Simon Sinek, speaker and author, says:
An excessive drive for order interrupts the beautiful chaos needed for creativity to thrive.
This quote gets at the heart of a specific dynamic I have been noticing and wrestling with lately. In any organization, you need the “order” people and the “creativity” people. (Let me acknowledge right here that I know I’m painting with a broad brush, and there is certainly crossover.)
The “order” people make things happen. They are thinking about logistics, they are in the details. They are the implementers and executors.
The “creativity” people come up with the ideas; they’re the innovators. They see what hasn’t been done before; they connect the dots in a brand new way.
Both skillsets/proclivities are crucial for any organization to be able to grow and deliver. But there’s often an implicit tension between these two types of people. The creativity folks get excited by what’s new, thinking about what’s never been done before. Their order colleagues like to see what’s worked in the past and systematize that.
In an ideal environment, each set of people would deeply appreciate the value the other brings, and understand their complete symbiotic dependence. In reality, though, the creativity people might get annoyed by the need for every last detail from the order people, and the order people, in turn, can’t get why their creative colleagues won’t just make a decision already.
In the organizations I work with, large and small, there is a strong push for systems and replicability and order. (And we need those! I get it! I love stage managers!) The organizations hire lots of people who can manage the systems and get the work out the door. But as more and more “order” people make up that workforce, the creative person’s style seems to be barely tolerated.
In theatre, one of the most wonderful partnerships can be between the director and the stage manager. The director is creating something out of nothing, a three-dimensional living experience that stated out as words on a page. The stage manager is creating structure and reliability from the managed chaos of rehearsal.
As a director, I absolutely cannot do what I do without an incredible stage manager. I rely on the SM to write down where the actors are going, to let the designers know what came up that we hadn’t anticipated, to keep an eye on the clock to tell me when we need a break. I rely on them to see the details I miss—that actor can’t enter there because they exited on the other side in the previous scene, or this prop can’t be on that table.
But more than any of that, when the play is open, it needs the SM to keep it in shape. She is there at every show, and she is the one who nudges the actors back into place if they depart from the way the play was directed, males sure the physical environment of the play is intact, and communicates with all the members of the company. She makes the play happen night after night.
I know it’s hard to measure ideas, to pin them down and put them in a rubric. I get that intangibles are ambiguous, and there’s no place for ambiguity in a balance sheet.
But I also know that every organization needs people (more than one) who see past what is to what can be. Every company requires the creative people to imagine what’s next. An “excessive drive for order” drives your idea folks away. Their “beautiful chaos” make get under your skin, but it’s the water they swim in.
What might need to shift where you work in order to nurture and grow that two-way appreciation and respect?
