Being creative is more than letting people run wild with their ideas, as uncovered in an insightful interview with Brad Bird on Innovation lessons from Pixar, where the McKinsey Quarterly examined issues around creating a successful creative environment:
The Quarterly: How important is team dynamics to innovation and creativity?
Brad Bird: Making a film, you have all these different departments, and what you’re trying to do is find a way to get them to put forth their creativity in a harmonious way. Otherwise, it’s like you have an orchestra where everybody’s playing their own music. Each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they’re crazy.
An insightful and entertaining reflection on our educations system from TedTalks, by Sir Ken Robinson, and the essential need for schools to learn how to promote creativity.
Both the education system and the corporate work environment are not conducive for creativity, and that the structure favors following procedure and being right over the freedom to try new things and fail. Yet now, it seems that companies that can’t innovate are choking to death.
Oops.
At least it feels like a slight vindication for doodling in my history book in 3rd grade. I knew I was on to something!!!
Check out the insight from Hivelogic into Offices and the Creativity Zone. Dan discusses some reasons why the corporate work environment isn’t the right setting to be creative – through countless distractions and pressures to produce results.
Reminds me of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… where too many demands coming from too many places, makes it impossible for us to be single-minded-ly focused on one task at a time. Although, central to the Flow concept is finding the right balance between challenge and skill level (if the challenge is to great, it causes stress, and if it is too low, it causes boredom). And I think achieving this balance is essential for accessing our most creative states.
People tend to life seriously and make situations overly complicated. Or is that just me? Does drama ever do anything remotely useful?
One approach I find to be effective in combating this is Rule #6, from Ros and Benjamin’s Zander’s Art of Possibility. The story of Rule #6 is:
An executive is in meeting at another company with one of their managers. They are sitting in the manager’s office, when suddenly the door burst open and a man comes in upset and shouting about an urgent problem. The manager says, “Peter, Peter, please remember Rule #6.” Immediately Peter calms down, says thank you and departs.
Soon after, a young woman enters, hysterical, hair flying all over the place, carrying on in frenzy about her situation. He responds, “Mary, please — remember Rule #6!” She says, “Oh, I’m so sorry”, apologizes and leaves the room quietly.
Then it happens a third time. (It always happens a third time.) At this point the visiting executive can’t keep quiet any longer and says, “Sir, I have seen three people come into this room in a state of uncontrollable fury, and then walk out completely calmly. Would you be willing to share this, Rule #6, what it is?”
The manager says, “Oh yes, Rule #6, very simply put is, don’t take yourself so damn seriously.” And so the executive says, “Oh, that’s a wonderful rule. What, may I ask, are the other rules?” And he replies, “There aren’t any.”
So… whatever it is, get over it, and don’t take yourself so god-damn seriously.
3. Expose yourself. Not after too much vodka. Expose yourself to new art – books, music, paintings – all the time. If you’re a rocker, listen to funk. If you’re a crime writer, read fantasy. If you’re a productivity writer, read something about slacking off.
8. Drink too much coffee sometimes (one of my favorite submissions).
15. Creativity is a muscle. Exercise it daily – if you only need to create once a week, your muscles may have atrophied if you don’t do it just because you don’t have to.
22. Keep a journal. It can get your mind working, and in a month, or a year, when you’ve gained some distance from what you’ve written it can give you new ideas.
In October, I set out to transform my room to create an inviting atmosphere. I couldn’t paint my walls, so instead I painted sheets of A3 and tacked them to my wall. As my walls are filling up, the change to the room is incredible.
Things I have learned from this project:
Side benefit #7: Painting is a great way to relax, and at the same time exercise the creative side of the brain.
Bigger Picture #2: I wanted to learn how to paint. Having a bigger purpose of “transforming my room” gave me the motivation I needed.
Insight #1: It would have been easy to say, “I don’t like my room, but there is nothing I can do about it”. Instead, being open to possibility allowed for a creative, fun way around my constraints.
What can you do to cultivate your intuition and creativity?
Try meditation. It is not just a spiritual practice. Meditation serves to calm the rampant mind-chatter that runs through your head. When your thoughts quiet down, truth and insight arise from within. It is from this place where creativity flows naturally.
There are many techniques: pick one, try it for 15 minutes each day for the period of a month, and record the changes you experience.
The world we live in treasures the intellectual mind. From a young age we go to school – a structured environment where we are taught to follow instructions, process information and return expected answers in order to succeed. We are not encouraged to fail, nor are we given the freedom to define our own path.
This is the same in the workplace. We are expected to show up on time and follow the process we need to get the job done.
But the dark secret is that true value, both in our lives and in business, comes from creativity and new ideas. Creativity doesn’t come from intellect but from intuition – a skill few have taken the time to cultivate.
Either you can see possibility in the world, or you can see the threats, problems and dangers. If you’re really talented, you will see possibility where others see a threat. This is called turning a problem into a challenge.
The magic secret is to understand that what you see is your choice. Do you notice yourself feeling defensive or mulling over issues? Then ask yourself:
Life is a funny set of challenges, pushing us to grow and discover.
It seems a mysterious playground at times, but at others it seems anything but in a work environment that is filled with pessimism and irritation, and surrounded with negative world news. I find myself living in a world which seems driven by a strange obsession with money as measure success, which does not appear to be as fulfilling as society likes to portray.
Stuck in a mess of conflicting belief systems, it is not always easy to stand up to this confusion, face your fears and forge your own, true path.
But at the end of the road, on your deathbed, don’t you want to at least be able to look back and say you had the guts to give it your best shot?
, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… where too many demands coming from too many places, makes it impossible for us to be single-minded-ly focused on one task at a time. Although, central to the Flow concept is finding the right balance between challenge and skill level (if the challenge is to great, it causes stress, and if it is too low, it causes boredom). And I think achieving this balance is essential for accessing our most creative states.
