How did I Develop Creativity?
When the word “creativity” made it into the business lexicon, I initially felt odd. My perception of creativity was associated with artistic activities such as painting, photography, writing and music, so in my view, business and art were like oil and water. Then, I rethought, “What if I would bring some aspects of art into a business, I could incorporate some humanity in business?”. I believe it would help align business and people better and create products and services kinder to us. This thought raised my curiosity about creativity, and I enrolled on classroom and online courses hoping to understand creativity and its relationship with the business.
Learning Creativity
I started with the 100 Design Projects short course at Central Saint Martins, UAL in London. It was a classroom 5-day (full day) course. When I enrolled on this course, I was initially looking for some course to create something with my sense and hands. Over five days, I completed about 90 mini-projects designed a new set of alphabets, a book, posters, jewellery, bag, banknotes for example. The instruction of each project was provided on the spot and we had 10 to 15 minutes to complete with limited materials (papers, paint, pens, strings, magazines, cardboard, wires, wire mesh etc.). At the end of the course, I realised that creativity is fundamental to any design work.
Next, I enrolled Developing Your Creativity short course at Central Saint Martins. It was a classroom 10-week (2.5 hours per week) course. After having great fun in the 100 Design project course, I wanted to explore my creativity further. The format was similar to the 100 Design project course. The difference was that I learnt about various creative approaches used by famous artists and designers before doing mini-projects. So, I could practice these approaches to my creative projects. The creative approaches helped me explore different ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. Sharing work with the classmates also stimulated my creativity at both courses.
Then, coronavirus hit. So, I turned to online courses designed to apply creativity in a business context. I started with Boosting Creativity for Innovation delivered by HEC Paris in Coursera*. This course focused on developing your own creativity and provided exercises that were straightforward to do by yourself. I learnt the history of creativity, creative mindsets and habits, and current trends and findings from recent creativity research. Techniques and tools introduced in the course help generate ideas and you can apply them for anything from my personal life to work.
I came across another course, Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success delivered by Imperial College London https://www.coursera.org/learn/creative-thinking-techniques-and-tools-for-success in Coursera. I enrolled on it to find out differences from the previous course. This course introduced creative techniques and tools as the course name suggested. Some techniques and tools could use for your idea generations and others were designed for group set-ups. This course uses tend to use engineering cases for exercises, but all techniques and tools are relevant for anything.
Coincidently, my workplace organised the applied creativity training after I took online creative courses. This training focused on developing creativity in the workplace to become innovative teams. It covered similar topics to other courses but it emphasised the approaches to select ideas as a team, eliminating biases in selection processes and narrow it down to one or two ideas to implement.
What is Creativity?
After seeing various definitions of creativity (you can find them on the internet) through these courses, I came up with a long-ish one by myself.
Creativity is to come up with something novel and useful by connecting seemingly unrelated things by using your own lens**. The outcomes should be ethical and responsible to people and other living things on Earth (and the entire universe since humans are exploring outer space!).
This definition might make you wonder what is “usefulness” of art that associates with creativity. The perceived usefulness of art is subjective — you may see the value in the impressionist style of painting as it gives you comfort, but your friend may not. She may find contemporary art is far more helpful as she can address social issues through the art.
My point is creativity doesn’t need to appeal to everyone. What you think useful changes over time, too. When I was younger, I thought I couldn’t live without a plastic bottled drink. Since I became aware negative impact of single-use plastic on the environment, I stopped buying them. I switched to reusable bottles and carry them around now.
This leads to the responsibility of “Creativity”. When we create something, we should make sure that creation doesn’t harm anyone and anything or have a system to remove or reverse negative impacts to others. This is more important than ever considering current climate and environmental issues.
I also noticed common themes from the learnings although each of them had a different focus and approach to develop creativity. My findings are:
- We can develop creativity; Human beings are born creative (see kids around you!) and then taught to be uncreative as we grow
- Relaxed and peaceful environments and minds help us to be more creative. For example, when we are relaxed and feeling happy such as, in the shower, walking, on holiday, having fun with friends and family etc.
- Idea generation is effective when it’s done alone as we feel safe — free from judgements from others, peer pressure and groupthink
- Be open-minded, remove bias and delay evaluation of ideas
- Having some constraints or restriction helps us to be creative as we can focus our energy on creative activities rather than exploring many alternatives or options
The most surprising finding for me was the last point — we are more creative under restriction and limitation. I thought I would be more creative if I have more time and resources. However, in the research mentioned in Boosting Creativity for Innovation course, the work created by the knitters who instructed to use the limited number of colours were perceived as more creative than others who had no limitation. To test this ourselves, in this course, I created two poems. One with no limitation and another with some rules such as including medical equipment and number of words per line. To my surprise, the one with rules was regarded as more creative and interesting by fellow learners.
What did I Find?
After the learnings I:
- Can come up with more ideas than before with short period with tools and techniques
- Become less overthinking as I learnt that time spent on thinking does not equate to the quality of ideas
- Become more open to new ideas and different opinions, and able to think laterally
Interestingly, these behaviours and mindsets are often encouraged in business to develop new products and services but not always embedded in a workplace. Bringing cultural change in a workplace is not a simple task.
However, if we develop our own creativity and start applying it to our immediate circle or even our personal life, would it help us inspire each other and open to new ideas and opinions? Would these interactions create a ripple effect on people around you, people around your friends and wider society?
After learning creativity, I believe we can regain creativity with techniques, tools and mindsets. The good news is that we all live with some limitations or constraints which stimulate our creativity. So, we are surrounded by opportunities to be creative!
Everyone looks at different things as constraints and limitations since we all have different lenses. Diversity helps us come up with unique ideas and solutions. As I mentioned in the previous article, in the VUCA world, the working formula in last year or even last month won’t work. So, we need to come up with different ideas and approaches that we haven’t thought of before. If we can tap into many ideas from diverse perspectives, we have a better chance to create something useful for us, the environment and even outer space — think about space debris!
*this course was available in Coursera in mid-2020 but it does not appear in search in Coursera now (at the time of writing in Dec 2020)
** this is formed by who you are, your experience, belief, core values and way of looking at things
Key Takeaways
- Creativity is to come up with something novel, useful and responsible
- We can develop creativity with techniques, tools and setting mindsets
- Constraints and limitation is not a bad thing for creativity or even better
