Do It Again
I’m sticking with the theme of creativity this week, starting with my own creative endeavours over the past two years. At the beginning of 2020, just before COVID up-ended everything, I decided I would post at least once a week on Linked In.
To be honest, it was a bit patchy to begin with. Well, we were chucked into a global pandemic facing mortal danger on a daily basis, so it’s maybe not that surprising. I stopped completely in June and July for reasons I can’t fathom or recall, but since then I have been pretty consistent.
(As an aside, I have noticed that we often think we are dealing with a crisis quite well at the time and it’s only when we look back some time later we realise we were much more affected and almost lost the plot. I think we’ll look back at this COVID experience and realise we’ve been clinging on for survival much more than we think, which is why we must be kind with ourselves. Getting up and carrying on every day is a perfectly worthy achievement).
The posts have been well received, a couple of gone a bit bonkers, and I regularly get good stats. I guess I’ve built a bit of an audience. (You can find them all in the blog section on the Decrapify Work website, starting with this one).
Then I thought I’d start a podcast, because that’s what every white middle-aged man with an inflated opinion of how interesting he is felt compelled to do in lockdown.
Mercifully, I tried a couple of trial runs and realised I didn’t really know what I wanted to say and I had an ideal voice for writing. So I thought I’d start with writing something every week that was not constrained to the demands of the LinkedIn algorithm, and here we are 40 issues later.
These two activities have become part of my weekly rhythm and I really enjoy the creative process. This creativity thing has stuck, it’s become a habit.
I’ve been writing blogs and posts since my mate Bernie Mitchell told me I should nearly ten years ago but it’s never become a creative habit. So what’s made this different?
I think the big difference is that I gave up being attached to the outcome. I wasn’t trying to make anything happen by writing my blogs, I just wanted to express myself. I wasn’t bothered whether anyone read them or not, even less bothered whether they agreed with me. I wasn’t trying to push a ‘Call to Action’ or influence behaviour - which for someone from a marketing background was a big shift!
I also just enjoyed the process and counted it as a win when I finished the piece and hit send. My job was to send it out into the world, to offer it up to the universe. What the universe did with it was up to the universe, not me.
And of course, the mundane reality of all creative endeavours. Persistence. I have just stuck at it, turning up regularly (well, regularly for me!) and doing the work. It’s been a revelation.
You should give it a go (if you’re not already).
World Of Our Own
We had a conversation about creativity at EQ Labs Future of Jobs session this week. One of the panellists, Paula Larocca, initially described creativity as ‘reframing obstacles as opportunities’, which I thought was rather neat.
She then came up with another definition that I though was much more interesting, that all our thinking is creativity. Her reasoning is that we create our own reality, and we do it all the time. Our thoughts are what gives us our view of the world.
She also said that this wasn’t what she presented in corporate contexts because it was too much for them to get their heads around, which seems to me to be the problem with creativity in organisations. If you are determined to keep the reins on and stay in territory where you feel safe, you will always inhibit creativity. Or, as the pirates would put it, if you don’t sail to the edges if the map, you’ll never discover new lands.
A fun fact that Paulina shared was that creativity was not in the dictionary until the 1930s, and it only became popularised in the 1950s through the advertising industry (think Mad Men), which is why we associate it with ideas. In fact, it’s everywhere. In every thought, actually.
My Life
I’m a big fan of self-organising and the conversation gave me the insight that self-organising has creativity at its heart. The act of self-organising is a creative act. People deciding what they do, where, when, how and who with on a daily basis is highly creative.
I’ve often said that self-organising is just how we run the rest of our lives outside of work, so why is it thought of as so radical a way of doing things at work? In fact, it’s hierarchical command-and-control structures that are wierd and ‘not normal’.
As organisations struggle towards hybrid/remote/distributed models of working, they are having to give employees much more autonomy. They are stumbling towards self-organising, and in the process allowing people to be more creative about their work and, more importantly, about how they design their lives.
I think this is a thoroughly good thing. Whilst the path forward is unclear and fraught with dangers and diversions, I feel optimistic that for a lot of people we’ll get to a better place where their creativity is at the heart of what they do and they will live richer lives for it.
Picture This
One of our lockdown favourites was ‘Grayson Perry’s Art Club’, so I’m delighted to see that another series has been commissioned. For those of you not familiar with it, Grayson invited viewers to send in their art about a particular topic, whilst he and his wife Philippa would also make something. It was fascinating to see how people used their art to make sense of what was happening, and very touching to see how it helped them through a difficult period.
What really made it a great programme was Grayson’s deep empathy, humour and replica Sid-James laugh, a loud, infectious and rather dirty cackle that bursts forth like a small explosion of joy.
Art is, of course, what we normally think of as ‘creative’ but it’s only one aspect. It’s a means of expression. The importance of art, though, is that it’s impossible to do it without connecting with your emotions, without delving into your subconscious (well, it is just about possible but it makes very dull art). It makes us engage with the things we cannot express with words, with our deeper knowing.
Maybe that’s why this stuff scares organisations. They’re happy to have art up on the walls but they don’t want people engaging with it because that will bring the messiness of humanity out into the open.
Perhaps if organisations ran Art Clubs rather than team building or the myriad of other sessions of corporate nonsense, they’d be better, happier and more creative places. They’d certainly be a lot more human.