C. The Wellspring. Your Creative Flow.

You are creative. That’s not an empty affirmation, but a fact. We, as humans, are all creative.

Except that there are blockers to us fully developing and utilizing our creative capabilities, including misperceptions of what creativity is and how it can be applied, which can prevent us from reaching our true potential, and highest aspirations in the real world.

A landmark study by Adobe in 2016 found that while 70% of respondents said that creativity was valuable to society, made us better workers, leaders, and parents, and happier, only 41% of respondents saw themselves as creative, and only 30% said they were living their creative potential.

This is the third article in a series that makes the link between authenticity, creativity and self-actualization (reaching your potential), as a precursor to series of courses and content that address how to further develop your creativity, and unblock your creative flow towards real world aspirations.

This article describes a metaphor and model for creativity and vitality called The Wellspring, which aims to anchor your creativity and creative development to an infinite organic source within you, rather than somewhere “out there.”

Yes, we’ll get to “how to generate ideas that lead to more money” in a multitude of contexts, perspectives and permutations very soon, both organizational and individual. But let’s turn on the spigot of your creative flow in the right way first.

In presentations, when I ask participants to tell my why they want to be creative, it’s fair to say that a really broad range of answers come back, but most boil down to the belief that creativity will make their life better, let them achieve something, be all they can be.

People setting out to improve their creativity in a deliberate way want creativity for what they believe creativity will give them, rather than pursue creativity for its own sake.

I think that this distinction is an important one to make upfront lest we get lost in the many rabbit holes that a field like this presents to us.

Focus on the outcomes.

Ask, is what I’m learning helping me at work and in life, either directly (innovative approaches or ideas, individually and teaming) or indirectly (increased confidence to tackle new challenges, fulfillment, feeling alive)?

Although there are many variations, academic definitions of creativity center around the “generation of ideas that are new and useful.”

What makes creativity exciting for me, beyond the self-expression part that people most readily associate with creativity, is the confidence and competence that a developed generalized creative ability can give you to tackle valuable problems such as how to optimize your work and life, move up in or out of your current career, move city or country, to be all you can be. To change the world.

The Wellspring as a metaphor and model is a source of creativity and vitality that powers this generalized creative capability at each stage, so starting with the end in mind, let’s look at the capability first, and then come back to The Wellspring metaphor and model.

Generalized Creative Capability

Here's one view of what I mean by a generalized creative capability, and how it applies to personal and organizational development and transformation:

A general iterative approach to doing anything could be as follows:

i. Understand - what you’re trying to achieve and why, what success looks like, and how that relates to your (or your organization’s) core values, vision, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and so on

ii. Define – the detailed blueprint for what that future vision looks like in practice, define goals and measures of performance/success. Generate ideas and approaches to get to the future vision

iii. Actualize – test and implement your blueprint in an iterative and phased way, review results of what’s been done, moving back to i. Understand, and making corrections

Quite often we find ourselves “shooting from the hip”, we dive into implementation / Actualize, without taking the time to really define what we’re trying to do in a systematic way (Define), or even work out why we’re doing it in the first place, and if we’re focused on the right things.

Creativity in a narrow sense is just a tool, and like any tool can be used to do the wrong things faster!

This is why I’ve advocated a generalized creative capability (GCC) that is tied into a structured approach to change, and rooted in the concept of The Wellspring.

Let’s examine that a bit more:

i. Understand.

The Wellspring, and The Well and Wheel of the previous two articles, anchor your understanding of the context of anything you’re trying to do in a deep understanding of yourself and what you really want, your strengths and so on.

This deep need for understanding also applies to distilling the essence of an idea, brand, or organization.

Solving any problem well involves getting a clear view of the context of what you’re trying to do and why.

The Wellspring is a constant drip feed of ideas, intuition, interconnections and pointed reflections that allow you to understand what you’re doing, what you’ve done, and what next.

When undertaking a change, we also need to get really good at defining the problem itself in a way that helps get us to the best solution, and this is often not a one-shot exercise. Often, you’ll be reflecting on the problem in the exact type of quiet moments when The Wellspring comes into its own.

Problem solving approaches, such as Design Thinking, have a step upfront to “empathize” with users, observing and speaking with them and other stakeholders, documenting requirements and so on. While this is venturing into topics like Emotional Intelligence, is also clearly a creative skill. For example the ability to identify and create metaphors that show the problem in a new light, understanding that feelings drive satisfaction, purchase decisions (including B2B), and behavior generally, often as much if not more than analytical processes.

ii. Define.

One of the difficulties of taking on novel challenges is how to define and measure success, and this requires creativity and iteration.

I’ve found and talked about before how traditional measures of success might not apply to new endeavors (e.g., innovation), or at least not straight away, those measures may even be counterproductive or destructive in the short term.

