Radhika Chadha

"Cages come in all sizes and shapes."

— Bert the chimney sweep, Mary Poppins

"I think that there is far too much work done in the world."

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

I WAS at the beach with an old classmate. He was faintly bemused by my suggestion that we meet while strolling by the seaside, and agreed with the air of a man about to embark on a strange, but not unpleasant, adventure. We munched some masala raw mango and corn, and I watched him watch the world go by. "How interesting!" he said, his fingers sifting sand like an hourglass, "I haven't been to the beach in years. Who has time for this?"

Yes, who has time for this? A comment I hear so often in my interactions with the busy, workaholic corporate animal.

Check out the responses by harried CEOs to any of the ubiquitous "what do you do after work?" polls and you get a sense of how work has taken over lives in India. Thanks to technology in the form of those electronic leashes, the cell phone and the e-mail, no one has a 9-6 work day, or a 6-day week any more. One business periodical recently described how companies are making it oh-so-comfortable for executives to work on the weekend. "We make our executives stretch, but with a smile" says one satisfied head of human resources. In his organisation, when you troop into work on Sunday, you have the heady exhilaration of being allowed to dress in casual clothes, you can have pizzas, you can even take your kids for a trip to see a different breed of creatures in their common habitat : the work zoo.

Does this relentless work-obsession pay productivity dividends? I doubt it. On the contrary, it cannot but adversely affect the creative energy of the organisation. Consider the hapless corporate rat on the treadmill. Sooner or later, he will be herded into a laboratory experiment conducted in a conference room (or, if he is lucky, in an exotic offsite), and be exhorted "Go forth and create." Brainstorm, they will command him, come up with something ingenious and zany that will power our growth engines. Gamely he will put on his multicoloured hat, and with the help of his other, equally overworked team-mates, he will come up with a list of `out-of-the-box' ideas. It's not surprising that their tired minds throw up tired solutions that haven't a hope of success in the marketplace. Upon which, the bosses will throw up their collective hands and complain "No matter how many creative exercises we hold, our people just don't come up with good ideas, they are so weak creatively."

And yet, study the history of innovations through mankind, and you find that the best ideas are born and shaped not by committee, but by downtime. Consider Archimedes, relaxing in a warm tub and mulling over why the water splashed out when he sank in. Think of Einstein, vacantly staring into space in that patent office and getting bored, relatively speaking. Or Newton, who was snoozing under the tree when the apple hit him. The Post-it, arguably 3M's most public innovation, may have been created by Dr Silver in the lab, where they tried to figure out uses for its low adhesive quality - but it was in church that Art Fry, in search of a bookmark, had a brainwave on how it could be used. If, nearly 60 years ago, George de Mestral, amateur-mountaineer and inventor, hadn't gone for a walk with his dog and returned with burrs that clung to his clothes, we wouldn't have Velcro today.

It's not that brainstorming is a futile pursuit. Indeed, a good brainstorm can catalyse creative fission and fusion, leaving in the kiln the partly melded shape of some great ideas. Ideo, the stunningly successful creative hotshop, has honed the act of brainstorming to a fine art - it's practically a religion with them. But, before you put your team together, consider whether it has had sufficient downtime to allow those synapses to ricochet effectively. As the French chemist Louis Pasteur once put it, "Chance favours only the prepared mind." But the mind is ill prepared if it is ground down too hard, without time to reflect and dream. Brainstorming can be an excellent method of capturing and developing ideas collectively, but they are not necessarily conducive to germinating individual inspirations. For that, you need space and time for inner talk and reflection - `brain-chilling,' if you will.

Many organisations have tried to facilitate ideation within the office premises. Creativity rooms, time earmarked for thinking, hammocks for daydreaming on the job. Unfortunately, creativity rarely happens to order. In one innovation study, over 90 per cent of managers asserted that their ideas initially occurred away from the workplace, to be later aired and shaped within office hours. Creative psychologists find that the best ideas are born when individuals are engaged in some routine activity that does not require intellectual engagement, but allows the subconscious mind to flip the idea over and over again, examine it from different and unconventional angles, and toss it back and forth, without conscious involvement. It appears that a crucial input to the creative process is not physical location, but the free space that the individual creates in her own mind.

Which is why the most innovative managers are those who have identified the stimuli for their personal creative response. One senior marketing manager I know makes it a point to get home from work at a decent hour. He then sits in a darkened balcony on a rocking chair, with a cup of tea and a pad and listens to old Hindi movie songs. As he unwinds, he jots down whatever comes into his mind, and finds innovative new solutions to pressing work problems, apparently effortlessly. Another manager finds his mental rejuvenation through his hobby of aero-modelling. He concentrates on putting together the tiny parts, and finds that as his fingers put together a miniature model, his mind has pieced together a nebulous professional jigsaw. But these are rare examples of managers who have understood how their minds work and have recognised how to create their own `drift and dream' space. For most part, managers, like my busy friend at the beach, are trapped in corporate cages, unable to release their innovative potential even through carefully orchestrated creative exercises.

It's interesting, is it not, that the root for the Greek word for `leisure' is linked to the root of the word for `school?' For leisure provides the freedom to learn, and therefore, to create. Which is why, for the Greeks, `leisure' did not mean the act of doing nothing; `leisure' implied the act of thinking.

Downtime is a psychological necessity, essential to the creation of a balanced human being. It is by giving the other facets of our lives their due that we give our professional lives the room to grow. It is when we have the stillness of the mind, to mull, to reflect, that we open ourselves to a kaleidoscope of free associations. Giving birth to those serendipitous aha! moments that form the core of creativity.

Isn't it ironic, then, that one of the simplest tools that an organisation could use to switch on this creative potential, is to switch off ... the electricity in the office after hours, and on the weekend? Go home and relax, they should tell their people. Chill out, and the creative ideas - they will flow on their own.

(The author is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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