Insights on How to be Creative at Work  

At work, people tend to think about creativity as a binary thing: either you have it, or you don’t. Either you are “a creative,” or you’re not. (Which makes you, what? An Uncreative?) Falling officially in the professionally creative camp, I hear these kinds of assumptions tossed around all the time, the “but I’m not a creative” warning. Typically, it’s mentioned as a sort of confession, a caveat that precedes delivery of qualitative feedback on design work, a concept, or a piece of writing — a take this with a grain of salt kind of warning.

Flattering though it can be, thinking of creativity as a gift bothers me. To start, it’s just not true: we’re all creative. Some of us are just better versed at channeling and accessing our creativity on command.

Further, it idealizes the powers and talents of The Creatives, discrediting influence from those outside the club — which in turn leads to lesser work. Great creative results, work that resonates broadly — think of an ad that goes viral, a design language that becomes the standard — tends to be influenced by lots of people with lots of points of view. Creatives who dismiss or even just undervalue,\ the perspectives of people who might not “get it,” will produce compromised work that appeals only to a microcosm of the population. Rarely is that the goal.

Here’s my real beef: the ability to conjure creativity is a powerful and limitlessly satisfying tool with applications far beyond what’s officially considered creative work. Demystifying it — teaching it, even — will be beneficial to every corporate domain, from personnel management to business strategy to finance to marketing to, naturally, design.
For starters:

Creativity is not the same as talent

However, they are often confused for one another. Talent may power the fruits of our creativity and may separate the perceived quality of some of those fruits from others. The ability to produce and execute is not handed out at birth in equal measure to everyone, but the ability to come up with new ideas, with proposed solutions, to “think outside the box” and make unexpected associations is just as meaningful. That’s creative, and we were all born to do it.

But creativity needs to be developed

Though innate, creativity is a skill, and skills need to be honed. Much has been written about “inspiration,” where it comes from, and when it strikes, especially the romantic idea of a muse, of genius striking during exercise or immersion in nature. While that might be true of a handful of historically great ideas, most are born on assignment, at a desk, over conversation, or in the car, while actively trying for them. With practice, creative inspiration can come quicker, more easily, and more frequently.

Here are some ways to get in the habit of accessing your creative brain for work:

• Know your body clock: Spend an average week paying active attention to your energy levels, concentration, and thought patterns. When is your brain firing on all cylinders, and when are you on autopilot? Most professionals are already somewhat aware of these patterns and form habits around them, subconsciously or otherwise, when in our day we stack high-intensity meetings versus independent work versus passive tasks like catching up on email. That natural “independent work” window is going to be your ticket to creative productivity, and for some of us it’s in the wee hours of the morning, before the clutter of the day has taken residence in our minds. For others, it’s early afternoon, three cups of coffee and a workout in. For plenty of us, it’s late at night. Zero in, and be careful how you spend it. (If you waste it shopping online or writing your grocery list, you probably won’t get it back that day.)
• Pregame: Talk the issue, problem, or assignment out with other people. Get opinions and be open to varying perspectives. Read articles, related or otherwise, or books — and don’t forget about fiction! Immerse yourself in other people’s creativity. Visit museums and listen to podcasts. Tune in, rather than out, to the advertising targeting you every day. People watch. In other words, actively, consciously give your mind some fodder to work from. Carry a small notebook or shamelessly voice dictate into your phone, so you can recall anything interesting later. Great ideas don’t need to happen in Big Bang fashion — in fact, they almost never do.
• Make time for it: Don’t wait for creativity to strike. Find it, and don’t be coy. Dedicate an hour to coming up with one or even a handful of ideas or solutions to a problem, and give yourself a deadline. Block off distractions. My favorite time to do this is during my commute to and from work because I’m alone, I’m impatient to be productive, I have to ignore my phone, and the physicality of driving keeps my body occupied, so my mind can wander. I say to myself (sometimes out loud), “By the time I reach X, I will have solved for Y.” Holding myself accountable to a result within a time limit is surprisingly effective!

Probably most importantly, when it doesn’t just work because you worked it, don’t give up. Consider wherever you get to be progress, and solicit input from others, not just Official Creatives, because the best kept secret about creativity is that…

Ideas lead to more ideas

A bad idea today can become a great idea tomorrow if you keep at it, if you make it a discipline. Creatives are good at what they do because they keep doing it and because they aren’t too embarrassed to toss something rough and even silly out there to see where it leads, what it might spark, what it could become. They recognize the potential in a thought, and they can identify seeds, and sometimes that’s the key. I’m often heard saying things like, “OK, this isn’t really formed yet, but I’ve got this thought around…,” which allows my colleagues (or friends or family) a jumping-off point for their own creative thinking.

Eventually, together, when everyone’s allowed to be “a creative,” we tend to get somewhere good.