Creativity Leashed?
I’ve been musing over creativity lately. There has been a question spun out in a few other blogs debating whether it should be -
Creative Productivity or Productive Creativity?
I don’t have a response to that, without going into the whole ‘unleashed’ thing.
‘Unleashed‘ is one of those catchphrases you see used to pre- or suf-fix quite a few things on the internet. One of my own favourite e-course sites for mixed media artists must be Creativity Unleashed, the site of Traci Bautista. She actually calls it Collage Unleashed in the header, but sends out emails with the Creativity tag.
There are also quite a few random blogs using the Creativity Unleashed tagline, under various blogging and internet platforms.The name is also being used for a ceramics business in California.
There’s a Crafts Unleashed blog recently opened also, owned by a company called Consumer Crafts. Moving away from the pure creative side, here in Australia, Coke has used the ‘unleashed’ title in it’s website offering – CokeUnleashed – which is where you go for rewards and competitions.
Yes, the term ‘unleashed’ and creativity seem to go side-by-side. Unleashed conjures up the freedom and joy to just ‘do’. When I take the lead off my dog when we get to the free-to-run doggy park down the street, that’s the whole unleashed concept in one image. Simon, my dog, goes running off – wind in his fur, ready for some sniffing and playing with the other pooches, and I stand there wishing sometimes I felt that pure rush of freedom. When we add the word ‘unleashed’ to our creativity, we also can feel ourselves running off with my freedom and abandon to ‘just create’.
But then I got to thinking. Because I know my own creativity, and how easy it is to just run with it. If unrestrained for too long, then I end up doing nothing-much-at-all. I can spend a lot of time doing things like this – musing and thinking, coming up with half-baked ideas, and then running off to sniff something else. The creativity grass always looks greener over there – just to add in yet another mixed metaphor.
To remain creative AND productive (productive creativity or creative productivity?) I have to actually leash my creativity, not unleash it. It’s not a matter of trapping it, though – I know where it is, it’s inside of me. But it is a matter, sometimes, of tying it down and getting on with the work at hand (after promising a run in the grass at a later time).
Leashing creativity seems to be getting an un-necessarily harsh bad rep lately, however. Across the web we have a lot of Inspiration and Creativity websites suggesting that, amongst many things, managers and corporations are stifling their employees’ creativity with too many leashes. Managers are ‘bad people’ for stifling creativity, we are told *. Too many rules and too many expectations means dead-soul workplaces and no creativity. And later – no jobs.
Again and again, we are being told that the ‘latest statistics’ (which have been going on for many years now) show that CEOs are calling for more creativity and innovation (actually, they mean new ideas generation and productivity to make those good ideas happen) as the singular and top requirement of employees in this new age.
To help all those current employees now be more creative, we have several new idea generations tools – from visual thinking methods, to recording meetings using visual loggers. Corporate Training organisations are doing a roaring trade in teaching people how to doodle, mindmap, pick up marker pens or crayons – and use them, mindstorm, take breaks (provided they come up with usable ideas in them) and basically in how to come up with a great idea before the competition does. Across the world, many corporates, and even smaller businesses are reverting to some form of creativity ‘unleashing’ in the search for more creativity.
Some of the bigger corporates are held up on high for the playdens they provide as inspirational offices for some of their employees, or for allowing some of their employees to take a few days off (maybe even a week) in the year, to just ‘play’ on company time. Those are the businesses which are suggested as being the true forerunners of providing an unleashed creative play-space. At the moment, we are being told a few of the products or good ideas which have come from those unleashed opportunities, rarely are we told of the poor ideas which also came from the same environments, and we also aren’t told who or how long it actually took from idea generation to actually market-research, bring-to-market and sell the new resulting products. We are not told what leashes or ties were necessary to make the good ideas into good products.
Creativity is ideas generation. Innovation is producing something out of it. (Defining both terms is something acknowledged as being very difficult to do).
Therefore, in my own thinking, it’s okay (recommended) to unleash creativity, but to be innovative (or productively creative) I also need a fair few leashes.
In my own personal creativity program, CM*P, I have four compass points – Create Minded (the study or learning of how to be creative), Imagine Nation (musings, ponderings, and ideas generation), Connect Minded (the connections with others) and the all important and larger piece – Work&Shop (actually creating something).
During Imagine Nation time, unleashing my creativity is the right thing to do. During the me-times, day-dreams, artist-dates, and running around in a dog park, the freedom to just be is everything that I personally need to generate some wonderful ideas.
But during the Work&Shop time leashing my creativity is what I want to do. I want to provide some constraints – time, money, starter ideas, plans, output expectations. I want to create, but also be productive in that creation. I want to, in essence, be innovative, or a productive creative. To do so, I have to manage my creativity – yes, just like having a boss. I have to set expectations upon myself and my work, and take responsibility to produce something.
Creativity ‘Leashed’ isn’t a bad thing at all.
* We are also told something similar for our Western education systems – that schools nowadays are excellent places for stifling creativity. This is something I am inclined to agree with, to a certain extent. But the irony hasn’t passed me by either, where nowadays people are going back to specific schools, or training centres to learn (or re-learn) how to be more creative.
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