The Groove Issue 88 - How To Use Emotions for Innovation
HOW TO USE EMOTIONS FOR INNOVATION
Creativity is a whole lot more than cognitive associations. Great ideas also come when you involve your emotions.
That doesn't mean you have to turn your practice or company into a Shakespearean play, but instead rely on feelings for motivation, self-expression, sustained interest, happiness and fun. This isn’t about toxic positivity either, as anger and fear also have their place here.
James Averill, a professor of psychology from the University of Massachusetts, defines emotional creativity as “your ability to feel and express emotions honestly and in unique ways, that are effective in meeting the demands of both intra-and-inter-personal solutions.”
How Elizabeth Murray Used Her Emotions for Innovation
Elizabeth Murray in her studio, Spring 1991. Photo by Brigitte Lacombe.
Innovations in painting are rare -not impossible- but unusual. Elizabeth Murray was able to innovate in a 40,000-year-old field and give a new twist to modernist abstraction with shaped canvases that look cartoonish, highly energetic and filled with humor. This was frowned upon at the time, because a woman painter who wanted to be taken seriously 40 years ago couldn’t have dreamt of venturing into amusing others with her work.
Murray was longing to do her own thing in the 60s and 70s, and so she set out to reinvent the way paintings were made. Acknowledging that this wasn’t an easy feat, she wrote in the catalogue for her first museum show in 1987 that “Everything has been done a million times. Sometimes you use it and it’s yours; another time you do it and it’s still theirs.”
But she persevered and accomplished her objective. Instead of settling for a flat canvas, Murray began to dismantle her paintings and rebuild them in different ways. Kaleidoscopic zigzags, curvy lines and bulging forms collided in her compositions in ways that hadn’t been seen before.
Murray with one of her drawings.
From then on, she gained recognition, gallery representation at Paula Cooper and later at Pace Gallery, and a robust collector base.
Of course, she was willing to experiment, but how many people experiment and barely get to anything new? Murray admitted that her innovations had sprung from feeling her feelings.
In an interview with writer and editor Greg Masters, Murray emphasized this many times: “To me those are really emotional things. Like a crack in the forms. It really makes me feel something twisting or shoving or touching. All those words like process or formal parts or how a thing gets constructed or deconstructed, all those things feel like, ultimately, they have to go into feelings.”
Have Space for The Order and Chaos of Feelings
Murray’s solo exhibition “Paintings 1999-2003” in the Spring of 2003 at Pace Gallery in New York.
In that interview, Murray added that she hit her jackpot by “[having] a real desire for structure and for order. But also the chaos of the feelings feels like the thing that has to be in there. I think it's totally emotional. For the emotions to be seen you have to have a format.”
It’s not a surprise that this balance of extremes is such an excellent place to generate great ideas in the arts, but what about business?
For businesses to succeed and ideas to flow, there’s got to be a structure that backs it all up, whatever that means to you: an organized sales team, a strong marketing plan, a killer website with SEO in place, etc.
But researchers from the University of Malaysia have recognized the role of feelings and emotions in entrepreneurial success, which enhance creativity and opportunity recognition. Intense feelings and passion for your business will play in your favor even when people still insist that “business has no feelings”.
Even more revealing, psychologists from Case Western University proved that if you don’t block or repress your emotions, you are more likely to have creative associations.
Bring Your Emotions To Work
Watch out how you’ll use this one. It’s not about exposing intimate things or crying hopelessly in front of others, it’s about balancing the use of positive and negative emotions in the right context.
For example, according to a recent study conducted by Washington State University, investors prioritize transparency over unflinching positivity.
500 pitch videos from the online crowdfunding site Kickstarter were analyzed for this project. A facial analysis software program was used to identify various emotions in presenters’ faces, and even detect neutral expressions within every frame of each video. All of that emotional research was then compared to subsequent investment decisions and outcomes.
Most of the more successful entrepreneurs were able to evoke different emotions at different times during their pitch. Some started with overall positivity and enthusiasm for their idea before moving on to a more angry or fearful tone when discussing setbacks and all the hard work they had already put in.
Conversely, presenters who showed little to no emotion at all, or even just one emotion, generally performed worse than their more animated entrepreneurial peers.
So the next time you hear the very old-school advice to hide your emotions, stay neutral, have a poker-face or suppress your feelings when trying to come up with your next big idea, consider the realities of a world where human emotions and creativity go hand-in-hand and are almost the only things that cannot be replicated by machines or programmed by algorithms.
You want to get deep into the art, business and science of creativity?
You can! In my bestselling book “How Creativity Rules The World” I give you countless strategies, tips, tricks and a blueprint that helps you not only generate ideas but also a path to turn them into gold.
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Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.