Delegation and creativity

The word creative is ambiguous. Generally it provokes images of weird guys in torn trousers, unshaved faces and unkempt hair with an astounding amount of talent in painting or music. Stereotyped to its death knell, creativity has also been commoditized.

In the factory state, where millions of students or workers assemble in a supply chain of human talent, each easily replaceable by the other, creativity had to be converted into a commodity to have uniformity. A uniformity of mediocrity which is happy to be good but never strives to be breakthrough.

The factory state needs standardized mediocrity. After all — every one needs to memorize tables for 3 in exactly the same way and each cup cake needs to look/ feel exactly like the other. We call it statistical quality control. It’s required. Global consumption depends on this parameter of standardized mediocrity.

Consumption creates demand which sometimes creates innovation, but more often than not it stifles free creativity. And its a loss. We do get the first iPhone, but after that we get 300 million more exactly similar iPhones. These inspire some 400 million more androids and so on.

You cannot create 300 million Guernica’s. There will always be only one. That’s also a commodity auctioned for millions at a Christie’s or Sotheby’s. But that creativity cannot survive in a standardized environment, because every individual has their own perception of a creative viewpoint which needs to be tightly controlled from inception to execution to create the exact vision, the way it was visualized. That’s why a product for mass consumption can never be auctioned. It needs to be standardized. Because human beings by nature are lazy, scared and happy to exist in a state of status quo. They also like to wallow in familiarity.

This process of standardization requires two things. Processes and delegation. Make one blue print and get a million to follow and execute it. Processes are good, even required — until the human supply chain of talent starts hiding within it in the fear of trying anything new. When this supply chain of replaceable human talent starts delegating, it further compounds the issue because the mediocrity also gets delegated along with the process.

And then this mediocre human talent which is not really mediocre at its core, bows down to the ease of existentialism and uses its ingenuity in games of volleyball, fencing, ping pong and extempore debate, where the talent lies in passing the ball to someone else’s court.

Next move yours mate!

Sounds familiar? In all probability it does. This is the state of things and this is what we all live in.

Fact is if you are whining because you feel stuck, you need to reconfigure. Creativity dies when delegation starts, because it has to. So if you feel stuck, move to the process where its being conceptualized. If you are in a supply chain factory and you dream of designing frameworks then you will always be unhappy. However, the push to move to that next stage where you can come up the value chain, needs to start when you are executing some of that delegation. Scale up. Skill up. Change a job. Re-start a career.

It comes with risks. Most of us are risk averse and hence adapt to the factory state. The factory state though was built on the edifice of standardized mediocrity and it was designed to take care of EMI’s, tuition fees, yearly appraisals and once a year family holidays. It does have its own value. The value of providing scale. But if you are integral to the process of a scaling operation you will always be a cog in the wheel.

If you don’t wan’t to be a cog and expect to hold the wheel, then be a linchpin.