Can the creative mind be destructive?

According to new research, the creative mind has a dark side. That’s right. The reason your company has hired people in the first place may actually not be all it’s cracked up to be.

In addition, the researchers had guessed that creativity would lead to unethical behavior because it enabled people to more easily come up with justifications for their actions. Research has previously shown that whenever people do something which might be perceived as bad, they tend to reduce the ‘badness’ of this behavior by finding some justification for their corrupt behavior. As an example, if you find yourself being less than honest on your taxes, you may justify this by telling yourself that this is something everyone does, or that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.

But you don’t have to worry. There is much good to come from creative people. They may have the ability to justify their future misdeeds, but in the end it seems worth it to have your company benefit from the good deeds of creative folks. They innovate. They make changes that take your company to the next paradigm.

What really becomes your task as the business owner is to understand how the creative mind works and learn to harness it as best you can.

Controlling The Creative Mind

There really is no way to entirely control the creative mind. That’s the point after all.

When it comes to blogging, you will need to hire creative people to come up with remarkable content. By nature, non-creative people will struggle to push the envelope with their blogging. If you want to create content that is engaging and interesting and ultimately leads to sales you will need people that are fine with pushing buttons.

This requires a certain level of immorality.

You need people that can justify making people angry. They need to have the feeling that they can make people mad and even cross a few moral boundaries. These creative bloggers are rule breakers.

But as you know, you can’t always break the rules in business. There need to be some restraints on the bloggers that work for your company.

One way to harness the creative mind is to give a few limites to the bloggers. You can research the ways your company could potentially be harmed the most by the actions of your bloggers. It’s difficult to imagine all the ways things could go wrong, but if you can think of a few (just a few) it’s good to share them with your bloggers and really explain the importance of avoiding them.

For example, if your business depends on FedEx to ship its products, it’s probably best that your blogger doesn’t call out FedEx in their blog posts. Another example might be the use of certain language or images in blog posts. You could realize that cursing is not appealing to your conservative target customer. Or you could realize that pushing the boundaries of fair use with images could really lead to some expensive litigation for your company.

Focus on what could really harm your company and communicate the concern to your creative bloggers.

But let them have some free reign. It will lead to more good than bad in the long run.