“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
Creativity is a highly personalized and individualized process. Yet when taken into the business context, it can fall short of its potential to be truly impactful. Instead it’s reduced to a step by step rote process, one which is only collaborative in nature, and does not allow the time, space, or facilitation on an individual scale, it needs to breed worthy concepts worth testing and implementing. As such, creativity is an asset largely untapped in employees and organizations.
THE (INDIVIDUAL) CREATIVE PROCESS
For my grad school thesis, I delved into the creative process, explored how it can be cultivated, encouraged, and applied in a business context. My background in neuroscience informed my perspective and inspired the basis for my initial hypothesis and approach. That hypothesis to question: are we missing a key process that prepares individuals for ambiguity and equips them with tools to read signals as they emerge?
If we consider how the world is changing, there are some signals that can point to a need for a complementary process to strategic design that will empower the individuals, mindsets behind the "design” process.
My working assumption was that if we can take strategic design to be both an art and science. Then, creativity is a skillset needed for the front end of the design process (i.e. research, sense-making, ideation) while scientific methods can be leveraged for prototype/testing, the latter end of the design process. As such, the design process is a “creative” process that can be studied for its applications. I was particularly interested in its application for business innovation.
In an effort to understand the applications of individual creative processes, I looked across disciplines and sectors touching art, design, science, entrepreneurship, music, teaching.
As part of my key takeaways, I gathered that creative processes can be categorized in three ways with varying goals and purposes:
Creative Expression – as a personal outlet
Creative Discipline - as a practice, repeatable process
Creative Audience – as an end application, generating a feedback loop with some other person(s)
Taking it a step further, I defined key design pillars to enable creativity to flourish in a business context for innovation purposes.
Inspiration,
Imagination,
Freedom,
Focus.
The Challenge of Creativity in Business
I view the challenge of tapping into creative energy source from an individual level, understanding that mindsets and behavioral patterns can influence how we regard creativity, how we apply its power, and how we integrate it into our collective (human) identity.
My working belief is that creativity is core to our unique mental DNA. It’s reflective of our brain circuitry, how we’re able to connect that the dots, make sense, find new perspectives and approaches. When creating, factors of adaptability, mental flexibility, letting go, and openness come into play. To me it suggests freedom, allowing your mind to travel to different places, and explore. It’s grounded in imagination, mental visions, and bringing seeds of ideas to life. Yet as part of the human spirit, psyche, soul, it lies largely untapped in the business world.
Creativity to me embodies originality, novelty, ingenuity, and imagination: the essence of innovation.
Why I’ve been so interested in design strategy is because it represents a creative approach to strategy. Framing a box in which to create possibilities by understanding the root of the problem. Then finding innovative ways to test them in order to learn. An ebb and flow process rather than linear process. One that works the brain, but also allows time for rest, for neural connections to form and ideas to emerge.
Our adult brains are plastic, in constant development. This notion of brain plasticity can be used to exercise different thinking patterns and learn alternate skill-sets, ones that can both energize ourselves as well as benefit the organizations we work within. I’m interested in tackling how creativity can be cultivated, encouraged, and applied in a traditional business context as a means to bring life, joy into the workplace and also allow for organizations to rapidly adjust by probing, testing new directions through innovation.
I think about the capacity to free up brain space in employees and that notion is closely linked to creativity. Organizations that seek executers have traditionally placed the thinkers at the top as a byproduct of moving up in the ranks. However, we are shifting away from an archaic world of pyramid hierarchy to a more fluid, organism, living ecosystem model for organizational structure, that requires all employees to be engaged in the thinking and doing process. Modern day business problems are not easily solvable. They are open-ended, ambiguous, and increasingly multifaceted.
Now more than ever corporations require a fresh approach to framing, thinking, and problem solving. Permitting employees to create, ideate, design, test and play can cultivate a thriving and growth-oriented work environment where ideas have freedom to emerge can be highly beneficial. As we move towards a culture in which more executers are strategists as well, requires managing for their creativity. Employees require a creative mindset and companies require resources to unlock and foster this potential within each employee.