Creative Dishonesty
By Peter LloydIn a working paper titled, The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More Dishonest, a pair of Harvard Business School researchers propose the glaringly obvious proposition that, possibly, “creative thinking may also have a hidden cost in the form of increased dishonesty.” All together now... Well, duh!
Upon closer inspection, the paper spells out the question the team proposes to answer. Using several tests, they want to determine whether or not creativity increases dishonesty. To their credit the authors have considered the reverse, “Of course, it could also be the case that dishonest people are more likely to think creatively than are less dishonest ones.” There it is. They could have stopped there.
Everyone is creative when they need to be. It follows that people who practice original thinking on a regular basis have the ability to be more dishonest than those who do not. Or as we’ve all known since we could think: to be dishonest, one has to be creative.
Machines, flatworms, and literary critics cannot be creative. They merely evaluate alternatives and select or comment one way or another based on their observations. On the other hand, dogs, horses, crows, chimps, and some humans demonstrate creative ability, including deception.
If you are a moral creative person, you might take your creative dishonesty to highly refined levels, such as art. Fiction, for example, relies on deception to achieve its effects. To enjoy fiction in books, films, plays, and YouTube videos, one must suspend belief, which requires creativity as well. You must choose to believe the invention of the author in order to enjoy it. This conspiracy of lies generates the paradox: invented stories reveal truths and insights to us that factual prose like working papers can’t touch.
Applied Creative Dishonesty
Let’s say you want to rob a bank. If you are not creative, you’ll imitate the way you’ve seen it done in the movies. If you are creative, you’ll invent a way to rob a bank that will overcome the problems that prevent you from getting away with the money. It’s not creativity that drives bank robbing, rather it’s creativity that presents ways to succeed.
In short, like any ability, creativity rolls like yin and yang. Creative is what creative does. If you have strong legs, you run. A beautiful voice, you sing. If you have none of these kinds of gifts, you write useless papers. The fact that fast runners make better thieves, or that big bruisers make better hit men, doesn’t make running speed or brawn evil.
We learn nothing exploring a study of whether or not creativity inspires evil, enables evil geniuses, or why it evades some researchers.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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