaknesses in an idea. Prevention focus is unlikely to lead you to creative insight – in fact, it is likely to block creative insight from happening in the first place. You definitely don’t want to be prevention-focused when you are trying to generate ideas. But switching to a prevention focus after you’ve come up with some options will help you to more easily tell a workable idea from one that will never get off the ground.

In my new book Focus, I describe many techniques for shifting from one focus to the other – but here’s one that works brilliantly:

Phase 1: Creative idea generation

Get your Promotion Hat on by taking a few moments to think about what you will gain from successfully completing your project. What good things will happen? What are the rewards? How will you be better off? It can help to actually write a short paragraph to really get into focus and, as Charlie Sheen might say, access the right set of mind tools. The next thing you know, you’ll be feverishly scribbling all your awesome new ideas onto cocktail napkins.

Phase 2: Creative idea evaluation

Now it’s time to take a breath and put your Prevention Hat on. To do this, think about what you will lose if you don’t successfully complete your project – what will the negative consequences be? How will you be worse off if you fail? (I know – this doesn’t sound fun. I never said prevention focus was fun. But it is really effective.)

Looking again at your cocktail napkins with your prevention focus, you’ll be able to see much more clearly which ideas probably won’t work, which ones can’t possibly work, and which ones appear to be mustard stains. The ones that still seem promising, even while wearing a Prevention Hat, are probably gold.

Are You An Unsung Hero?

            At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter.  Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere, and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander.  Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit. 

It had come, unintentionally, 100 kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was 25 kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function.  Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it.

The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion.  The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990.)  The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.) 

When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.”

When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention.  But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves?  When things go the way they are supposed to.  And because of this, roughly half of us – people we call prevention-focused – rarely get the credit we are due.

As I’ve written about in previous posts, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don’t succeed.  They want to stay safe – to hold on to what they’ve already got.  As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success.  They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.

Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed – how they might advance or obtain rewards.  Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities – exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.

But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn’t (or at least wasn’t) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs.  It’s not really surprising – these people, after all, are rocket scientists.  They devote their lives to exploring space– if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don’t know what it is.  These folks pretty much own the phrase “going where no one has gone before.”  

The heroes of the business world always seem to be the risk-taking promotion-focused innovators.  But you see, it’s really not that there are no prevention-focused heroes - it’s that they are so often unsung.  You rarely get the credit you deserve for averting disaster when it never happens.   No one says “Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob.  You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation.  You rock!”  Instead, the prevention-focused toil away, quietly and carefully, making sure that things work the way they are supposed to.  They see to it that the airplane you are flying in won’t fall apart at its seams mid-flight, that the medication you are taking wasn’t contaminated in the factory, and that your large skim mocha latte really is decaf so you won’t still be up at 4 a.m. watching The Weather Channel.

When what you are good at is keeping things running smoothly, and things do run smoothly, your contribution is – sadly - less likely to be noticed. So you probably won’t get the praise you have in fact earned.  (Unless you are the immediate successor to someone who let things go to hell in a handcart – then people will appreciate you, at least for a little while.)   And this is a big part of why Tory Higgins and I wrote FOCUS – to make people understand that there are two ways of looking at our goals, that result in two sets of distinct strengths – both of which are critical to the success of any team or organization.

Portions of this post were adapted from Focus: Use Different Ways of Perceiving The World For Successand Influence.

What Should You Look for In Your Perfect Match?

Do opposites attract, as Paula Abdul once assured us in a pop song, or do you need to be similar on twenty-nine dimensions of personality – as E-harmony suggests – to find the perfect match? 

Throughout the history of our young science, psychologists have gotten caught up in heated debates over questions like this one.  Is intelligence a product of nature, or nurture?  Is our personality stable, or does it change?  Are our cognitive processes  - like making decisions or forming impressions - rational, or biased?  The answer, of course, always ends up being some version of “It’s both.”

