by Massimiliano Saccarelli 

Massimiliano Saccarelli invites us to think of a company as a marketplace of innovative contributions, as a porous ecosystem between within and without, with hybrid figures between employee and management capable of delivering creative contributions. 

"One climbs the sycamore to see if the Lord ever passes by. Alas, I'm not a climber and even standing on tiptoe I've never seen him." — Eugenio Montale
per vedere il Signore se mai passi.
Ahimè, non sono un rampicante
ed anche stando in punta di piedi
non l’ho mai visto.”
— Eugenio Montale

I was asked to write a reflection on creativity in companies. I take my inspiration from Montale. I too, in over forty years, have passed through companies in Europe and Asia, walked through corridors, projects, hierarchies. And, like the poet, I have found no traces of true creativity. The company is an organism whose architecture is born with a precise objective: efficiency. All the managerial theories of the twentieth century – from Taylorism onwards – are the children of the need for control, standardisation, and predictability. Innovation, therefore, in the best of cases, is, rather, continuous, sustained improvement, not generative creativity. And yet, at the origin of every enterprise there was a creative, visionary, founding act. Creativity was not born within the company, but before the company.
The challenge, therefore, is not to find creativity in the company, but to understand how to keep alive the drive that generated it.

Why does creativity struggle to manifest itself in the company?

Because, paradoxically, creativity needs voids. Voids of control, of prediction, of efficiency. Neuroscience tells us that during moments of mental inactivity, such as mind-wandering, a brain network called the Default Mode Network (DMN) is activated. This network is associated with self-reflective and creative thought processes. A recent study showed that the DMN plays a causal role in creative thinking. During tasks that require the generation of original ideas, the DMN shows significant activity. Furthermore, when the activity of the DMN is temporarily reduced through electrical stimulation, the creative capacity of the participants decreases significantly. Creativity does not arise in productive effort, but in the interval. The company, however, is designed not to leave voids. Even when, provocatively, "white hours" or "empty time" are introduced by the company, the logic that governs them remains the same: predict, channel, measure. But creativity is more like Eros, Plato would say: elusive, unprogrammable, unrationalizable.

Creativity as misalignment

Creativity, after all, arises from a gap in vision, from a point of view that is “other” than the mainstream. In this sense, the company could be the perfect place to host creative visions, because it is full of contradictions, tensions, misalignments. (Gallup surveys also say so: most people do not feel aligned with the values ​​and functioning of their organization.) But today the outsider is expelled, not integrated. Thinking of the company as a marketplace for innovative contributions, as a porous ecosystem between inside and outside, would be the real revolution. Otherwise, talking about creativity in the company will remain just impressive, sophisticated hypocrisy.

What's next?

A future in which, rather than pushing creativity into the company, the company accepts that creative processes happen outside of it. And it equips itself to recognize them, welcome them, integrate them. In this sense, even the word “employee” should be overcome. We need a new figure, a hybrid between employee and manager, capable of bringing creative contributions that are not just “ideas to put in the box” to win company awards, but initiatives to co-develop. The real turning point will be to rethink the mechanisms of participation and value distribution. Those who contribute with a radical solution do not remain external or subordinate, but participate in the value generated. In this way, the company can begin to generate the conditions for something that does not yet fully exist: a hybrid figure, neither employee nor manager, but bearer of visions. A presence capable of moving between rules and intuitions, between belonging and autonomy, between identity and transformation. It will not be the result of a new organizational scheme, but of the cultural evolution that we will be able to accompany. Perhaps the true act of creativity is finding a way to let creativity happen wherever it wants to happen, but then also finds advantage in returning to the company.