What is creativity? Is “creative” something you either are or aren’t? Or can we learn how to be creative, think creatively? What happens when we reframe being creative as performing acts of creativity?
One of the most-asked questions of creative people, whether artists, writers, or filmmakers, is “where do you get your ideas?” Anyone who is creative—or, I should say, does creativity—knows that the ideas are the easy part. You get ideas by living life with your eyes and ears open. To a musician, every series of sounds carries the potential to become a rhythm or a melody, because they’re always listening for a rhythm or a melody. For visual artists, the eye is always composing a camera shot or framing a painting. For a writer like Virginia Woolf, an old woman on the train is not just an old woman on the train. Everything about her, from her clothes to her body language, suggests a character and a story because she’s always observing the world in terms of story ideas.
The hard part isn’t coming up with ideas. It’s separating the good ideas from the bad ideas. That takes time. It can take weeks or months to let an idea play out in your head. You might get halfway through drafting a story before you realize there’s no story there yet. So you think about it. You sit with it. You let it percolate. At work, creativity requires a shift in mindset from “being creative” to “doing creative things” and the culture and processes to support creative thinking.
Making Space for Creativity
Any one of your employees can come up with the next great idea. They just need to feel like they are allowed to think like a creative person. So-called creative people don’t have any special inborn trait that the rest of us are lacking. It’s just a matter of looking at the world through the lens of your field. Applying this idea to business, it’s about encouraging your employees to see the world through the eyes of your customers and your work: what’s missing from our customers’ lives? How can we fill that need? How can we improve the way we work? It’s almost like a program you keep running in the back of your brain at all times. “How can we make this better?”
This is a cultural change, and if you want to change the culture of your workplace, you have to change the processes that guide the way employees work. That is a change that takes place at the level of strategy. For more on how to approach innovation strategically, see this article.
At the level of day-to-day operations, there are some things you can do to encourage the kind of creativity that generates innovative products and ideas.
- A/B test everything: Email headings, landing page copy, the images you use in advertisements, everything. Collect data on who sees what and which version performs better. You’ll gain new insights into your customers and get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Without A/B testing, you might be tempted to play it safe. Having the freedom to test different ideas gives you the space to be more creative.
- Tolerate ambiguity: You can’t solve every problem or reconcile every contradiction. Sometimes, you just have to accept that two opposing ideas can both be true and even the best data can’t give you 100% certainty. This kind of thinking can lead to unforeseen ideas.
- Assemble a diverse team: People from different backgrounds have different life experiences that have led them to see the world in different ways. Bringing together people with different experiences lets us all see the world in ways we previously didn’t, leading to innovative ideas we wouldn’t have otherwise come up with. This isn’t an assumption; it’s backed by research.
- Find creativity in unexpected places: Creative people pull from disparate disciplines. They’re endlessly curious, and they’re able to apply ideas from one discipline to their own. Activities like guest lectures, book clubs, and art classes can open up new ways of thinking about work. Bringing together employees in cross-functional teams or taking the corporate staff on a tour of the production facility give employees a view of the company beyond their immediate list of tasks. When guided through follow-up questions, these kinds of activities can generate innovative ideas.
Creativity Takes Time
The modern workplace is becoming increasingly regimented. As the biggest businesses try to squeeze every drop of productivity out of their employees, whether by limiting break time or employing draconian digital surveillance measures, employees have less time to just sit with a project and think. Thinking doesn’t look like work. It looks like daydreaming or wandering aimlessly around the office for ten minutes. If employees are trying to “look busy,” they won’t be doing the kinds of things that engender creativity. Keep this in mind when developing creativity-based goals and metrics.
It takes time to come up with good ideas, and it also takes time to see an ROI in innovation. A commitment to a more creative, innovative workplace is a long-term commitment, but eventually you’ll see the results: products more attuned to your customers’ needs, better customer service, more efficient processes, and overall higher-quality output across teams.
