There’s a post from Harvard Business Review out this morning on creativity that has me thinking.
The credo here in Silicon Valley and business from my MBA studies is “innovate or die.” It’s so harsh. Die. And yet, this is true – if you have a product or service and you don’t continue to keep it fresh and updated, you lose your competitive advantage and die just a little each day, leading to being lost in the weeds while your competitor out-advances you and scoops market share and revenue. Ugh.
That’s one scenario anyway. And along the way, creativity has been co-opted as THE WAY to discover these innovations and stay in front of the pack.
My life work – engineering the liberation of creativity – has me thinking today about what I am meant to do in the context of “innovate or die” thinking. How do I help people be more creative and why are they wanting to be creative?
I discovered a book a couple of weeks ago that was, titularly at least, in my sweet spot. I thought Joseph Berk’s book*, Unleashing Engineering Creativity was going to be my book – my thing. I ordered it, terrified to open and read it, thinking “here we go again, you have no original thoughts.”
Inside, I discovered a wonderful set of tools and methods for helping engineers work through the creative process in a very analytical way. It was as though the very essence of creativity got distilled back down into analytical – all linear, and process-y. It was a fun read and I know has valuable nuggets, but it is NOT what I’m up to at all. It is everything I’m trying to run away from – the structure, the process, the documenting of it all. I wonder how you can be in a room full of people asking them to bring forth their creativity while you charge and document the whole thing. It SEEMS logical, but intuitively, I know this isn’t entirely how creativity works.
My experience is that creativity happens when there is NO structure. Instead, when there are a few colored pencils and some paper, a chill atmosphere with some light music in the background and some like-minded people immersed in the soup of their own interests and creativity.
This is what happens at Bad Art Night every two weeks at my house: people come here with something they are working on. It is usually not their main area of art. For example a women who weaves and knits very competently may be here to work on necklaces or collaged boxes. She works quietly while chatting. She is paying enough attention to her work to get the glue on the box or the beads on the thread, but she is not consumed in her own world thinking hard about how to make this the next good thing. Instead, she is chatting, sipping some tea, loosely observing someone across from her who is painting or cutting out shapes – doing their own thing. Meanwhile, she is innovating. Maybe her next new necklace design, innovating ahead of her competition, is in the making. She isn’t working hard at it through a rubric of think this, brainstorm that, write down possible designs, evaluate them and eliminate/refine. She’s just making the next best necklace out of her intuitive knowing and skill and talent.
My “job” is to create the right environment for this type of creative R&D to be able to happen. The atmosphere – the room, the lighting and the music and vibe I have some control over physically. I sweep the floor, put out tea, clear the table each night before people arrive. That’s the physical. Easy.
What I really do to have this happen is BE. I am the creative person I want to see all of them be. I am open to possibilities. I dive in and try new things looking for where my art will next innovate. I work with reckless abandon, and I keep working something over until I am happy with it. I hold in my heart the love of creativity and the possibility that everyone is creative and that their creativity feeds their art and personal happiness.
Oprah was onto unleashing creativity in 2011 which I did not know until I started this blog entry and did a search for Joseph Berk’s book. Even Peggy Orenstein’s take on creativity has suggestions for coming up with how many ways you can use a egg carton in five minutes.
I guess because I don’t perform well under pressure, at least creatively, this approach overwhelms me. Instead, I would rather sit at my art table with some paints or ink and paper, and my pen, and start doodling. I keep my “problem to be solved” in the background, but don’t head on dwell on it. Instead, I noodle and doodle and like journaling can help people, the answer comes to me directly, or I relax enough into my creative thinking that it will pop up in a dream or a bit later.
I’m not wanting to bash this head-on methodology because it can and does work for a lot of people and even me, sometimes. It’s just that I find the indirect soup of a creative and nurturing environment better in the long run.
That’s how I help people liberate their creativity. I invite them to be in that nurturing environment and believe in them that their next best idea will come out.
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*In his latest book, author and educator Joseph Berk explores the best techniques for stimulating creative thinking, creating new products, improving existing products, and solving design challenges. Surprisingly, even those of us who are paid to be creative often need help. Most of us lose much of our natural creativity by the time we finish high school, but we can regain it through the techniques included in Unleashing Engineering Creativity. This is exciting and fun material, and Unleashing Engineering Creativity presents it in an interesting and engaging manner. Many organizations and engineers rely on brainstorming as their primary creative and inventive tool, but this simplistic approach often fails to stimulate creativity in a meaningful way. Unleashing Engineering Creativity goes far beyond brainstorming. This book explores powerful new creativity stimulation approaches and provides recommendations for overcoming self-imposed obstacles. The title says it all. If you want to unleash your engineering creativity, this book will help you and your organization attain significant creativity improvements.