Creative work requires a relaxed mode that tolerates an unresolved question, while execution requires a purposeful mode that closes it, and the second drives out the first.
Cleese's argument is that the two modes are both necessary and mutually exclusive, and that organisations reward the closed one because it looks like work. The practical prescriptions were specific: a boundary of space and time, a defined period, and the discipline of tolerating discomfort rather than resolving the problem early to relieve it.
In practice
- A team that books two hours and an unresolved question produces more than one that books thirty minutes and a decision.
- A manager who ends the discomfort of an open problem by choosing early has closed the mode that would have solved it.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that generating options and choosing between them are different tasks: one needs an unresolved question held open, the other needs it closed, and holding both at once is not possible.
- In its favour
- It is consistent with research on incubation, where setting a problem aside improves later solutions, and on time pressure, which reliably narrows the range of options people consider.
- Against it
- It is a practitioner's model from a lecture rather than a tested one, the modes are defined by the behaviour they explain, and no measure distinguishes them.
- Standing
- A practitioner's model from a 1991 lecture rather than a research finding, though it is consistent with work on incubation and on time pressure reducing creative output.
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- Protecting the conditions for good work