Use "Creative Abrasion" As a Source of Energy

Conflict can enliven your creative work—but it has to be the right kind.

Brad Bird and his frequent collaborator, John Walker, have turned arguing into an art form. Bird is the Academy Award-winning director of Pixar movies like Ratatouille and The Incredibles; Walker is the producer who helped to manage the making of these and other films. The two are “famous for fighting openly,” Bird has acknowledged, “because he’s got to get it done, and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done.” 

Some of the arguments they had while creating The Incredibles were so epic that they made it into the bonus materials included on the movie’s DVD. In one moment captured by the camera, Walker yells, “Look, I’m just trying to get us across the line!” Bird hollers back, “I’m trying to get us across the line in first place!” 

In an interview that took place after the movie’s release, Bird explained that he counts on Walker to push back against the arguments he makes, saying of his producer: “I don’t want him to tell me, ‘Whatever you want, Brad’ . . . I love working with John because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face. Ultimately, we both win. If you ask within Pixar, we are known as being efficient. Our movies aren’t cheap, but the money gets on the screen because we’re open in our conflict.” Stanford University business school professor Robert Sutton conducted the interview with Bird, whom he calls “a vigorous practitioner of creative abrasion.” 

That term—creative abrasion—captures the truth that conflict can be a potent source of creative energy. A group in which everyone engages in tepid agreement is unlikely to generate much in the way of creative sparks. In a study of technology companies, Stanford professor Kathleen Eisenhardt and her colleagues found that working groups with low levels of conflict tended to produce ineffective and uncreative solutions. “The alternative to conflict is usually not agreement, but apathy and disengagement,” they write. But teams who engaged in lots of angry, divisive conflict were not creative, either; their energies were consumed by negative emotion.

The key to creative abrasion, then, is fostering a very particular kind of conflict. Here, five steps to doing so: 

One: Recognize and play up your own distinctiveness.

We often forget how deeply different people are. Starting in earliest childhood, we orient to specific stimuli, pursue idiosyncratic interests, and develop characteristic ways of responding to the world. By the time we meet up in the workplace, we have decades of education and experience that make us different from the person in the next chair. 

In a group, however, conformity pressures often lead us to assume a bland universality of outlook. Decades of research show that group members tend to talk about the information they share in common—leaving unmentioned the singular knowledge that emerges from individual expertise. To generate creative abrasion, think about what only you know, and say that. 

Two: Stake out a strong and authentic position.

Think of yourself as a passionate advocate for the view you hold, responsible for making a forceful case on its behalf. Strongly-stated views make things happen: they enliven the debate, stimulate powerful counter-arguments, and produce more numerous and more original solutions. (If you’re concerned that strongly-stated views will create impassable deadlock, just wait for Step Five.) 

For this kind of conflict to provoke creativity, however, it has to be real—rooted in genuine differences of opinion. Research led by UC-Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth has found that having a team member play the role of devil’s advocate doesn’t produce the same kind of conversational electricity. “Only authentic dissent shows the consistency, confidence, and commitment” that generates creative abrasion, Nemeth writes. 

Three: Throw away those familiar brainstorming instructions. 

Most of us have been told that during a brainstorming session, it’s important to refrain from criticizing any ideas that emerge, lest we shut down the process of free association. But research shows the groups who are instructed to engage in active debate and critique actually produce more original ideas than those who follow the no-criticism rule. 

Though we may worry that criticism will “shut things down,” studies suggest that it is actually the desire for consensus that leads to premature closure. Spirited debate can “liberate individuals from conformity pressures,” writes Charlan Nemeth, holding the door open longer so that more creative ideas may enter.

Four: Make sure it doesn’t get personal.

Karen Jehn, a professor of management at Melbourne Business School in Australia, makes a useful distinction between relationship conflict and task conflict. Relationship conflict exists when there is tension, animosity, and annoyance among members within a group, Jehn writes; task conflict exists when there are disagreements among group members about the content of the tasks being performed.

Jehn found that for “non-routine” tasks—such as generating creative ideas—task conflict was beneficial, producing better outcomes. Relationship conflict, on the other hand, was always detrimental. The ideal, Jehn concludes, is a low level of relationship conflict and a moderate level of task conflict.

Five: Be flexible enough to allow for convergence.

Eventually, contention has to give way to what researchers call “convergence”—the achievement of an agreed-upon solution. This requires a psychologically nuanced stance: passionately believing in the value of our own ideas, while remaining radically open to changing our minds when better ideas come along. 

According to Stanford’s Robert Sutton, we should strive for “strong opinions, weakly held.”* The practice of creative abrasion entails allowing our ideas to get roughed up—changed, enhanced—through contact with other ideas. Sutton also puts it this way: “People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” 

* Sutton borrowed this phrase from the futurist Paul Saffo. Saffo calls it his “personal motto,” offering this observation: “‘Strong opinions weakly held’ is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty. Try it at a cocktail party the next time a controversial topic comes up. It is an elegant way to discover new insights—and duck that tedious bore who loudly knows nothing but won’t change his mind!”

How about you? Have you ever noticed original ideas emerging out of a process of creative abrasion?