What Happens If We Don’t Allow For Creativity? Business is obsessed with measurement, quantification, justification and control. ‘What is the value that creativity adds?’ They ask, ‘How can we measure it?’
The truth is that creativity is basically impossible to measure. Why? Well because it has a quantum nature. It is both a particle and a wave, and neither, depending on how you look at it.
Modern business takes it’s lead from 20th century science. We view everything around as a discrete, self-contained ‘things’ that can be managed, controlled, and indeed, measured.
The trouble is that, once you start digging into quantum mechanics, you begin to realise that this view of the world doesn’t match up to the scientific reality. Managing for a discrete, specific outcome is impossible because there are so many contributing factors. Everything and everyone sit in a system … and these systems are open ended. You cannot control them.
Creativity is just like this. It’s useless fighting over a definition of what creativity is or isn’t because depending on what you already believe or want to see, that is what you will see.
What is true though, is that without creativity there is no change. A lot of management schools are about managing and controlling events, peoples and things so that change is controlled, predictable, measurable. However, as we have just seen, this is in fact impossible.
Therefore, major events nearly always catch big institutions like governments and corporations napping. They didn’t think this could happen; they were focused on making this other thing happen. Their systems are closed, discrete, inward looking. They ignore or even worse, deny, the existence of an interconnected world that can influence their programme. And they do so at their peril.
If nothing else, Covid19 has opened the eyes of many to the fact that, everything is connected. At a distance, directly, subtly or obviously. And you cannot act or exist in isolation. That is a fiction of the function of our consciousness and one we need to resist with great vigour.
Without creativity there is no adaptability, no change, no innovation, no progress. We become dinosaurs and the landing of the great meteorite becomes merely a question of time.
But how do you allow for creativity? Well a few baby steps to start:
- Reference the outside world
- Set fuzzy goals not measurable targets
- Don’t insist on controlling every step of the journey, let it emerge
- Stop saying ‘Yes but…’ and start saying ‘Yes and…’Just let it go. The world doesn’t need you trying to control it.
- Step into the unknown to learn new things and to do things differently.
You cannot trust what you think you already know.
