WhyDoors Are Closed

The reason the creative malcontent speakers this way is that so often the people to whom he addresses his flow of ideas do, indeed, after awhile, ignore him and tell him to go away. They shut their doors to his endless entreaties ; they refuse to hear his ideas any longer. Why? There is a plausible explanation.

The reason the executive so often rejects new ideas is that he is a busy man whose chief day in, day out task is to handle an ongoing stream of pressing problems. He receives an unending flow of question on which actions must be taken. Constantly he is forced to deal with problems to which solution are more or less urgent but for which answers are far from self evident. It may seem stolen did to a subordinate to supply his boss with a lot of brilliant new ideas to help him in his job, but advocates of creativity must once and for all understand the pressing facts of the executives's life : Every time an ideas is submitted to him, it creates more problems for him and he already has enough.

Professor Raymond A. Bauer of Harvard has pointed out an instructive example from another field of activity. He notes that many congressmen and senators have the opportunity to have a political science "intern" assigned to "help" them. However, some congressmen and senators refuse this help on the grounds that these interns generate so many ideas that they disrupt the legislator's regular business.

Similarly, Dr. E Paul Torrence of the University of Minnesota found that teachers of highly creative children said they were less desirable to have in the classroom. They were measurably less studious and less hard working than highly intelligent students. They predictably departed in unpredictable ways from the expectations and order the teachers apparently felt required to institutionalize. Jonathan Kozol has written about quite similar problem in Boston's black ghetto schools.