Accidental Creative

Q: Organization: Friend or Foe?

A: Yes.

Depending on our perspective, organizations can either be the life-sucking entities that bring us eternal woe or the life and resource giving entities that facilitate our creative growth. Organizations are about the BOTTOM LINE, whether it’s financial (usually), humanitarian (rarely) or spiritual (hardly ever). And guess what - they SHOULD be. That’s why they exist. Organizations exist to serve themselves. They are set up for maximum efficiency and profitability, not for creative brilliance or health. (Of course, one could argue, as we often do, that better creative equals a bigger bottom line, but that’s a topic for another rant.)

In his excellent book, “Orbiting the Giant Hairball ”, Gordon MacKenzie suggests that creatives should treat the organization as…well…a giant hairball. Each time a new rule or procedure is implemented, it adds another hair to the hairball until it’s simply a big messy bunch of rules and bureaucracy. When this happens, creatives get stuck in the hairball and find it difficult to innovate.

What MacKenzie recommends is that creatives “orbit” the hairball drawing resources from it when necessary, but not getting stuck by its limitations. This enables the creative to have the best of both worlds - the resources of the organization without its limiting short-sidedness.

Orbiting is mostly a mindset. Few of us have the freedom of time and place to avoid organizational chaos, but we can implement some mental disciplines to help us find freedom within the organization.

Here are a few AC principles we teach to help creatives find freedom from the organization:

1. Be certain that you are defining your work, not being defined by it. See your work as a subset of your greater purpose in the world, not the sum total of it.
2. Resist the victim mindset. It opposes the creative process. It will suck you dry and spit you out. Victimhood is inward-focused whereas creativity is inherently outward-seeking. If you become all about yourself, you are limited to your small subset of experience rather than drawing from everything.
3. Cut your organization some slack. Organizations are made up of people. People are {GASP!} not perfect. We screw up. We inflict pain. But at the end of the day, we all wrestle with the same concerns. (Did I do right today? Could I have done something better?) Whether you’re on the giving end or receiving end within an org, cut some slack to others. Yes, your boss might be incompetent. So what? You can still choose to engage.
4. Beware of competition. Competition makes us do weird things like going after jobs we don’t really want just because they’re perceived as “important”. Know what you’re about in the world and go after it. Celebrate others’ success. There’s more than enough to go around.