Get creative with your career

In many organisations there are traits of leadership that are seen as absolutely essential and then there are some that are the ones you bring in alongside you, to supplement the overall team skill.

It would be rare for you to have worked in an organisation, in a senior leadership capacity and not be asked to demonstrate strategic thinking, commercial acumen, organisational design and effectiveness, to attract or retain talent, to communicate with stakeholders.

And then there’s creativity.  Not innovation (which by the way is the output of creativity).  But creativity itself.   Call for the marketing department immediately – the guys and girls with the bright clothing, out there styling, the radical ideas and so on.

Culturally we learn in corporate life that creatives are a bunch of people who inhabit their own special corner of organisations.  Sometimes they are even awarded their own workspace that’s full of bright primary colours to stimulate their thinking.  

It allows the creation of a mythology that creativity is something that some are born with and others are not.   It’s a mistaken belief.   And yet many of us grow up in organisational cultures that have convinced us that we are not creative.

So here we are in a conversation about mid-life career change and the burning question in your head is if I don’t do this then what else can I / could I / will I do?   Cue brain freeze before the saboteur voice in your head starts to spiral whispering to you that you were only cut out for this one job, and who are you at your age to start rocking the boat and dreaming up new ideas, just stick to your lane.

It’s not very helpful to organisations when they perpetuate the myth that only a few people are creative but if you swallow that line then who exactly is going to help you get creative and redesign your career and next career move?

So let’s look at where this myth comes from and hopefully I’ll persuade you it is just a myth and that creativity, the key to unlocking the new opportunities that are out there for you, you just can’t see them or a way to grab them yet.

Creativity stems from curiosity not from ideas

Bad news to all lovers of high school physics, turns out Archimedes didn’t jump naked out of the bath running through the streets shouting Eureka having noticed the bathwater rise and fall with his body mass (that story was actually all about understanding whether a gift was real or fake gold).

Creativity isn’t about having the great ideas.  That’s the output.  Creativity is about having observational skills, noticing how what you have is comparing to what’s out there.  Noticing something’s out of place, getting curious enough to ask questions.

Want to practice this and redesign your career – find a contemporary who does the same job as you but in a different organisation.  Grab a coffee together and compare notes.   Find someone who has just pivoted in mid-life to a new career.  Grab a coffee together and get curious.   Look at people in your own organisation who are also in mid-life same as you but appear to have the energy and vigour you crave. Grab a coffee together and you guessed it – be curious.   You’re not asking for a job or anything as overt as that.  It’s about field work and gathering inspiration from other people’s experience.

Creativity is more about enhancing / improving than the entirely new

Every now and again a high profile court case emerges in which someone successful is sued by someone less successful for copying lyrics or elements of a song the latter wrote.   Sometimes these allegations have merit but as court cases go they’re often really tricky to figure out because after all these years of mankind creating musical output, it turns out that finding pleasing combinations of notes doesn’t have endless possibilities and that sometimes even the biggest hit songs are borrowing inadvertently from common stems of notes that just work together because they do.

The American consumer revolution of the early 1900s electrified everything, sometimes even the hapless owners of every electro-domestic appliance and invention under the sun.  A brief shout out at this juncture goes to Mr Richard Hartman of Issaquah in Washington State who filed a patent for a device that would automatically rotate your ice cream cone for you as you licked it, demonstrating perhaps not every problem is big enough to merit an invention. 

There are a few tiny examples of entirely new revolutionary things that were invented in that time.  The rest, the vast majority were existing chores that could be made simpler, easier, less arduous, faster through an electrical / mechanical device.   Early washing machines looked like and resembled the manual process.

Creativity is much more about incremental improvements and advances than brand new thinking.   We can however fall victim to the lone-creator myth.   This myth trips us up because it stops us from looking around and learning from others and it creates a ridiculously high bar to invent a new career destination for ourselves that’s never been done before.  Unnecessarily difficult.

Want to absorb this into your career thinking?   Well for starters agree that you don’t need a blank sheet of paper because you’re already more than a blank sheet of paper.  Instead use your starting point as the skills you have.   From here you can then start to ask – in what other contexts or fields could those skills be valuable – this is creativity through changing the environment.   Or what combinations of these skills go best together, if I bring these four together and drop the fifth how would I describe that person – this is creativity changing the combination of ingredients.

Don’t disregard the importance of years of learning and practice to master a craft

David Burkus looked at how creativity evolved over the ages.   A lot of our cultural beliefs about creativity can be traced back to Greek mythology and then templated into many western religions – let’s call this the “Gifted from on high” or “Blessed be” myth.   In Greek mythology Thamyris, a gifted if conceited singer, boasted that his voice was sweeter than any of the muses and challenged them in a competition.  In revenge, the muses blinded him, robbing him of his ability to play the lyre. 

In relatively recent Christianity, children were said to be blessed with sweet voices, acting talent, wisdom, writing talent, sculpture and artistic talent.   People routinely gave thanks for their blessed gifts.   In short, whatever your religion, a higher power dispensed things to some and not others – if you weren’t at the front of the line when the talents were being handed out, you don’t and won’t have them.

It completely disregards the years of research and note-taking Newton had undertaken and his mathematical skill in crafting the theory of relativity.   The “chosen one” theory, whilst attractive, would have us believe that as the apple was falling from the tree and landed on his head it also simultaneously picked up a pen and wrote out the algebraic equation we know and love today.  Clever apple.

Want to reflect this in your career thinking?   Many things we consider gifts are actually skills that people have learned and honed over time.  Interest and aptitude help to a degree but giving up on something you’d like to do because you’re too old, there’s not enough time, you’re not smart enough or good enough to learn it and someone’s bound to be better at it than you anyway, is succumbing to the Blessed Be myth.   Don’t confuse talent with sheer hard work and determination.  Face into things you don’t know yet  and understand the effort and curve to acquire those skills.

The componential model of creativity

Harvard Business School Professor Theresa Amabile proposes what she calls the “componential model of creativity”, designing the model to explain the creative process and how it works.

Theresa Amabile proposes that creativity comes from four components:

-        Domain relevant skills

-        Processes that support the act of creativity

-        Motivation to succeed

-        Support from the social environment around you

When these factors overlap, creativity is more likely to take place.  

Or as David Burkus puts this, creativity will be seen when an intrinsically motivated person with sufficient creative thinking skills and a given level of expertise operates within an environment that supports creativity.

Take-out time

Skills can be learned.   Process to support creativity can be obtained and practiced.   The environment around you can be constructive and willing you to succeed.   Being motivated – that’s almost entirely down to you.

That career change in mid-life demands a bit of creativity from you – that much is true.   Is creativity something everyone has inside them – that’s true as well.

But creativity is a process.   It’s not an apple tree we just sit under waiting for the lightning bolt to strike inspiration that will change everything.   You have creativity within you, break through the myths and focus on getting those four components in place.