Rediscover creativity
Beliefs are powerful things. They often build through our childhood, reinforced in our adulthood and become who we are without us understanding why.
In today’s article and podcast I wanted to look at why so many of us are paralysed from seeing ourselves as creative and what we can do to change this belief.
Back at school I don’t think I was naturally very gifted with art. Some kids were big on the crayons and expression through colour. This wasn’t me. At school art was considered the creative subject and so it was easy for me to pick up messaging that I was not creative. Yet I could read and play music freely through my imagination, I could write and loved writing poetry, prose and stories. I wrote mini journals of family trips and added castles and impressive buildings into my stories. I was not and still am not naturally tuned into tactile skills such as woodwork and metalwork but I could play for hours with lego, creating buildings and structures of my own invention.
It is easy for us to see creativity as a label that some are deserving of and others are not. Though I’ve left school some time ago, moving into a corporate life there are certain structures that seem to limit creative expression:
- The reaction of managers and supervisors to suggestions for improvements
- The tendency of those labelled as the creative types to also be extrovert personalities and thereby conflating imagination and creativity with a certain expressive style
- The fear of getting things wrong and the consequence in social isolation or even worse for speaking up with an idea that people might laugh at
- The wait until its perfect syndrome that means people harbour a good idea but mull it in their heads contemplating its flaws for so long that its actual relevance and need moves on or the thing is invented by someone else (the I told them so syndrome)
It is easy for us to see creativity as a label some people are deserving of and others are not yet we can all be creative in different ways. As a leader I implore you to consider that injecting more creativity and innovation into your company will not come just because you announce it as so. Your people have been through a journey where the notion of being creative has likely been stripped away from them and what’s needed is a journey towards self-belief and a different approach towards ideas, wonder and rigour.
The thing is your people won’t tell you these are the blockers because self-belief in creativity was removed from them a long time ago. And if you only signal – this company values people who think creatively, those for whom potential lies inside but so deep they can no longer readily access it, will likely feel isolated further – this company is not for me.
Here are a few thoughts whether you’re a supervisor, line manager or CEO for you to engage with a reawakening of creativity within your people. Go slowly, go gently to coax the creativity back into the open air.
1) Explore the zones of creativity? Be curious about people’s whole lives and what they get up to. We’re all smart in different ways. By exploring and expressing wonder in the things people get up to, particularly the things they choose to get involved in whether that’s music, DIY, writing, speaking – it’ll give you a richer insight into the special zones of genius that each of your people have but it’ll help you to take a step back and wonder how come Fred writes music and loves performing with his band on stage at weekends but the Fred I know in my team seems to be quiet and inexpressive – is it just because he’s tired from rocking away at the weekend or have I not yet found the right environment for Fred to rock out at work?
2) How have your people felt and experienced feedback? In the excellent book Thanks for the Feedback the authors remind anyone who reads it (and I strongly recommend reading it) that feedback is subjective and often corrupted with the values of the person giving feedback as well as their own priorities and failings. It’s a perspective. Yet for people in your team feedback may have been used as a performance yardstick, as if it was an absolute and objective fact about performance and something to be feared. Any text can say feedback is a gift but for many people it may have been the Snow White’s poisoned apple. You need to get curious about people’s attitudes to feedback. Feedback is an important part of the creative process but if people fear it for its negative consequences you’re on a rocky starting point.
3) How do your people feel about surprises? Often those of us who fear and are reluctant to change are the ones who like surprises least. Are you running the type of business which is prone to watching the world and your customers go by until one day you wake up and the only remaining surprise is there’s no one left but you? You may find a need to coax your people into not seeing things that are new as “surprises” but just things that are different to yesterday, forming a different attitude so that surprise engenders curiosity not fear
4) Talk to your team about the island you’re inhabiting right now – what’s great about it, what’s not so great. What do we all see about the neighbouring island that if we could have some of what they have we’d like it at lot? How might people feel about moving to another island, how radical a change are they up for? What might happen is someone set fire to our island of comfort – competitors, new markets. You can game-plan how we might improve the island or you might game plan how we might find materials to build a boat, navigate to a new place and set up home there. It’s about relaxing people into accepting the state we’re in is transitory and that’s OK and it’s better to have these conversations now than when a sudden external event happens and no-one is prepared for the change
5) How can you bring more curiosity into your team’s daily life? How can you take the opportunity when being a consumer yourself to consider how the service you’re receiving has been designed? Which elements of the service feel clunky and not built for you? Give your team a task every month to research how someone else does broadly what they do. What did they notice that you do better or they do differently? What incremental improvements might lie within your existing grasp? The starting point of the creative journey is wondering why things are, how things might be can come later.
6) Get out the magic wand for your team. Often our creativity is limited by what’s gone before. We subconsciously add constraints to our thinking and then fail to air our true thoughts. How many times have you considered something that would really help your organisation but you then shy away from ever airing it because you “just know” they can’t afford it or it’s not how things are done around here. Every day thousands of ideas, concepts and observations are discarded without being aired for these reasons. The magic wand question is an invitation for your people to air these thoughts and let the constraints come later. Often viable concepts come as an amalgamation of multiple thoughts rather than one single brainwave. If you don’t get these thoughts aired, you’ll be missing the exposure of the inflection point for your industry
7) Tap into the new people in your team? Often new folk struggle to feel impactful in the early days and yet their insight as to how your organisation, relationship with its customers, markets it serves, ways of doing business is really clear to the new folk and getting this all out on the table gives you valuable insight for free but is also a great way of ensuring the new folk feel the immediate value they can bring
We all have the power to be creative, we’ve just fallen for the gremlins that tell us we’re not or we’re not as good as others or we’re looking at creativity through an overly narrow lens. We all run the risk of a slow fade into irrelevance if we allow things to be this way, we can’t take anything for granted. But the good news is the inspiration to be different is all around if we can recognise the starting point of creativity is a curiosity as to why things are and how things could do. As a leader you need to recognise it’s taken the world years to knock creativity out of your people and the journey to recover won’t happen overnight and it certainly won’t happen by accident. You need to start not by just a declaration but by daily actions that create the conditions to foster creativity.
