Creativity - you're doing it wrong!
Busy times we are living in my friends. Thankfully, a train-ride turned into a bus-ride due to railroad works lets me take some time off from being connected and contemplate on a buzzword that has been buzzing in my mind and life lately. That being creativity, which the sharpest of you probably picked up from the title.
Creativity is everywhere. It’s being proposed as the solution to all the problems which the developed (and even the developing) world is facing today. Anticipations are high, everything should be more creativity oriented in order to produce the innovative solutions necessary to reach the bright future ahead of us.
Overoptimistic? Sure. Wrong? Not so much. My personal opinion is that these developments are to the right directions. Though I’m getting tired of the word itself, the actual solution presented is rather intriguing. I like the idea of setting aside the restrictions of what we’ve before seen too artsy for the business world and the worlds big problems and truly working in ways that we have previously only seen used by artists and artist-minded. Surely we can’t do everything through heavy analysis and useful toolkits and methods, which can easily be modeled and mastered. The world is, and has always been too compile for that to be possible. Model-based methods work for many things, but not all the things. So being able to approach problems in novel ways, even so novel that you’re not quite sure what you’re embarking on, can produce insights unlike never before.
So the concept itself is in no way problematic to me. The thing I see problematic can be summed up in a few descriptive phrases, first being:
"Everyone can be creative!”
No, we can’t be. Not at all. Many of us are very very VERY terrible when it comes to being creative. And even more of us are mediocre when it comes to being creative. Being mediocre in creativity is maybe even worse than being totally uncreative. There’s another phrase which is described the most common reasoning for the above mentioned statement which I’ll bash next:
”We are all born creative, we are all creative as children”
Pardon my French, but that is total bullshit. Not all children are creative. Go to a kindergarten and you’ll see a few truly creative kids going through their daily life in such an unorthodox way that it’s just mind-blowing. But there’s also the big mass of kids spending their days eating crayons in the corner of the room or just simple copying the things that the more creative ones do. Then there are the kids that just simply do what they’re told. Some kids have the natural tendency to truly see things differently, but most don’t. Now, you might argue that kids are still more creative than the adult versions of themselves, which I fully agree on, but I still don’t see too much creative potential in the crayon eating bugger thirty years later wearing a grey suit and sucking on ball-point pens. (As a side not, yes eating crayons is a rather unorthodox and even creative interpretation of the use of crayons, but still not very useful. And I know that copying is in the heart of many truly creative success stories, but still the people behind the progress are of the creative kind. There is hardly any creativity in learning to use the CTRL+C combination and shifting the order of a neat PowerPoint which you saw the other day.)
But like I said, this growing interest toward creativity is a very positive matter. It gives us a new way of looking at the problems we encounter. The problem is that at the moment too much effort is going into building false hope and sense of can-do, when most of us in fact can’t.
What I’m proposing is that we mix up the discussion with a bit of reality. We can’t all be creative problem solvers who can tackle life’s big problems. Most of us won’t be able to create over 5000 prototypes of vacuum cleaners before finding the winning design. With a more creative touch to life we can have new ways of solving smaller, more personal problems and even enjoy life a lot more, but that’s most likely enough to fix everything there is to fix.
The true reason why this emphasis in creativity is meaningful and can have a truly powerful impact is the fact that it improves the acceptability of being creative. Also, as creativity comes closer to us and turns from an occultism to something we can better understand. The society will be more supportive to the truly creative masterminds who can do, what most of us cannot. It’s okay if you can’t think of a system which in the future prevents the economic crisis from ever happening again, nevertheless by building your understanding of creativity and creative problem solving you can better support and spot the ones who can. In a recent interview I conducted, two interviewed designers pointed out that the Finnish business life is lacking in design management abilities. I believe that that will be a problem of the past, as the understanding towards the value and possibilities of creativity become stronger.
To conclude and maybe aim your sights to the future I’ll end with a quote which I love:
"Novel problems require novel principles” - Gary Hamel
Yours truly,
WHAQ Axel (with a little help from Tuomas)
