Accidental Creative

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.