Why Your Creativity Isn’t Gone—It’s Just Asleep
Remember when you were 5 years old and you just started school?
It’s an exciting new world full of possibilities: Of exploring, of learning, of making new friends. And of creativity.
You draw and paint at every opportunity. You make a mess. You get the building blocks out and construct things from your imagination. You invent whole new games. You even invent new words and new names.
Not long after that for many people, inexplicably, the creativity appears to stop.
By the time you enter a world of work you say things like:
‘I’m not really creative’ or ‘I don’t have a creative bone in my body’ and ‘Well, the creative people are over there’.
Some of you will rarely draw on a board to communicate an idea or concept, or sketch something out on a piece of paper let alone get involved in generating ideas without fear of some of them ‘being wrong’.
What the heck happened?
Well, that creativity is still there, but it’s lying dormant. And the confidence to be creative is all but gone.
And that matters because…
Finding new ways to do things, and do them better, is a creative process.
Solving problems is a creative process. - Strategy is a creative process.
Making breakthroughs into new areas is a creative process.
Every company needs creativity, and it’s partly there already, just sleeping.
And the problem is many organisations don’t know how awaken it in people - to build an environment where creative confidence can flourish, where people can experiment, be playful and try new things.
'So we don't need the creative professionals now?'
Not so - being a professional designer requires skill, experience, knowledge and craft of course.
But the reality is designers can play a very important role in bringing back that innate creativity - they can be the guides and mentors, bringing consistency and structure, driving inspiration and a pioneering spirit to the challenge of giving people their creative confidence back.
So when I hear people say they or their teams aren’t creative (they get stuck, they need to do things differently, they can't improve or make the necessary break throughs)
...well, that's a challenge I readily accept!