points of view on creativity, creative process, and things alike and akin

Much of the time, creativity is a team sport. One essential aspect of team creative performance is the climate in which the team works. The climate affects the level of engagement people have in their work, and I would posit that — since creativity is a decision — that a worker must be engaged in order to be creative.

Here’s the bad news:

Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs.

Here’s the good news: if your organization is filled with engaged workers (which does not happen accidentally; you have to work at it), you are going to out-think and out-create your competitors.

[OmniSkills can help you assess and improve your creative climate. Email us to learn more.]

Ideas are cheap. Plentiful. Less than a dime a dozen. Ideas are not creativity. Novel solutions, crafted from ideas, make up creativity. What is the difference between having an idea and having a solution? The hard work of actually doing something.

From Poke the Box, by Seth Godin:

• The first imperative is to be aware—aware of the market, of opportunities, of who you are.
• The second imperative is to be educated, so you can understand what’s around you.
• The third imperative is to be connected, so you can be trusted as you engage.
• The fourth imperative is to be consistent, so the system knows what to expect.
• The fifth imperative is to build an asset, so you have something to sell.
• The sixth imperative is to be productive, so you can be well-priced.

I can find a thousand books and a million memos about the first six imperatives. They were drilled into you in countless moments in school, and plenty of graduate schools and bosses are delighted to help you with them. But when it comes to the seventh imperative, it seems as though you’re on your own. The seventh imperative is frightening and thus easy to overlook or ignore.

• The seventh imperative is to have the guts and the heart and the passion to ship.

To promote his new book Anything You Want, Derek Sivers has created a series of interesting animated videos. Here’s one that’s appropriate for creatives, about the way we judge our own ideas.

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

Creativity equals change.

While the word “creativity” is tossed about so casually that it has become a kleenex word (that is, it has become generic rather than specific), there are some of us still fighting to reclaim it. So: creativity is the work of producing something new and valuable. When introduced to others, this new thing (product, solution, theory, method, etc.) by its very nature is a change.

Which raises a question: don’t we all resist change? Isn’t change bad?

Actually no, and no. First, let’s consider resistance. As humans we crave change. Not in everything, and not all the time, but we have an inborn need to grow and learn and develop. When we are not changing, we say things such as “I’m in a rut.” This is not to suggest that there is never resistance, but to emphasize that the commonly-held belief that we all resist all change is just not true. What we do resist are those things that cause cognitive dissonance: senseless change, random change, change that is clearly not for the better.

But: why do we seem to resist change even when it’s positive? I believe that we are reacting to the fact that change is difficult. It’s not about the change, it’s about the hard work of change. Which may also be why true creativity is relatively rare: creativity is not the sudden idea, it’s the hard work of forging a novel and valuable solution out of that idea.

Finally, is change bad? Here’s the answer, as succinctly as possible. Seth Godin said, “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity.” And that, precisely, is how creative people think.

This is a recommendation for Art & Copy, a 2009 documentary about advertising and the people who create it, which serves as a reflective glimpse into creatives and creativity, ideas and environments, vision and persuasion, and creating art for the sake of commerce.

I watched it just a few days after visiting the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, which celebrates all things Coke, and serves as a tour into the advertising arc of that product. I left the Coca-Cola exhibit feeling a bit unsettled – this is the celebration of a soft drink, after all – but after seeing Art & Copy, I thought better of it. Art & Copy shows how advertising can be a mirror into our culture at any given time. The best advertising talents know how to look at the culture and capture it; they don’t create it.

Film web site: artandcopyfilm.com, and streaming at Netflix.

In upstate New York, where I grew up, we decorated the eaves of our homes with icicles. Real icicles. Snow collected on the roof, and is it melted, it created lovely ice stalactites. (Lovely and life-threatening. I’ve seen icicles as big as a second grader.)

In Charlotte, NC, we hang icicle lights from our roofs, perhaps in nostalgia for the icicles of Damocles. I deeply dislike this chore. There is nothing easy: an hour or more up on the roof, untangling, wrangling, stretching, hanging, and trying to avoid plummeting.

Here’s the idea, free for anyone who will build and sell it to me: embed lights into the gutters. They wouldn’t be icicles (no loss there), but more like rope lights. They would be long-lasting LEDs, and they could be programmed in different colors for different occasions. A string of red for Valentine’s Day. Red and green for Christmas. Orange for Halloween. Red, White, and Blue for Independence Day.

And independence for all of us from hanging those darn lights ever again.

Here is how I (and most people I have observed) buy a carton of eggs:

1. Select a carton.
2. Open the carton and check every egg in it.
3. If a broken egg is found, open another carton, and exchange the bad egg for a good one.
4. When finished, put the intact dozen in your cart. Leave the carton with broken eggs on the shelf to inconvenience the next egg shopper.

The flaw in this is obvious: the way step 4 feeds step 1. Step 1 should actually read: “select a carton into which someone has placed a broken egg.” My question is: why do grocery stores allow this? When any other damaged merchandise is found, it is removed from the shelves. Except with eggs, apparently.

Here’s an idea to fix this: the store sets up an “eggschange,” an organized method for getting rid of the broken eggs without putting them into a future patron’s carton. Imagine two bins. One is for cartons that have already been used for spare parts; one is for cracked eggs. Now, it works like this:

1. Select a carton.
2. Open the carton and check every egg in it.
3. If a broken egg is found, throw the broken egg into the discard bin.
4. Take a replacement egg from the eggschange. If there are no eggs in the eggschange bin, take any other new carton. Remove a good egg, then place the carton with the remaining 11 into the eggschange.
5. Go your merry way without having inconvenienced the next egg shopper.

Someone store somewhere may be doing this, but I’ve never seen it. Grocers: have at it. Fix this, no credit to me is necessary.