Everything New under the Gun: Creativity and Deadlines

With varying degrees of panic, teams pull up short when someone voices the perception, “We're running out of time!” At that point, successful groups quickly complete or drop agendas. They cast around for fresh ideas, often with the newly sought input of outside stakeholders. They come up with novel ways to approach their work and new insights on material they had already generated.

The whole business of having a deadline and a time schedule imposed is the ongoing largest single challenge of creativity within a corporate context. “Dead” is the operative word in “deadline.”