How creative are you at work? Have you ever come across the question- how creative are you? an you instantly think about your artistic side from painting, drawing, designing posters/ flyers etc.. Where your answer tends to lead to something along the lines of 'i'm kind of creative, not as creative as a Leonardo da Vinci or 'I used to be creative an do x'... but not anymore...
Well... seems like you're missing something key here... creativity isn't associated to what you can create, it's about the process of bringing something new into existence. Creativity can be divided into three key components: Exploratory, Transformational and Combinational.
When using creativity in the world of work, we tend to forget how to combine our creative mind into our everyday task/routine, especially with remote working the concept of needing to isolate our creative energy was one of the scariest things we humans feared. Before remote working our creative ideation grew during those moments of frenetic spark that happens when a group of people are together, face-to-face, pens in hand, pacing back and forth against a messy whiteboard etc... this close-knit culture allowed colleagues to share abstract ideas and feedback with each other.
So, how can we bring back our creativity, especially with remote working?
What's the missing ingredients...
Solitude — The ability to have more time for the deep focus work that is as much a part of creativity as collaboration — could be one of the greatest advantages of a distributed model. It allows individuals to avoid the distractions of the office and begin to gather their ideas in systematic ways. The beauty about remote working allows us to spend time away from our screen and change our working environment to help us embrace our creative nature. We can go for a lunch walk, listen to music, vision boards, podcast, notes etc.. all of these different activities enables us to go into a free flow learning.
Team members- Each company will bring different elements of creativity where you can adapt and learn from each other such as senior managers, business analyst, sales leaders, product team who can all generate, explain and sell ideas. By working with different members we begin to formulate ideas and skills, including imagination as each member of the team will bring different approaches to solving one solution by using their own way of logically solving the problem.
Technology - Implement long term technology can help foster creativity and improve all-remote meetings and future hybrid meetings. This approach allows employers to include anonymising contributions so that ideas are judged on their merits rather than the person who presents them, helping reduce bias or stop groups from deferring to seniority during creativity flow.
Creativity is an essential skill needed at work, it's the very nature of historical limitations of technology to build great tools to augment people's abilities. Creativity allows us to be innovative, solve problems in original ways and enable us to re-frame our solutions through discovery and embracing experimentation by recognising our mistakes we make as we go.
Remote creativity enables us to explore culture transformation by being able to facilitate conversations between colleagues around the world or different employers from a wide variety of organisations.
Three benefits to embracing your creativity fuel...
Creativity demands fluidity and adaption
Creation happens anywhere and anytime
Creativity is visual- you see/watch/hear something and your ideas begin to form
No matter your creative level, there is a balance of generating an idea and working on it together or alone. No matter what type of creative person you are from the idea collector who generates new ideas from collision of old ones or the one who isn't afraid of idea abundance by reframing questions and asking the key words of curiosity from 'what, why and how' are we going to achieve this...
Whichever type of creative person you are, don't lose it in the workplace because of your environment, emotions or lifestyle. Bring out your creative side and see what happens...
Thank you for reading, I hope this article inspires you to nurture your creative mindset. Comments and Likes are always welcome. Don't forget to subscribe for more empowering work life balance articles.
Chandni Patel @madeadifference
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