The Psychology of " Idea Men "

The fact that a consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible in the sense that we have used this term is in part predictable from what is known about the freewheeling fantasies of very young children. They are extremely creative, as any kindergarten teach will testify. They have a naive curiosity that stumps parents with question like, "Why can you see through glass?" Why is there a hole in a doughnut?" Why is the grass green?" It is this questioning attitude that produces in them so much creative freshness  Significantly, the unique posture of their lives is their almost total irresponsibility from blame, work, and the other routine necessities of organized society. Even the law absolves them from responsibility for their actions. But all spruces testify to their creativity, even biblical mythology, with its assertion about wisdom issuing from "the mouths of babes." Respectable scientific sources have compared the integrative mechanism of adult creativity with the childhood thought process that "Manifests itself during the pre-school period possibly as early as the appearance of three word sentences . . . "

Clinical psychologists have also illustrated the operating irresponsibility of creative individual in Rorschach and stroboscopic test. For example, one analyst says, "Those who took to the Rorschach like ducks to water, who fantasied and projected freely, even too freely in some cases, or who could permit themselves to tamper with the form of the blot as given, gave us our broadest ranges of movement. "In short, they were the least "form bound," the least inhibited by the facts of their experiences, and hence let their minds explore new, untried, and novel alternatives to existing ways of doing things.

The significance of this finding for the analysis of organizations is pointed up by the observation of another psychologist that "the theoreticians on the other hand do not mind living dangerously. "The reason is obvious. A theoretician is not immediately responsible for action. He is perfectly content to "live dangerously" because he does so only on the conceptual level, where he cannot get hurt. To assume any responsibility for implementation is to risk dangerous actions and that can be painfully uncomfortable. The safe solution is to steer clear of implementation and all the dirty work it implies.