Published on: April 2, 2025 at 5:47 pm
Leaders need creativity to innovate, grow, and adapt to fast-paced changes in the business world spurred by rapidly evolving technologies such as AI. As scholars note, however, creativity embeds inherent tensions between introducing something radical and novel while also being useful and practical.
Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware notes that these tensions are oppositional but also interdependent. Focusing on usefulness can create constraints that inspire more novelty, while ensuring that more radical ideas can foster more divergent thinking that can ultimately result in something that will be more valuable to the organization and its stakeholders.
“Embracing the paradoxes of creativity inherently enables more creativity,” Smith said.
In the 1970s, psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg noted that geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Virginia Woolf all generated their greatest insights by juxtaposing oppositional ideas. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity emerged by exploring how an object could be both in motion and at rest at the same time. Rothenberg called this process Janusian thinking after the two-faced Roman God Janus who could look forward and backward at the same time.
“An important part of the creative Janusian process is changing the question,” Smith said. “If we point out that conflict and ask people to create something, they’ll try to maximize either the novelty or the usefulness.
“But if we say, ‘Those things are in conflict with each other, but they also reinforce each other,’ and ask the question, ‘How can you create something that is both novel and useful amid that conflict?’ people will be much more creative in what they develop and create over time by bringing them together,” she said.
“So situationally, just changing the question makes a huge difference in boosting creativity.”
As the business world becomes more complex, Smith noted that an essential leadership competency will depend on embracing the paradoxes of creativity.
“Leaders of tomorrow will need to embrace both novelty and usefulness, coming up with new approaches to respond to our greatest challenges,” she said.
