Creativity and work
Can the two co-exist?
When Roz and I started out planning Curiosity Seeds, we wanted to write about work. Work and wonder and creativity and how they all connect. We came up with the tagline: field notes on work and wonder. It seemed simple and obvious that these two things could co-exist.
As this newsletter has evolved, we’ve naturally found ourselves writing a lot more about creativity and a lot less about work. Although we always try to connect the dots between the two, it has been surprisingly hard to do it. Writing about work and writing about creativity just feels so…different.
Lately, I’ve been wondering: why is that?
The creativity gap
Reflecting, I realised that I myself tend to separate those two parts of my life: work and creativity. Work is what I do between approximately nine and five each weekday and it’s what pays the bills. Creativity is all the projects I start up outside of work that pay back in joy rather than financially – Curiosity Seeds being one of them. I spend a fair bit of time filling up the creative well, mastering my craft, following a creativity routine in pursuit of these other projects. When it comes to ‘work’ (please don’t tell the people I work with!) often I just show up and get the work I need to do done.
Now I’m sure all these extra-curricular projects benefit the day job. In fact, I know that I draw on things that have inspired me in other projects when I’m at work. Yet, I don’t consciously think about myself as being creative at work, or nurturing my creativity for work.
I remember the first time I did the Artist’s Way (I know we talk about it all the time, but if you haven’t encountered Julia Cameron’s life-changing body of work on creativity – please click away and do that now) and coming across the term ‘crazymakers’. These can be people in any part of your life, but are often people you encounter at work, who suck up your energy and stifle your creativity. Crazymakers want your time, attention and energy, and make you feel like what you’re creating is never enough. Unfortunately, many people experience some kind of crazymaker at work that stops them thinking about work as a place they can be creative. Looking back, I know I certainly have.
Your job needs your creativity
The irony of all this is that companies and organisations really need our creativity. As Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller write in The Imagination Machine:
“Corporations have changed the world radically in so many areas: medicine, consumer goods, finance agriculture, entertainment, communications. And they’ve done so by combining organisational abilities with the unique human capacity to imagine: the ability to see and create things that had never existed.”
Stifled creatives at work are a missed opportunity. And innovation doesn’t have to mean coming up with a ground-breaking new product. Innovation can happen in smaller ways – the way we run our teams, how we problem solve, how we connect with our colleagues. When you start to think about it, the possibilities for creativity at work, no matter your role, are endless with a little bit of space.
Making space for creativity at work
Of course, if it were easy, we’d all be doing it. One thing is dealing with a crazymaker boss. Another is the simple fact that the structure and bureaucracy built into many organisations often limit creativity.
In Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, artist and cartoonist Gordon MacKenzie shares how he learnt to maintain his creative uniqueness while successfully operating within the corporate structures of Hallmark – what he terms ‘the Giant Hairball’. He writes:
“Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond ‘accepted models, patterns or standards’ – all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.
To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organisation without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.”
It’s MacKenzie’s conviction that everyone has something unique and brilliant to bring to an organisation, and we must do whatever we can to protect that part of ourselves. He himself managed to rise up through the echelons of Hallmark’s hierarchy, all while operating on the periphery of the more bureaucratic and stifling side of the company. His advice:
“Whenever you feel your head being pushed down onto an organisation’s chalk line, remember the challenge is to move out of the way, to choose not to be mesmerised by the culture of the company. Instead, find the goals of the organisation that touch your heart and release your passion to follow those goals.
It’s a delicate balance, resisting the hypnotic spell of an organisation’s culture and, at the same time, remaining committed from the heart to personally relevant goals of the organisation. But if you can achieve that balance and maintain it, you will be out of the Hairball and into Orbit, the only place where you can tap your one-of-a-kind magic, your genius, your limitless creativity.”
Three creative things to try at work ✨
So, in the spirit of bringing a creativity practice directly into your day job, here’s three ideas you can try out today:
Read: I have struggled so much with allowing myself reading time for work. It feels too slow, too enjoyable, too out-of-step with the pressures of our productivity-obsessed culture. Yet, when I think about my creative endeavours outside of ‘work’, reading widely is one of the most important things I do to keep my creative well full.
Take yourself on a lunchtime walk: there have been countless studies on the relationship between walking and creativity (see the wonderful Anna Weltner’s article on walking and creativity here). A walk in the middle of your day can be a great opportunity to clear your head and let ideas percolate. You never know, perhaps you’ll come back having solved that problem you’d been struggling with all morning.
Introduce a creative ritual: it could be as simple as spending some time making yourself a nice coffee (or other hot beverage of your choice), or buying yourself a new notebook. Pick something that brings you joy and let it become a signal to your mind that you’re going into focus mode.
Do you feel you can be creative at work? Let us know in the comments – we love hearing from you.
All so well said :) I am so interested in creativity, too: how it works, why it works, what to DO to make it work. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Helen, glad you enjoyed it! I could discuss the creative process for HOURS :)