Creative, meaningful work is the goal. For everyone.

This post first appeared on the Creative Huddle blog.

If you didn't need to earn money, what would you do? You'd be on a permanent holiday, with all the free time in the world. It would be amazing for a while. Lots of travelling, seeing the world. But after a year or so you'd get bored. You'd have to find something to do to keep yourself busy, something to give your life meaning.

Meaningful work is our goal. When our work is meaningful, it doesn’t feel like work. When we are involved in a creative project that matters to us, we are completely engaged, we lose track of time, and we have a clear sense of purpose. So imagine if we could get paid for it as well. How amazing would that be?
 
In our recent Creativity at Work survey, we asked people to state how they felt when they were being creative. They said things like:

• Happy and sometimes exhausted
• Good. Fulfilled. Inspired. Motivated
• I get motivated, feel fully invested in wanting ideas to succeed and thoroughly enjoy it.
• It makes me feel an integral part of the success of the company.
• Empowered, challenged, free
• Free. capable. excited about possibilities. Energised.
• Keeps me motivated and keeps the fun in work. If you have the space and freedom to be creative it gets the mind going and makes you feel passionate.

As the modern workplace becomes increasingly complex, it can be harder for employees to feel a sense of purpose. The combination of multiple projects, distributed teams, online communications and shifting deadlines can often obscure the meaning of our work. It is easy to become disengaged as we become overwhelmed by the noise. And disengagement leads to lack of motivation, unhappiness, lower productivity, and ultimately lower profits.
 
So how do we help ourselves and our employees rediscover the meaning in work? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Take a moment to think about why you go to work. What makes you get out of bed? How do you feel as you walk out the front door each morning?
2. Make sure you’re absolutely clear about why you are doing the job that you do. Do you love the work? Does it provide you with a good work/life balance? Why do you keep showing up day after day? What are you looking forward to?
3. Take a step back and picture your role in the wider context of your organisation. Why does your job exist? And your department? Look at your organisation’s vision and mission statements – how does the work that you do help your organisation deliver its vision and mission?

Now, if you’re a leader or a manager, take a moment to think about how much input your employees have had in shaping the organisation’s vision and mission. Or their departmental strategy. Or even just the work that they do every day. How much autonomy do they have – and do you have – over your work? When was the last time they had the opportunity to be involved in a creative project that they cared about?
 
Here’s the thing: people are amazing. Full of creative potential. Even the most disengaged member of your organisation could be s potential leader – if you can encourage them to use their natural creativity and find meaning in their work.
 
We are all inherently creative, we just need a little time and autonomy to find our purpose. To find our ‘why’. So think twice before you send that employee on another training course to improve their performance, you may need to just allow them a little breathing space to be creative, and help them find out why their work matters to the organisation.
 
With the right questions and encouragement, we can find meaning in our work. And if we can’t, we should be doing a different job.

 

Why we need to reclaim our brains

This post was written for the Creative Huddle newsletter, 18th May 2015. Sign up here.

It’s easy to think that we are becoming smarter than ever before. The internet has placed the information of the world at our fingertips, and Google has made it incredibly easy to find both useful and relevant information. We are truly living in the information age, so what’s the problem?

 

The problem is that the internet is making us lazy. It’s reducing our attention span (so much so, even goldfish can focus better than us). Worse still, it’s making us think we’re smarter than we really are.

 

We think that all this technology is enabling us to work better, communicate better, and relax better, but there is a real danger that these perceived benefits are all in our minds. This has significant implications for learning: just because you’re reading something online it doesn’t mean you’re learning it.

 

The problem is that even Google can’t compare with real-world experience. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t a new phenomenon – the eminent philosopher and educationalist John Dewey was arguing for an experiential approach to learning in the 1930s. But in a world in which our daily activity is increasingly mediated by online technologies, it’s easy to think that an increased choice over what we can do equates to empowerment.

 

So before we become unconscious slaves to the internet, what can we do about it?

 

The answer is that we need to place much greater emphasis on understanding how our brains work. If we are to navigate this information-rich century, each of us needs a personal understanding of why we do what we do. To coin an educational word, we need to be more metacognitive and really take an active interest in how technology and information are shaping our reality.

 

If we know that students only remember 3% of a 45 minute lecture, we should really stop talking at them. If we know that constant multitasking is having an adverse affect on our productivity, we need to have both an awareness and a clear strategy to cope with the distractions brought by technology.

 

What does all this have to do with creativity? It's been shown that taking mental breaks, especially breaks from technology, can benefit creativity.

If creativity and innovation are in such high demand we need to help people learn how to reclaim their brains from all this distraction. This is especially true at the executive level, where creativity is increasingly perceived as a critical leadership quality.

 

The more we can increase our conscious awareness of why we are doing what we are doing, the more we are able to develop our own personal strategies to managing our thinking. In a world of work full of distractions, we need to fully grasp the importance of giving our brains more downtime. Understanding the impact of distractions is a critical first step to reclaiming our brains.

We call this approach Productive Creativity.

Thinking tools

I recently attended an excellent workshop hosted by Creative Huddle about creative leadership. During the workshop the subject of 'thinking tools' came up, and I was reminded of the fact of the importance of 'thinking tools' to help individuals and groups investigate complex problems..

Of particular interest was the value of asking 'why'. For example, why are we making this product / providing this service / targeting this audience / using this approach? Often the 'why' is overlooked at great cost.

During the discussion I was reminded of a couple of useful thinking tools - Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats, and Simon Sinek's 'Start With Why'. Both tools are explained well by my former colleague Damian Chapman:

Thinking Tools for Creative Problem Solving