Four factors in an expatriate experience that increase your creativity 9. June 2015Many artists and authors have seen their creativity flourish when living abroad. Henrik Ibsen wrote many of his most influential plays while abroad; these include The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt and A Dolls House. Forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the USA, and around half of all startups in Silicon Valley, were started by immigrants. Why is this? Where does the creative drive stem from?
There are four aspects of living in a foreign environment that increase your creative capacity:
A different culture often means that familiar solutions to common problems are no longer effective. This forces you to develop new solutions, or live with the problem. Examples range from daily tasks like how to clean, grocery shopping, tipping, use of concierge and the building's janitor to fix things, to the issues at work, such as office hierarchy and power structures, to which you must adapt in order to get things done.
You experience that seemingly the same event can have very different connotations. A somewhat trivial example is leaving food on the plate when you finish eating. In Norway, we have learnt to eat all the food on our plate, so as not to waste. When we are guests, we always make sure to do so, and expect the same of our own guests. So what when this expectation is not met? While not big, we still raise an eyebrow when guests do not finish their food, and wonder as to the reason. In China, where finishing your food shows appreciation, this is very similar. In Indonesia, on the other hand, to eat everything served is an insult, indicating that you were not given sufficient. With such experiences, you learn to suspend judgments based on own cultural expectations and rather explore other possible explanations. Over time, it becomes a habit to consider if a situation, letter or comment was meant differently than first thought.
Other countries often have values inconsistent with Norwegian ones and can be seen in various situations and social structures. The Norwegian equality culture, with small differences in wages across society, are in strong contrast to India, where these differences are enormous. As changing the local culture is impossible, you have to adjust your own perspectives in order to live in this reality. In other situations, you may feel that both sets of values are valid and equal, forcing you to choose which to live by: the one you grew up with, or the new, local one. Many leave Norway with the tradition of solving most problems yourself, and feel confronted in societies where it is normal to hire others to do tasks such as cleaning, cooking, chauffeuring children to activities etc. raising the question of whether this is really the way you want to spend your days. By being forced to make choices like these, you also develop a new humility and openness to alternative solutions and lifestyles
.
New experiences and the excitement, which novel opportunities in a new culture offer, breed new ideas and values. Grasping these impulses becomes normal, and a habit you bring with you when returning home, which in turn, opens the mind to more creative processes.
Common to these four aspects is that they have a far greater effect on you when you make a permanent or long-term move, than on short term assignments, business trips and holidays. This is because the relocation process forces you to think and find permanent and sustainable solutions, rather than a temporary acceptance of differences. Similarly, expatriates differ. There are those who hold on tightly to their own cultural values and avoid local integration, and thus often are hardly influenced by the foreign experience. Conversely, many embrace the cultural opportunities an expatriation offers; take the hard choices and do the work necessary to identify and implement good solutions. The more you are like the latter, the greater the creativity benefit, and the more potential it is to become a lasting competence.
There is also a difference in types of creative people. Some are born creative, and tend to think creatively in all situations including situations where time is of the essence. Those who have learned creativity, for example through an expatriation, have also learned to differentiate between those situations where action is required, and those that will benefit from a creative examination. This results from the expatriate experience where many of the everyday situations as described above, require a momentary decision, and where one has to reflect after the fact, so as to make a better decision in the future. This ability to distinguish when it suits to think creatively can be invaluable, both in social and business setting.
To learn more about the underlying research, please watch this interview with William Maddux at INSEAD:
Many artists and authors have seen their creativity flourish when living abroad. Henrik Ibsen wrote many of his most influential plays while abroad; these include The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt and A Dolls House. Forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the USA, and around half of all startups in Silicon Valley, were started by immigrants. Why is this? Where does the creative drive stem from? 