Waking up your dormant creativity
In her 1998 classic article, “How to Kill Creativity”, Professor Teresa Amabile suggested that large and complex organizations [in essence, multinational companies] (at times) unknowingly develop a profile of an organization unable to sustain creativity. Features of such an organization:
a closed organizational culture and political infighting, resource constraints which force employees to manage scarcity, lack of employees’ process autonomy, and allowing a culture that undermines and blocks novel ideas to unfold.
At various stages of my career, I served corporates. Consulting firms, DAX-listed multinationals, research firms… these were my employers. What I noticed while working for them, however, was the need to conform. My professional success was partially dependent on complying with the respective organization’s culture. Creative problem-solving is a buzz word. But what does that even mean and how do companies ensure employees get to hone this skill?
Most of the time, my employer’s culture was not supportive of creativity and innovation. Quite the contrary. Like snow white in the brother Grimms’s fairy tale, it felt like my creativity was dormant.
At times I wondered whether my creativity was gone, never to be resuscitated again. To rejuvenate it, I researched its key components and dedicated an Executive master’s thesis to it and the experiments I conducted. Think of it as coaching myself back to my younger self when I was still creative.
What is creativity? Academics have made various attempts to differentiate between creativity’s different forms, distinguishing between “Big C” creativity, the trait of geniuses and inventors, and “little c” — everyday — creativity (Kaufman, Beghetto). Kaufman further refined this in his “Four C” model, developing the concepts of “mini-c” creativity (creativity inherent to the learning process, the “genesis of creative expression”) and “Pro c”, professional creativity (Kaufman, Beghetto). The below model shows Kaufman and Beghetto’s Four C model of creativity.
Norman Jackson: The Four C model of creativity. 2015. URL below.
Consider the genesis of 3M’s post its: the product of an adhesive glue experiment gone south, a creative act, it is now one of the key tools of brainstorming workshops (as shared by Adam Brand). While academics like Kaufman and Beghetto assume that all individuals possess “little c” everyday creativity, access to it can get disrupted, negatively affecting an individual. This is often preceded by the loss of “mini c” creativity — the creativity inherent to the learning process.
When you feel like your creativity is dormant, your aim is to rejuvenate your mini-c and little-c creativity.
I focused on enhancing my mini-c creativity first. I don’t think I did this consciously in the beginning. I signed up for an executive master’s program in change management and coaching (in Singapore). This way a way of countering my boredom, and it turned out to provide me with many transformative learning experiences.
But one does not have to go so far. I interviewed three different professionals as part of my master thesis research. All of them had gone through their personal transformation and changed careers in the process.
And all of them agreed that engaging in small experiments during this phase sparked their imagination again.
One took on cooking. Another one renovated a house. Even changing up your daily route to work by taking a slightly longer, but more scenic, route, could do wonders. In a similar vein, I engaged in a host of experiments as well. I drew portraits of my current and future professional self (see my 2017 article). I regularly went to a photo booth and took pictures of myself against “playful” backgrounds and wrote about that (see below). I broadened my professional network by interacting with peers from other industries (primarily, the fashion industry and the startup world). I mentored managers at NGOs. This helped me.
2017. Photo booth One North, Singapore.
If you also wish to rejuvenate access to your mini-c and little-c creativity, I encourage you to experiment. Engage in activities you otherwise wouldn’t engage in. Say YES to things. If your current workload does not permit you to do so on a weekly basis, even signing up for a cooking workshop during your next vacation might initiate the process. No one says you have to change careers. But mini-c and little-c creativity are important — not only to your wellbeing, but also to innovation.
A subject for another article :-).
Sources:
Teresa M. Amabile (1998). HOW TO KILL CREATIVITY. (cover story). Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 76–87.
Adam Brand (1998). Knowledge management and innovation at 3M. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2(1), 17–22.
Norman Jackson: The Four C Model of Creativity. Published on 21 October 2015.
James C. Kaufman, and Ronald A. Beghetto (2009). Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology 13, 1, 1–12.
Caroline-Lucie Ulbrich (2017). Stuck in a career transition? Play with self-created portraits to access novel insights. Published on 02 August 2017.