The Persistence Dilemma in Long-duration Creative Projects

Abstract

Persistence, continuing effort in the face of challenges over time, can have clear benefits for creativity. At the same time, abandonment, stopping effort toward a course of action, is often necessary to help creators move forward towards their best ideas. Creative workers, and the organizations that employ them, thus face a dilemma between forces for persistence and forces for abandonment in developing ideas and projects, what I refer to as the persistence dilemma. Existing theory provides some clues about this dilemma (e.g. theories of motivation or escalation of commitment), but a lack of holistic theorizing leaves many questions outstanding. Through a longitudinal qualitative study of four organizations, I set out to explore how creative workers managed the persistence dilemma. I found that the organizational context shaped how project teams responded to the dilemma. Teams within the startups I studied managed the dilemma with a process focused on commitment. Leaders helped team members transform the ambivalence that resulted from the dilemma into commitment to the organizations core project. Teams in the established organization, by contrast, managed the dilemma with a process focused on balance. The organization focused on balancing forces for abandonment and forces for persistence since both were perceived as necessary and beneficial in their own way. My work has implications for understanding the persistence dilemma, as well as for theories of creativity more generally.