Can Political Correctness Stifle Creativity?

I recently attended a leadership workshop in Singapore as part of my MBA program, where a significant portion of the material was on "creative leadership" based on the Manchester MPIA (mapping, perspectives, ideas, actions) model. The crux of creative leadership entails that the creative leader brings out the creativity from his team.

The MPIA model and many other like it, uses a combination of brainstorming and lateral thinking to reduce the mental barriers to individual and team creativity - thinking outside the box. That phrase is oft used but may not be deeply understood. It this workshop that had provided additional insight into what shape that box takes.

Each of us have our own biases, opinions, experience, knowledge and fears; factors which shape our individual boxes. What may be considered out-of-box or creative, may not be to another person. This leads me to the question of can political correctness stifle creativity?

At the leadership workshop, our team had the project assignment of creatively addressing a critical problem of a charitable organization. This organization has the challenge of reaching out to the hearts and minds of people everywhere to make peace on world peace day. One of the techniques of MPIA is to use perspectives to capture key challenges. A key example was when I had said "How to make this movement spread like bird flu?"

The team was aghast at the working of this how-to. Immediately they had rejected it (being an island state - I take it to mean that contagious viral diseases were a sensitive subject), when they're not suppose to at this stage, and offered to reword it as "how to make this spread like wildfire?" I did not object, as at first glance they would mean the same thing, however upon reflection, there are significant differences.

First off, wildfires spread because there is able fuel (dried grass), and a catalyst, strong winds. Flus spread differently, there are the hosts, means of transmission and mutation. Applying the flu metaphor to an idea has vast implications - hence the phrase "going viral."

In the end, we did well with our group presentation, although a part of me wonders what would have changed if i had objected to the rewording. For a team to be creative, rules must be established, but boundaries broken. This would enable exceptional performance.