There appears to be general agreement among reward professionals that the compensation approaches and protocols which have dominated practice for the last few decades are more than ripe for reinvention. That disruptive change in the field is necessary and inevitable.
I also sense an assumption that we will be the change that we have been waiting for. That we will lead the revolution, just as soon as we get those year-end budgets and incentive plan changes completed and find the time to get our innovation game on.
Will it pan out that way?
A while back, Derek Thompson had an interesting article (which continues to pop up in conversation online) in The Atlantic, Why Experts Reject Creativity, which takes a close look at the bias we all have against new ways of thinking. Thompson asserts that not only are our brains hard-wired to distrust creativity, but that the more knowledge and expertise we have on the subject, the more hostile we are to new approaches. And he highlights a number of research studies that support his claim.
In one study, 142 world class researchers from a leading medical school were randomly assigned to evaluate proposals for research funding. Sometimes the faculty were experts in the subject matter being considered, sometimes not. The experiment was triple blind, so that evaluators didn't know submitters, submitters did not know evaluators and evaluators did not talk to one another. What the researchers found: New ideas -- those that "remixed information in surprising ways" -- got the worst scores from everyone, but were particularly punished by experts in the subject matter.
Thompson goes on to demonstrate that, in reality, most of us dislike new ideas, regardless of what we say or believe about ourselves. Ouch, right? Read on.
Another study found that teachers who claim to enjoy creative children don't actually enjoy any of the characteristics associated with creativity, such as non-conformity. Research conducted by organizational psychologists at Cornell University examines our bias against creativity and why people desire but reject creative ideas. The authors of the study, in discussing their findings, note that "Because there is such a strong social norm to endorse creativity and people also feel authentic positive attitudes towards creativity, people may be reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity; hence, the bias against creativity may be particularly slippery to diagnose." They further state that "If people hold an implicit bias against creativity, then we cannot assume that organizations, institutions or even scientific endeavors will desire and recognize creative ideas even when they explicitly state they want them."
Which means that disruptive change, innovations that move the field of play and introduce new reward management ideas, tools and solutions, might likely originate outside our profession. It could happen out at the edges and beyond, outside the perimeter of "professional" reward practice. And so I propose that our mission, if we choose to accept it, will be to discover, devote attention to and learn from what is happening outside the core of our field. And then to bring those ideas in, adapting and piloting them in our own organizations.
To paraphrase the wisdom of Gordon MacKenzie, author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace (and IMHO one of the best book on business creativity every written!), we won't be able to truly push the boundaries of practice until we figure out how to escape tMacKenzie's Hairball -- our entanglement with the policies, assumptions and practices of the past. Orbitting -- escaping the gravitational pull of the Hairball enough to observe and embrace original ideas and lessons -- will require that we read and interact outside the boundaries of our profession.
A closing thought. The fact that the events of the last few years have pushed so many of us not only outside our on-site offices but outside our comfort zones in many ways may position us for escaping our own professional "entanglements." Does this up our odds of taking the steps to reverse any bias against creativity ... at least as it exists in our own field?
What do you think?
Ann Bares is the Founder and Editor of Compensation Café, Author of Compensation Force and Partner at Altura Consulting Group LLC, where she provides compensation consulting and survey administration services to a wide range of client organizations. She earned her M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and enjoys hiking, reading and hanging out with family in any spare time.
Creative Commons image "Lightbulb in Malta" by Mark M.
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