Prioritisation: should creative work be accelerated?
In an R&D team, designing a solution and carrying out a procedure do not draw on the same resources. The management question is specific: should exploratory tasks face the same time pressure as tasks whose methods are already established?
What the literature establishes
Markus Baer and Greg R. Oldham (2006, Journal of Applied Psychology) examined the relationship between experienced time pressure and creativity at work. The inverted-U relationship they observed depends on openness to experience and support for creativity: it is not a general law stating that moderate pressure is always optimal. For managers, this means that deadlines cannot be considered independently of the individual and the working environment.
Motivation also changes the nature of the outcome
Teresa M. Amabile (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) experimentally directed the attention of people engaged in creative writing towards intrinsic or extrinsic reasons for writing. Work produced in the extrinsic condition was rated as less creative than work produced in the other conditions. This study does not concern deadlines, but it indicates that how work is framed can change its creative quality, beyond the time available.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all deadlines should be relaxed for innovative teams. That would turn a conditional relationship into a universal prescription while wrongly treating time pressure and extrinsic motivation as equivalent. A more cautious decision is to distinguish delivery commitments from the periods when a team still needs to generate and compare alternative solutions. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot determine
The field study on time pressure does not establish that changing deadlines would cause creativity to improve. Nor can the writing experiment determine how many hours should be allocated to pharmaceutical research or the design of a logistics process. Moreover, an idea judged creative is not necessarily safe, compliant or usable: these dimensions require separate criteria.
A practical check in Bâle
In Basel, a pharmaceutical or life sciences team could test an explicit separation between exploring options and implementing the chosen solution, within an international R&D project involving a Rhine logistics constraint. For one month, it would record, for each exploratory task, planned and actual time, perceived pressure and whether several options had been documented and compared before the decision against predefined technical and regulatory criteria. The central measure would be the proportion of these tasks with a documented comparison, considered alongside adherence to critical deadlines, without presenting any change as causal evidence. In SHR — Swiss Human Resources' “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, this record would support a concrete decision: where to protect exploration without shifting constraints onto partners. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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