I believe that if our organisation is creative it will allow us to be, and focus on relationships. Valuing processing is important, so that we aren’t always rushed from place to place, task to task, doing things. The creative organisation will not crowd us out with busy-ness. We are, after all, human be-ings, not human do-ings.
Allowing time to share stories is also important. Sharing stories can give us space to nourish our spirits.
Solitude and reflection are most beneficial as they give us time to fashion ideas, to offer new perspectives on old problems, to daydream about what might be possible, to explore the unfamiliar, step outside the well-worn comfort zone, and imagine the future. Translating the imagining into reality is another day’s work – but imagining is the first step – and remember, dreams won’t cost us anything.
Many scientific inventions and developments have come to people when they were engaged in something else – almost by accident.
Formal planning or development days, SCOT (Strengths, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats) exercises, strategy days and the like are great but just as many ideas come from non-formal encounters.
We will often see possibilities in what our colleagues are doing, grafting our own idea onto others and then (if it works out well) embedding it in practice. Good communication offers constant possibilities for cross-fertilisation of ideas and growth of our organisation in general. Equality and democracy, and getting rid of as much comparison and competition as possible are important too, of course.
Do you ever wonder why, as we get older, we tend to gradually lose idealism, zeal, perceptiveness, and the enthusiasm of youth? Sometimes we lose our sense of injustice at the world, or our sense of fair play as we succumb to what we perceive to be inevitable not only in our working life but in the world in general.
(I attempted to track how this happens in the Chapter on Energy, Sub-Chapter on Myth vs. Reality).
In order to counter this tendency, it is most important that we maintain a sense of wonder, mystery, and adventure in our day-to-day work. Often a child can spot the obvious, and reality is staring us adults in the face but we don’t want to see it.
But the abilities to spot the obvious or maintain a sense of wonder are in all of us – they may be dormant – but they are there.
A positive by-product of maintaining a sense of wonder (like I said above about creativity) is that it is very attractive to people.
I believe that there is a danger that the wrinkles of inspiration and innovation are ironed out of us in formal academic education because they cannot readily be regurgitated in an exam.
But we can restore the freshness and vitality of youth by allowing time and space where such elements can flourish.
The reason that allowing time and space works is that thinking hard does not really enable creativity – in fact it might often work against it.
Rather, creativity resides in ever-changing patterns in our brain/mind generated by our perceptions, experiences, intuitions, emotions and connections that are ongoing in our unconscious all the time.
This is why we might wake up after a night’s sleep with a great idea about something that has been bothering us for a long time, or remember the name of a film star or a long-forgotten song title that we couldn’t remember the night before.