Intelligence is clearly influenced by both the genes our parents bequeath to us, and the environment in which those genes express themselves.  Personality is somewhat stable – most of us can see aspects of who we are now in the children we once were – but people can and do change with experience.  And our decisions can be fairly rational, or remarkably biased, depending in part on how much effort and attention we pay to the problem at hand.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that the answer to the question “Should I choose a partner that is similar to me, or different?” is…  choose someone who is both.  The trick is understanding where similarity matters, and what kinds of differences will benefit you most.

Let’s start with the differences  - and here, it basically boils down to a particular kind of talent sharing.  Research we have conducted with other members of Columbia’s Motivation Science Center, has shown that people tend to see their goals in one of two ways – ways that determine their relative strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they work best. 

If you think about your goals in terms of the potential advancement, accomplishments and rewards they might bring – in terms of what you would gain if you are successful - you have what’s called a promotion focus.  Consequently, your strengths (relative to those who aren’t as strongly promotion-focused) include creativity, openness, and the ability to identify and seize new opportunities.

If, instead, successfully reaching your goals is about staying safe and secure, and ensuring against any losses— you have a prevention focus.  Prevention-focused people want fulfill their responsibilities, make no mistakes, and keep things running smoothly.  Your strengths are careful planning, thoroughness, and solid, realistic reasoning.

           

Promotion-prevention pairings in relationships might, at first glance, seem like a disaster waiting to happen.  He is willing to take a chance on something new, she wants to stick with what has worked before.  He is an optimist, she is a skeptic.  He is spontaneous, she lives by her daily planner.  He speeds, she’s quick to put on the brakes to make sure they are heading in the right direction.  The opportunities for conflict are endless.

But new research that will appear in the journal Social Cognition by MSC Fellow and University of Waterloo psychologist Vanessa Bohns and her colleagues suggests that the best relationships (and by “best,” I mean something like “most adaptive and mutually satisfying”) may in fact be these Odd Couples. 

Bohns and colleagues studied both dating and married couples, and found those with mixed-motivations enjoyed greater relationship satisfaction than all-promotion or all-prevention pairings. They argued that this was because of the clear advantages of being able to “divide and conquer” your various activities. After all, couples usually have goals related to both advancement and security - they need to help each other in order to both reach their dreams and fulfill their responsibilities. So each person can take on the tasks that they are best suited for, knowing that their partner has got the rest covered.  (He can come up with the plan for a great vacation, she can make sure they actually get there with passports and clean underwear.) With mixed-motivation couples, family life has the potential to be more balanced –children know how to be optimistic and realistic – because the partnership contains both the promotion and prevention points of view.  

But there is one very important caveat, and this is where similarity becomes essential.  The couple in question must have shared goals. They need to feel that they are on the same page in terms of what they want in life, and differ only in terms of their preferred ways of getting it.

The Key To Choosing The Right Career

Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to "follow your passion" or "do what you love," but as Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can't Ignore You, this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it.

We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It's not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In fairness, how are you supposed to know if you will be happy as an investment banker, or an artist, or a professor, if you haven't actually done any of these things yet? Who has ever, in the history of mankind, taken a job and had it turn out exactly as they imagined it would?

So if passion and expected happiness can't be your guides, what can be? Well, you can begin by choosing a career that fits well with your skills and values. Since you actually have some sense of what those are (hopefully), this is a good starting place.

But a bit less obviously — though just as important — you also want to choose an occupation that provides a good motivational fit for you as well.

As I describe in my new book with Columbia Business School's Tory Higgins, Focus and in our recent HBR article, there are two ways you can be motivated to reach your goals.

Some of us tend to see our goals (at work and in life) as opportunities for advancement, achievement and rewards. We think about what we might gain if we are successful in reaching them. If you are someone who sees your goals this way, you have what's called a promotion focus.

