Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

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Great Art is Rarely Efficient

He was “obsessed with the creative process itself and would work on a theme in many different mediums until he had made it part of himself.”

-Patricia MacDonald from her book Pablo Picasso: Greatest Artist of the 20th Century

This week I attended a conference where the focus was on using internal social networks within organizations as a means of promoting collaboration.  It’s no secret that companies are increasingly looking beyond conventional communication tools to foster better knowledge sharing across corporate structures.   Email is a notoriously poor platform for collaboration.

What struck me though was the number of companies in attendance that expressed their goal in doing so was primarily to make their internal collaboration efforts more efficient.  Not more frequent, more fantastic or more fruitful, but simply more efficient.

Those two words, collaboration and efficient, side by side in the same sentence seemed somehow juxtaposed to me.

Creativity is inherently inefficient

In most instances, collaboration occurs when people come together at the intersection of common goals or beliefs to design, develop or create something that didn’t exist before.  So, irrespective of the result, collaboration is a creative process.

We also know from research that the creative path is often circuitous and meandering.  Artists are rarely associated with being methodical pragmatists.  Depression, alcoholism, creative blocks and even the occasional lost ear are only some of the steep prices that have been paid in the creation of great art.  Furthermore, different artists have unique creative processes so when several come together to co-create, the collective can become even less efficient than its individual members would be on their own.

And yet, out of these highly inefficient processes, masterpieces are created.  Classic films, priceless paintings, timeless music and even revolutionary business ideas – all born out of what often appears to be chaos.

Efficiency, on the other hand, will produce lots of paintings that no one will look at, formulaic music that people won’t listen to, B movies no one goes to see and companies no one cares about.

So if your only purpose in leveraging social tools for collaboration is to improve efficiency, you probably will.  But you may be sacrificing a few masterpieces in the process.

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