Mar 27 2007
GapingVoid - How to be Creative
Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame has a whole series of articles on “How to be creative.” You really should check them out if you haven’t read them before. Although the Hugh was approaching this from a artist point of view, there is some universality to some of these comments that each person can adapt as needed. One that happened to strike a cord with me today was:
“6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”……..”
This really is very qutie striking. The engineer and scientist in me likes the order and rules that we build up to explain the world, control our environment, and make the future. We didn’t start out with models, or rules, or equations, we had to be trained. All of us started out as uncontrolled little minds that didn’t know or care for the rules. We dripped of “outside the box” thinking and creativity, but over time had to learn the proper way of things.
S o what does this have to do with you or your career or innovation? Well a couple of things. One is the importance of stepping out of your training and experience to imagine what might be possible if you ignored the rules temporarily. What opportunities do you miss because you use the current paradigm that everyone accepts? Have you ever had a situation where an answer was simple and elegeant, yet it was counter-intuitive to the “right way”? What happens when you remove the lens through which you view reality and replace it with someone else’s?
Second is to leverage those fresh perspectives when you have a chance to come across them. One great example of this is the finding yourself in a situation where you have a fresh employee to your company or a fresh new team member? Take this blessing and use it. Give them enough information to see the problem and then step away. Let them identify the problem details and come up with those solutions that you would never think of due to your “training”.
After reading the article do any of you have a favorite. “guest author” spot up for grabs. Just shoot me and email.
