According to Neuroscientists, We May be Making Ourselves Less Creative by Becoming More Data Driven

We’ve all experienced it, those moments of ‘flow’ when we feel the most creative. When we’re in a state of flow our ideas are better and our jokes are funnier. It’s as if someone flicked a magical switched in our brains that instantly made us more creative. Recently I happened upon a set of interesting studies where researchers stuck rappers and jazz musicians into MRI machines to see what happens inside the brain during this state of flow. What they discovered is fascinating.
There’s a part of your brain that controls something neuroscientists call executive function. The more your executive function relaxes the more creative you become. Ponder that for a moment. It probably explains a lot about corporate hierarchy and why some of the most innovative thinking so often comes from the bottom of the pyramid. But that’s a subject for another day.
Let’s think for a moment about how we tend to consume data when we’re thinking logically. We lay out the information in a very orderly manner using tables and charts. That’s what appeals to our executive function. The outputs of data analysis therefore are very compatible with the parts of our brain that are responsible for decision making. On the other hand, if our goal is to create the act of injecting data into the process might actually inhibit rather than stimulate our brains. Processing tables and charts requires our brains to rev up the wrong brain cells taking us out of that state of flow. It makes you wonder if creativity can ever truly be data driven. Or is data-driven creativity an oxymoron?
As enterprises amass ever larger troves of data the need to be more data-driven in the process of creating and innovating will only increase. Data represents the needs and preferences of our customers. The data rightly belongs at the center of everything that we do. But it means we need to think of new ways to bring together data and creativity in a way that enhances rather than stifles creativity.
Solving this means two teams coming together. There’s the creative team, with their executive function switched off. And there’s the data team with their executive function revved into high gear. Instead of trying to switch on the executive function in the creative minds (remember we want it low not high), I think it’s better that we try to lower it in the data team. You don’t want to make your creative team better consumers of data. You want your data team to be more creative interrogators of data. The same relaxed executive function in the mind of a data scientist is actually a good thing as well. You want them to ask more creative questions and explore more interesting territories with the data. You want them to join new and interesting data sets together. You want them to dream of new customer experiences to build with the data and feel inspired to prototype those experiences.
The best data scientists do these things instinctively. But if we want more of it companies will need to begin to think differently. Try to incorporate creative exercises into the interview process for prospective data scientists. Create the time and space within the team to foster creativity. And look beyond technical skills when developing training programs. Hopefully researchers will get around to scanning the brains of data scientists. But until then I think these are a few good steps in the right direction.
