How Stillness Unlocks a Team's Creativity

Imagination — it grants us a kind of freedom of the mind, letting us slip free of the constraints of reality. For a company that wants to succeed, this faculty may matter more than knowledge, and more than luck. Yet it is nothing so magical, nor some rare and special product; it is simply something we are born with. The trouble is that once we step into the busy, high-pressure office — working like machines, living in a constant rush — we lose our imagination along with it, and with it the methods and the moments for solving problems. For a company, that also means stalled business and lost time.

Most of us already sense it: imagination cannot be wrung out of a busy, high-pressure environment. If you want to restore your staff's imagination, slowing down may well be the answer. Not convinced? The following experiment, from graduate students at the University of Florida, is evidence enough — it shows that even a short spell of stillness training is sufficient to lift a team's imagination.

How Stillness Affects Creativity

In the experiment, participants were split into a "meditation group" and a "control group". Both groups were given the same problem: list as many uncommon uses for a brick as you can. The one difference was that the "meditation group" went through five cycles of stillness training before answering. The result was striking. The "meditation group" produced twice as many answers as the "control group" (which did no stillness training at all), and as they worked through the task the "meditation group" also held a more open attitude towards others' ideas, allowing them to build on answers they could never have arrived at on their own.

Having seen the effect of stillness training on a team's imagination, psychologists then went a step further, studying the relationship between stillness training and the ability to think. The experiment found that the more meditation and stillness training people had, the greater their capacity to direct their attention. In concrete terms, when their attention was drawn away by something outside, they were also able to shift it back onto whatever they wished to focus on — sparing them from being trapped in their own mental dead ends, so their thinking became more nimble and free-flowing too. This result was no accident or fluke; later experiments along similar lines reached the same conclusion by different routes. And here is the one most worth discussing: the experiment ran in a 2 x 2 design, meaning there were two groups of participants (the "meditation group" and the "control group") and two experimental conditions (a "problem requiring insight to solve" and a "problem not requiring insight to solve"). What the experiment found afterwards was that the "meditation group" made clear gains only under the "problem requiring insight to solve" condition. But why?

To create the future, one must never be confined by past memories and fixed ideas.

The problems to do with creativity required participants to set aside their habitual thinking, and those who had received stillness training excelled in this category — confirming once again that stillness training can reduce the influence of the past on how we understand the present, helping us escape the whirlpool of habitual thought. Stillness allowed participants to solve problems in fresher, more imaginative ways.

For a company, imagination may matter more than you think. It is not only the catalyst for new ideas, but also a key ingredient in nimble thinking. If you want to cultivate a culture of innovation within your company, starting with stillness training may be a very good beginning. Here are a few workable measures for introducing stillness into a company:

1. Time for Quiet

Want efficiency? Working away blindly and mechanically tends only to backfire; giving staff the chance to slow down, letting them settle their thoughts and feelings for a moment, is the better choice. Setting aside a little time before the working day begins, letting staff breathe deeply — putting aside, for a moment, yesterday's worries and tomorrow's anxieties, and simply observing the feelings of the present — is also of enormous help in easing stress and ordering one's thoughts.

2. Provide the Right Resources

As mentioned earlier, imagination cannot be forced into being under a high-pressure environment; it needs the right combination of factors to have a chance of forming. So a comfortable working environment — even a room set aside for meditation — can effectively raise imagination. A company can also offer meditation activities woven into everyday life, such as meditating during meals, or walking meditation in the hills — all of which can lift a team's imagination and pour fresh energy into a hectic workplace.

3. Stillness Training

Quite a few companies (including Google) have already discovered the potential of stillness, and use enterprise-grade stillness training to improve staff performance and psychological wellbeing — so why not bring the spirit of stillness into your own office? There are also psychology-based stillness training programmes available on the market, dedicated to raising staff's imagination and improving their efficiency at work. The hope is that, through stillness and the imagination it brings, a company can take on a whole new outlook.