The rest of us see our goals as being about security — about not losing everything we've worked so hard for. When you are prevention-focused, you want to avoid danger, fulfill your responsibilities, and be someone people can count on. You want to keep things running smoothly.

Everyone is motivated by both promotion and prevention, but we also tend to have a dominant motivational focus in particular domains of life, like work, love, and parenting. What's essential to understand is that promotion and prevention-focused people have — because of their different motivations — distinct strengths and weaknesses. To give you a flavor of what I mean:

Promotion- focused people excel at:

• Creativity & innovation
• Seizing opportunities to get ahead
• Embracing risk
• Working quickly
• Generating lots of options and alternatives
• Abstract thinking

(Unfortunately, they are also more error-prone, overly-optimistic, and more likely to take risks that land them in hot water)

Prevention-focused people excel at:

• Thoroughness and being detail-oriented


• Analytical thinking and reasoning


• Planning


• Accuracy (working flawlessly)


• Reliability


• Anticipating problems

(Unfortunately, they are also wary of change or taking chances, rigid, and work more slowly. Diligence takes time.)

By now you probably have a sense of your own focus in the workplace, but if you don't, try our free online assessment.

Knowing your dominant focus, you can now evaluate how well-suited you are motivationally to different kinds of careers, or different positions in your organization. More than a decade of research shows that when people experience a fit between their own motivation and the way they work, they are not only more effective, but they also find their work more interesting and engaging, and value it more.

If you are promotion-focused, look for jobs that offer advancement and growth. Consider fast-paced industries where products and services are rapidly changing, and where the ability to identify opportunities will be essential, like the tech sector or social media. To use a sports metaphor, look for a career where you get to play offense — where boldness, speed, and outside-the-box thinking pay off.

If you are prevention-focused, look for jobs that offer you a sense of stability and security. You are good at keeping things running, at handling complexity and always having a Plan B (and C and D) ready at a moment's notice. Consider careers where your thoroughness and attention to detail are valued — for instance, as a contract lawyer or data guru. You work best when you are playing defense — you can spot a threat a mile away, and protect your company or client from harm.

But what about entrepreneurs? you ask. I'm thinking of starting my own business — which motivational focus is best for that? For any successful venture, the truth is that you need both promotion and prevention. An entrepreneur who is all promotion may get her business going, but she probably won't keep it going for long, since she'll be unprepared for the obstacles that will inevitably come her way. And the prevention-focused entrepreneur will get so bogged down worrying about obstacles that his business may never get off the ground at all.

This is one of the reasons that good partnerships can be so invaluable — it often takes a Steve Jobs to see a product's potential, and a Steve Wozniak to actually build it and make it work. So if you are starting a new venture, make sure that you've got a healthy balance of promotion and prevention thinking in the right places.

Finding Your Roadmap to Success: A Virtual Conference

Picking the right path in life isn't easy. Young adults have more options than ever before in history, but the paradox is, that all those options can make us feel anxious, uncertain, overwhelmed, and afraid to pick *any* option. The pressure is paralyzing.

Let's face it… The world is changing and the traditional roadmap for success just isn't working anymore. So, what does it actually take for us to be happy and successful?

Join us for the WTF Should I Do w/ My Life?! Virtual Conference April 22 - 27, 2013!

Happiness and success is just the tip of the iceberg in this free virtual-conference. More than 30 of the world's leading thinkers including, Tal Ben-Shahar, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Chip Conley and Tony Schwartz, (and of course, me) answer real-world, no-BS, street-smart questions to give you grounded, specific, actionable solutions so that we can rock *all* the important areas of our life.

You'll be left with the confidence, the courage, clarity, and tools, to make your ideal life a reality.

What you need to know

Dates: April 22 - 27, 2013 (schedule forthcoming)

Price: FREE

Where: Sign up online at http://www.entheos.com/WTF-Should-I-Do-W-My-Life/Heidi-Grant-Halvorson

I hope you will join us so you can finally answer the question - WTF Should I Do w/ My Life?!