Accidental Creative

Read this…

If you’ve not read “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman, YOU MUST. I was first introduced to it through my friend Dave, and since then, it has continued to be a creative spark plug whenever I’m feeling a bit stale. It’s the analysis of the worlds implied by Einstein’s theories, and it analyzes how life in some of these time-challenged places would be.

Pick it up. It’s a quick read, and I guarantee it will be stimulating.

Immersion

Let’s face it. Most organizations primarily value productivity, as they should. They are, after all, paying you to do a job. The problem is that most organizations don’t understand the dynamics of the creative process. Creative productivity cannot be measured as a snapshot in time, it must be measured over time. This is typically what happens in an organization - someone has a great idea or an incredible season of productivity. What happens next? The stakes are raised. More is expected. When the worker comes back down out of the stratosphere, all of a sudden everyone is saying, “hmm…you know….Sue just isn’t quite hitting the mark like she used to.” There is nothing more frustrating to the creative process than unreasonable expectations.

You see, when someone is fully engaged in a creative project, they need to know that they can fully pour themselves into the project and know that there will be a season of rest afterward. If they do not know this to be the case, they will start protecting themselves and conserving their energy and ideas so that they can survive. Productivity decreases, and people start behaving as machines - predictable output given a certain amount of input. The big problem with this is that people are NOT machines. They are capable of exponential return on input, but they need structured rhythms of work and rest to maximize this output. We need to allow people to have peaks and troughs in productivity so that they can predict their workflow and pour themselves fully into whatever they are working on.

So what does this mean to us? We need to be intentional about rhythms in our own lives and make certain that we are protecting ourselves from the fray. There are three main components of the creative rhythm - today we’re going to address the first, which is immersion. We need to structure regular times in our life where we are feeding our curiosity. We need to become good at identifying the questions in our lives, and allowing ourselves the “luxury” of pursuing them. We need to challenge ourselves and put new ideas into our head. We need to explore things that would not normally cross our paths - we need to go out of our way to find new things to stimulate us. This must be more than recuperation at the end of a project - it needs to be a regularly structured part of our schedule.

“Yes…but I don’t have time to do this….I’m already overwhelmed.” OK. Touche. However, if you make it a point to do this I guarantee that you will find the hours you spend working much more productive and ultimately you will get significantly better work done in shorter periods of time. A part of my immersion routine is stopping at a local bookstore on the way home from work to browse new titles and magazines. I find this a great way to get the vibe of what’s going on in the world, new ideas people are advancing, and just to unwind and be stimulated. Many of my best ideas come from seemingly unconnected bits of information or stimulus that I find in my local bookstore. Carry a small voice recorder with you and record everything that crosses your mind. Really. Everything. You never know what your brain might be trying to tell you. I also find this routine to be an effective buffer between my work and home so that I’m not just blurring one into the other. This structure allows my mind to shift from one set of dynamics to another and to clear me to start focusing on my family.

Immersion is critical. You can’t draw water from an empty well. The organization I lead has regular times called Fill The Well where we do things in team format or individually to challenge ourselves and re-fill the well we’ve been drawing from all week. Sometimes this involves sharing work we’ve been doing outside of the workplace, or something we’ve been reading that is challenging us, or sometimes it’s taking a field trip to someplace stimulating. These times, though not as consistent as I’d like, have helped us structure predictability within our organizational systems. I would challenge you to structure these times into your personal and organizational schedule as well.

AC podcasts on iTunes

The first five Accidental Creative podcasts are available on iTunes. Simply do a search under “Accidental Creative”, or click HERE.

Let it go, already…

Once something is finished, we need to learn to leave it alone. We need to learn to simply let it be. We cannot obsess on what has been done, and though it’s good to learn from the past, we cannot obsess on it and allow it to define our current work. We need to replace the tapes that play in our head that constantly rehash our past efforts and tell us why we are not good, or why we are the best. Both of these are destructive to the creative process. Either tape must be destroyed.

A lot of creative energy is wasted constantly re-analyzing and tweaking projects that we have completed. We must learn to allow these projects to take on a life of their own and to let them be as we made them.

Organizational dissonance

One of the greatest sources of tension for the creative person and also one of the key reasons for creative block is cognitive dissonance. It’s when we are unable to be honest with ourselves about our hopes, dreams, selfish ambitions, etc., and we allow guilt and fear to over-ride our natural creative intuition that we tend to lose site of our potential. What is true of the individual is very true of the organization. In fact, an organization is typically an extension of individual personality. If there is a sense within the organization that what is being said is not what is being lived out, there will be an inherent block of creativity. There will be fear and discord, and there will not be an ability to innovate in revolutionary ways. It is imperative that creative individuals and organizations do regular “self-examinations” to determine the level of dissonance in their life or organization. It is important to have a core set of values that drive every decision and bit of vision for the organization so that it can be clearly seen and there is no “black box phenomenon”. Nervous tension and fear take up so much psychic RAM that it leaves little room for creative ideation beyond what is necessary to survive. The body is inherently set up to survive, and it shuts down all systems in an emergency except for those that are necessary for survival. An organization and individuals within it will behave similarly. When there is a perceived “emergency”, or when someone feels subliminal tension due to cognitive dissonance or inconsistent behavior or systems, they will become inherently less productive because they are operating in “emergency mode”, always checking their behavior against that of the organization, unsure of what to aspire to, unsure of whether they are even valued or wanted. This is obviously a terribly destructive atmosphere for any organization and will lead to preservation of the status-quo.

Action steps to determine the level of CG in an org:

1. Can what your org is about be stated in one non-complex sentence? If not, it should be possible.

2. Do employees have regular ability to assess their own work? (Quality/Quantity and Personal Productivity) This is key to helping everyone feel that they have a voice in the organization

3. Are employees rewarded within the bandwidth of their area of giftedness, or are they promoted beyond their level of competency?

4. Is there a “black box” in your organization that everyone must react to, or are priorities clear and systems established to help everyone see clearly what the org priorities are? Blow up the black boxes and help everyone understand how decisions are made. Ensure that every area of the organization is less that two contact points away from the critical decision-making process. This means that any major, life-altering decision within the organization should be less that two contact points away from their supervisor.

The main benefit of “flat” organizations is not communication as much as it is the sense of connectedness with the employee’s own destiny.

Welcome to The Accidental Creative

The Accidental Creative is all about how we can structure rhythms in our lives to help us experience “creative accidents.” A creative accident is when two or more things that do not seem to belong together crash into each other forming an idea that is better than either individual idea on its own.

I hope to offer daily thoughts, insights, and perspectives on finding our creative rhythm, especially within a corporate environment, and how to structure creative organizations so that productivity is maximized over the long term.