Hi,
I hope you are safe and well. Nice to see the sun setting later here in the UK. Still cold. How very British of me to talk about the weather in every newsletter. I will find something else to muse about next week.
Today I will share a personal creativity process - that is also useful in the workplace.
For those new to the Meeting Notes newsletter, welcome, I’m Rob, Chief Innovations Officer at Cultivated Management. This newsletter is about learning, communication, leadership and the art of being effective at work. Welcome.
There are four key focus areas to my writing and my consulting work;
- communication
- creativity
- critical thinking
- personal cultivation (learning).
It’s my belief that if we weave in these four aspects to our workplaces we really can create workplaces that enrich the lives of others, and release business agility.
Leaders and managers have a profound role to play in unlocking these four aspects, to generate clarity, alignment and the right action.
But it’s not easy.
Effective communication, especially by leaders and managers, always results in more clarity over the future and what people are working towards.
This aids in aligning people. And when both clarity and alignment are in place, the busy work that people do is the right work.
Creativity and innovation leads to new products, new ways of working and a sense of human potential being utilised fully in the organisation. People thrive when they can unlock their curiosity and creativity within work.
Critical thinking allows decisions to be based on evidence and insights, rather than opinions that are strongly held. Critical thinking results in tough, but worthy, conversations that drive towards clarity.
Learning helps everyone in the organisation develop. The business as a whole gets incrementally better each year. Competency grows, good people stay and good work gets done.
All of these require focus and time. They’re not elements of leadership and management that simply manifest themselves or happen as a by-product of going to work each day. They require thought, plans, action, focus, time and attention.
Every single one of these four is captured in the Releasing Agility model, and so too in a cool creativity model I found whilst studying a course on Domestika called Creative Techniques to transform ideas into text by Aline Valek.
I thought it worth sharing here, more from a personal creativity perspective, but of course, this is also how creativity and problem solving happen in work too. More below.
Problems
Creativity always starts with a problem. A need. A problem and opportunity are flip sides of a coin. When we solve problems we open up opportunities. When we take on a new opportunity it always comes with new problems.
And so, it starts with identifying a problem.
A lot of my writing is about problem solving, as solving problems is the key to releasing agility (moving smoothly and quickly towards business goals).
Critical Thinking
Identifying a problem is not enough though, even in personal creativity. We now require some critical thinking. We need evidence, data, insights, examples - anything that helps us understand the problem more thoroughly and work out whether this really is a problem worth the effort of solving.
What problem are we trying to solve? And is it a problem worth solving?
Ideation
Ideation is not creativity, but it is a fundamental starting point. Ideas aren’t worth much if they are not brought to life. Creativity is the bringing to life of ideas.
Ideation can happen in many ways from brainstorming to mashing together lots of other solutions, problems or ideas, or using visuals. I cover this in my Zero to Keynote book - plenty of ways to ideate talk topics.
The same principles apply to any ideation process.
Time / Distance
Then we need time.
Time to distance ourselves from the ideas. This gives our unconscious brains (or the clever folk in there - as I talk about in ZtK) time to ponder, muse and synthesise.
Aha!
When we go off and do something else we often receive that aha moment - the idea worth pursuing. We get clarity over the potential solutions, or piece of art, or what this idea needs to become.
We now need to drop into closed thinking and get stuff done - action mode. Enough ideation and open thinking. Time to create something. Time to close off other distractions and get something done.
Iterate and learn
The creative process is agile in nature. Bursts of focused intense work, then reflection, testing, feedback and an objective view of the work.
- Are we hitting the brief?
- Are we delivering the right thing?
- Are we on the right track?
- Do we need to pivot, modify, adapt, change or alter?
Then closed thinking - action. More creating. More production.
Then break. Drop into the open mind. Reflect. Assess. Pivot or continue.
Any good business delivery model has these loops between open and closed. Thinking/reflection and action.
Repeat until you’re there.
It’s helpful to set some definitions of what good looks like. It’s tempting to get stuck in the loop of creation and feedback, work and refinement.
Refining over and over for perfection may seem like a worthy activity but perfection doesn’t exist. You need to ship it at some time. There is no value to other people until you do.
This is the same in work - ship it when it meets a standard that makes sense for your context.
It’s therefore helpful to know what ruler you’re measuring against, what standards you’re aiming for, what success and acceptance looks like.
We do this in work, ideally in conjunction with customers or customer proxies. We should do this for our own work too.
Have some idea of what this standard is upfront but be open to adjusting based on feedback and reflection.
Then ship it.
Ship it
Ship. Set it free. Launch it. Release it.
If we’ve included any stakeholders, audiences, publishers, customers in the iterative development of our work, we should be good to launch. This is the same in work and our own personal lives.
Ship it. Move on. Do the next thing.
A cycle for personal life and work
This cycle of personal creativity is an important cycle.
Ideas aren’t worth much on their own.
Part built creative work may be enjoyable to produce, and you may learn something through the process, but the world hasn’t had the benefit of seeing it.
Creativity is the act of bringing to life something which did not exist before. It’s the realisation of a dream, idea or hope.
In work we need much much more of this. In our own lives creative pursuits can be good for the soul and body.
A manager's role is to create the environment for creativity to flourish. In our own lives, it’s on us.
Either way, the process outlined here is one that works for both personal creative work, and for that essential creative work in our workplaces too.
It’s simple. It’s logical. It works. We just need time, space, energy and attention to focus on it.
“The ideal business is composed of managers and dreamers, and it is the responsibility of the former to protect the latter.” --Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid.
Editorial Desk
Published on the Cultivated Management portal:
- Decay | Repurpose - a photo essay on the emptying of our office spaces (bleak) and how we could repurpose them (hope)
- Dealing with impostor syndrome
- Everyone should have a coaching plan, even managers and leaders
If you enjoyed this newsletter then please consider:
- Sharing this content with others you feel would get value from it.
- Downloading the free ebook 10 Behaviours of effective employees.
- Buy a copy of Zero to Keynote
- Sitting the online Communication Super Power Workshop to develop your super power in work
It means a lot. Thank you.
Until next time - have a great week.
Rob..
This article is part of a new series running in 2025. Creative Soul Projects is a manifesto, and point of hope, in regaining and rebuilding what it means to do valuable, creative and meaningful work.
