Being chairman of the bored can be a good thing

Boredom at work (and meetings) is something nearly all of us feel at times, but admitting that boredom to co-workers or managers is likely something few of us have ever done.

It turns out, however, that a certain level of boredom might actually enhance the creative quality of our work. That’s the implications of two recently published papers focused on the link between feeling bored and getting creative.

In the first paper, researchers Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, both at the University of Central Lancashire, explained the creativity-boosting power of boredom in two rounds of studies.

In both rounds, participants were either assigned the boring task of copying numbers from a phone book or assigned to a control group, which skipped the phone book assignment. All participants were then asked to generate as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups.

This is a common test of divergent thinking – a vital element for creative output that concerns ones ability to generate lots of ideas. Mann and Cadman found that the participants who had intentionally led to boredom through the phone book task had generated significantly more uses for the pair of plastic cups.

Another paper, this one from Karen Gasper and Brianna Middlewood at Penn State University, found a similar effect using a different mundane task and a different type of creativity test. In their study, Gasper and Middlewood assigned participants to watch a video clip designed to “prime” participants by eliciting feelings of relaxation, elation, distress, or boredom – depending on which video was watched. (Participants were told, however, that the clip was random.)

They then had their subjects take what’s known as a remote associates test, where participants are given three seemingly unrelated words (for example: string, cottage and goat) and asked to think of a fourth word that links the three (in this example: cheese).

Remote associates tests are commonly used to measure convergent thinking, a different but complimentary element of the creative process that concerns ones ability to figure out the single, correct idea for a situation.

Motivation
Just as in the Mann and Cadman study, participants in the bored category of this study outperformed the participants in the other three categories. Gasper and Middlewood suggest that boredom boosts creativity because of how people prefer to alleviate it.

Boredom, they suggest, motivates people to approach new and rewarding activities. In other words, an idle mind will seek a toy. (Anyone who has taken a long car ride with a young child has surely experienced some version of this phenomenon.)

Taken together, these studies suggest that the boredom so commonly felt at work could actually be leveraged to help us get our work done better . Or at least get work that requires creativity done better.

David Burkus is the author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas. He is also founder of LDRLB and assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University.

In association with Harvard Business Review