ABOUT ANTONINA
Antonina Elliott is the Art Director and an Arts writer for National Business Review (NBR). She is also a volunteer writer and researcher for Fairground Foundation, an avid reader, and a mother of one.
DISCOVERING CREATIVITY
“Growing up, I used to think I knew what creativity was, but looking back I realise I only knew what creativity looked like. Creativity to me then was the finished posters of an award-winning advertising agency, or a clever ad campaign, or an interesting use of words. Creativity was whatever the great minds of Einstein or Picasso or van Gogh and others produced. I only saw the final product: the face of the body of work that produced those results in the first place.”
“The problem with this is that it tells you nothing about how you yourself can be creative. Essentially, I was learning creativity backwards – top down instead of bottom up. And when I came across problems myself that needed creative solutions (making something new that didn’t exist, or improving the status quo), I had no idea how to do it. I thought a good poster or the right colours or fonts would take care of it. But these were merely cosmetic changes to situations that required a methodical, playful, insightful approach.”
“What I should have been doing was studying how these people thought, what their environments were, how they got through solution blocks: basically their process. I should have been starting with my own story, environment… I should have started with out with more curiosity than pre-prepared solutions guided by the campaigns or magazine layouts I used as inspiration.”
CREATIVITY DEFINED
“Now creativity has a very different meaning to me. It’s almost a word I’m reluctant to use, because when you’re in the act of creation, you don’t say, ‘wow I’m being creative.’ You don’t have time. You are too busy playing with ideas, reflecting and refining those ideas, pushing through problems, producing prototypes or practice drafts or going through volumes of diaries / sketches or researching case studies.”
“Inside the creative bubble, the creator is busy doing, or making stuff, solving a problem, generating ideas and possibilities and connections to whatever they’re working on (and probably losing sleep in the process). The idea that they’re being ‘creative’ is probably the last thing on their mind. Essentially, you’re busy being creative, not trying to live up to the ‘creative’ label, which can actually kill creativity, funnily enough!”
CROSS-CULTURAL CREATIVITY
Being of Samoan descent, “I asked fellow Samoans on Facebook what the Samoan word for ‘creativity’ was. People returned with words like ‘sogosoga’ and ‘faifaimea’: words that basically mean someone who ‘does a lot of things’ or ‘does a lot of different things at the same time.’ I remember getting frustrated because at first glance, they fell short of the whimsical idea of ‘creativity’ which comes to mind when trying to define the word. But then I had to laugh because the answer was right there all along. It wasn’t anything whimsical (though creativity can produce those feelings). These words were a ‘how to’ for understanding creativity. Samoans, rich in their arts, had no one magic word that translated directly across to English. They had doing words that implied action and volumes of work – a much bigger hint to understanding creativity than the English version which is over-used but rarely understood – despite the fact that the verb ‘create’ is in the word. Instead we’ve made it mysterious and mythical. This elusiveness makes it near impossible to start an intelligent conversation around the word.”
“Creativity is not a thing. It’s an umbrella word that contains a process grounded in thinking and action that often solves a problem and is ahead of its time. The elements in the final solution may not be new, but the way in which they come together will be. It’s not exclusive to a particular industry, but is dependent on the thinking/doing creator.” Creativity happens “through their actions, reflections, volumes of work and time. People who get the right mix of those at the right time are often labelled ‘creative.’”
CREATIVITY’S SIGNIFICANCE
“Creativity is important because life without it would be boring! There’d be no novel ways to look at the world or solve problems or get a better understanding of something.”
However, there’s the possibility that creativity stems from a deeper place too. “It could be something innate in humans wanting to create something permanent that outlives us? Much like perpetuating our genes maybe, but in a cultural, not necessarily biological, sense… I think it gives us a purpose; it’s deeply necessary for expression or for creating a story or many stories.”
The urge to create has always been a driving human need: for various creative thinkers, “getting their thoughts out was an imperative. People have taken great risks in political, marital, financial, religious circles so that they could pursue their creative work.” Creativity requires “a deeply-held belief in an idea larger than themselves. That idea or vision is often the one thing that pulls people through their struggles in their quest to solve a problem.”
CREATIVITY AND EDUCATION
Education “both helps and hinders creativity. On one hand, education gives you a set of rules: this writer meant x, y, z; this leader stood for these values; this is how you write a hypothesis or a business plan or analyze a painting. But while education sets up a framework on how to think, it can also trap you within that framework. When millions of kids are learning the same things the same way, you’re producing a sameness of thinking and also a sameness of problems. Any system of thinking needs thinkers who can think outside the system.”
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
Innovation is the product of genuine creativity. “You can be creative but not necessarily innovative, but being innovative always uses creativity or creative methods. They’re almost the same thing, only creativity is more aligned with imagination and innovation is more involved with execution and tweaking that execution.”
It is interesting how people use the two terms. “A playwright or ballet performance is often called ‘creative’, whereas a new tech gadget or business approach is deemed ‘innovative’.” Noticing this tendency “makes me wonder if we’re biased in how or when we use these words. It’s as if ‘creative’ is too ‘soft’ a word, tied down to imagination, and so people want ‘harder’ words to reference their products. And vice versa.”
Creation does encompass action, however – in a way that ‘imagination’ doesn’t. “It is a process of thinking and doing; it can be expressed internally and externally. Whereas imagination is purely an internal process, a formation of concepts or ideas. Imagination is necessary for creativity, while creativity is not so necessary to imagination.”
CREATIVE ORGANISATIONS
Organisations can support creative processes “by understanding what creativity means in the first place. Creativity gets a bad rap in businesses, where it’s potentially deemed too childish or counter-productive. This old-school thinking is detrimental to organisational success.”
People are creative in business all the time. “A salesperson will change their approach or play with an idea to pitch to a potential client. A manufacturer will think up a solution to getting their product out the door because the machine has broken down. Still, none of these people will think they’re being creative – that could be partly to the way we label people as being arty or techy and so forth.”
To foster creativity, organisations should build time for play into their weekly or monthly calendars – “time where you can let loose, brainstorm or make suggestions without fear of rejection or being wrong. We often let problems get larger and larger because we’re so limited in our thinking. Creativity can help us get out of those ruts. I think if more people understood that creativity was not exclusive to an industry like the arts, they would use take advantage of it more quickly. They’d see that it could bring new results, better solutions, fresh thinking and, of course, more money.”
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