The Prisoner’s Dilemma: The Key to Creativity

August Turak

I was having lunch with one of my clients, the CEO of a rapidly growing mid-size company, when I casually asked for his job description.

He smiled and said, “Well, if you followed me around you’d probably think I do lots of things. But I only have one job. I build passion. Most people think talent is in short supply. Hell, the papers are full of stories about regular folks working miracles when something they really care about is on the line. Talent is not in short supply. Passion is. My job is showing people that what we’re doing is worth doing. I provide the whys so our people can provide the hows. Once passion is in place,” he said with a big grin, “my job becomes insisting that people use their vacation and trying to stay out of the way.”

In a previous article, 8 Keys to Innovation: Building Brands by Killing Frogs, I noted that prisoners are some of the most creative and innovative people. Turning toothpaste tubes into lethal weapons demonstrates their improvisational knack for engineering and product development; their creative selling skills, though usually manipulative, are legendary; and when it comes to applying the law in creative ways, jail house lawyers are second to none.

Obviously, education, training, prior experience, financial rewards, and traditional ways of measuring intelligence don’t account for all this creative achievement. So what does? More importantly if great leaders are creative leaders, what can we learn from prisoners?

The first secret is that prisoners have a high overarching mission that transcends engineering, product development, sales, or law. Whether applied to their fellow prisoners, prison regulations, or the prison itself the prisoner’s mission is freedom. Acquiring all the requisite skills is merely the by-product. The lesson here is that if we don’t have a galvanizing mission personally and organizationally all the skills in the world won’t spare us mediocrity.

Next, prisoners are not only emotionally committed to this mission they are in fact institutionally committed. Like Cortez burning his ships, they have no line of retreat. Freedom is not just a mission. It is mission critical. Prisoners live the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention, and they are living proof that great inspiration depends on some desperation.

Most of us are not creative because we fear commitment. We want guarantees that commitment will always produce successful outcomes, and since this is an impossible demand, we end up frittering away our creative juices “hedging our bets” and rationalizing that hedging represents a “balanced life.”

Read The Complete Forbes Article


Listen to Why Prisoners Are So Creative and How You Can Be Too with August Turak on Blog Talk Radio. Turak is a frequent guest with Doug Foresta on The Doug Foresta Show, previously Breakfree to Success. In this episode August shares his always unique and wise perspective, this time tackling creativity and spirituality. August poses the question: “Why are prisoners so creative?”