We’re living in a world where people increasingly demand purpose and meaning in their work, so accusations of boredom come with almost universally negative connotations.  Hence, you have a growing number of companies who not only strive to make work meaningful, but to make it fun too.

One recent study set out to explore whether boredom had any impact on our creative performance levels.  They recruited over 100 volunteers and split them into two groups, one of which were given a boring task to perform for half an hour, whilst the other group were given an interesting art project to work on.

Each group was then asked to complete an idea-generation task, with their ideas evaluated for their creativity.  A couple of trends emerged from the data.  Firstly, it transpired that those who were in the boredom inducing group came up with ideas that were rated as more creative than their peers in the other group.  This only seemed to occur in certain individuals however, with there appearing to be a trend towards those with certain personality traits, including cognitive drive, openness to new experiences, intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn new things.

Seeking divergence

The authors suggest that triggering boredom in such individuals can result in divergence-seeking behaviors that prompt the curious individual to explore.  In other words, when we limit the ability of people to seek new experiences and intellectual adventure, they respond by doing things that innately involve novelty and variety.

Which is interesting, but it seems perhaps unwise for managers to try and deliberately create boring scenarios for employees in the hope that they will respond with acts of creativity.  What the authors do believe however is that it might prompt us to think afresh about boredom at work, as it may not be entirely negative.

What it perhaps does underline however is the importance of understanding your workforce better than we do today.  If you understand whether your team are intellectually curious and open to new experiences, then you will have a better idea of how they might respond to periods of mundane work.

If you can do that, then it ‘may’ be possible to inspire bouts of creativity from them by giving them more mundane tasks to do, followed by requests for fresh thinking.  It is, of course, a single study so it’s hard to draw too firm a conclusion, but it may be something to play around with.