Of course, there is also the creative part around ideation of the central idea and solution. There is also the more intellectual/analytical, but still part of the creative process, tasks of assessing, stage-gating, greenlighting (or not) of candidate ideas. Being more creative doesn’t mean you give up your existing strengths and experience in business, and focus on putting the idea in the overall context of what you or the organization needs, for example.

iii. Actualize.

Clearly, we need to “get creative” in implementation, which is where ongoing problem solving comes to the fore. Having a generalized creative capability involves having from the start at least some level of confidence that you’ll actually be able to put the solution into practice in Actualize, otherwise why bother!

This doesn’t mean that you know exactly all the details of how you’ll put it into practice, rather that you know the steps and stages of the process of how to find the solution, and that you’ll be able to figure out how to put that into practice.

We will talk about the details of a generalized creative capability much more in future, but for now I hope that I’ve been able to reframe some of your perceptions on what creativity is and what it can be used for. i.e., real world goals, change, transformation and so on.

Let’s talk about how my approach to getting you to this generalized creative capability is different.

I identify as an artist, creative and creative entrepreneur, and have an overarching interest in optimizing lifestyle in the broadest sense “work to live, rather than live to work”.

I set out to develop a complete view of work, life and success, and frankly to fix some of the “bugs” in optimizing these that I’d experienced and seen in many others.

For example, being successful but not happy, feeling that I wasn’t bringing my full self to work, and thus wasn’t getting the full benefits in life, reaching my potential, despite all the hard work I was pouring in there, and sacrifices I was making.

And regrets. Research has proven the truism that “we regret more what we didn’t do than what we did do.”

We focus on what we feel we should do, rather than what we ought to do.

I’d delayed taking action on starting my business for so long that I was already starting to experience real regrets around the path not taken. When I did finally change I, like most people in similar situations, regretted not doing it sooner.

Having a generalized creative capability, and utilizing The Wellspring enables you to take ideas from your imagination, and make them real, at least in part, then build from there.

It is because of this that I’ve set out to build a distinctive creativity offering, if you want to call it that, which starts with the end in mind.

Let’s build it so that everything we’re doing leads you to live the overall life that you wish to live. There are numerous other resources about quick success, and creative “hacks”, but what’s the point if you’re not satisfied when you get “there”?

We begin by thinking about what that future life could look like, then aim to end up there, living aspects of that future as soon as possible. But, yes, in the middle you might be pulling the “levers” at work hard, you might be working hard and smart, changing and reaching, in the interim so that you can reap some rewards now, and greater rewards in a little bit.

Where I’m helping you to go, is to develop a set of mindsets, habits, tools and techniques that can be applied to better tackle very practical and tangible issues at work, and in life.

For example, perhaps you’re perceived as not being “strategic” enough, at work, just a “numbers girl or guy”, and thus not a high potential leader.

Perhaps you’re a leader who has gotten where you are by working in a certain rigid style, your “strengths”, but times might have changed and you’re seen as old-school, and not in a good way, no matter what your actual age is.

Perhaps you take pride in shooting down new ideas, based on your deep experience of “reality” as it is (or at least was), and keeping the “troops” in line.

Creative leadership is about growth, starting with you.

Creativity can help you see differently, to frame and reframe problems and your vision in a “big picture” way, to look for interconnected opportunities, and to use improved communications and storytelling to move and influence people at work.

Creativity can help you to be more vulnerable and authentic as a leader, and be someone who inspires and makes space for creativity in your teams.

Now we’ve talked more about where we are going, let me introduce the metaphor and model of The Wellspring, explain what they are and why we need them.

Wellspring - The Metaphor

A wellspring, according to the dictionary, is an “original and bountiful source of something.”

As I’ve said, The Wellspring of creativity and vitality is already within you.

Metaphors are important since they convey rich meaning and emotion and help engage both your imagination, and intuition. For example, in terms of intuition, if creativity is a wellspring inside you, your mind might naturally move to the questions of how do I access that, focus it, channel it, enjoy it, feel and realize the benefits of it, and so on. The Wellspring is infinite and never runs dry.

In practical terms The Wellspring comes out of your memories, life experiences, knowledge, sensations, cognition, and deeper levels of perception and consciousness, which you can experience through activities such as meditation, the creative process itself, through nature and awe inducing experiences, for example.

One reason we need another metaphor for creativity is that there are already plenty of limited and unhelpful ones out there.

For example, “thinking outside the box”, “brainstorming”, “left brain, right brain” and even the idea and ideal of “the artist.”

In addition, I’ve also been guilty of the well-intentioned use of phrases like “the creative engine” or “creative superpower”, which are useful to communicate certain aspects or benefits of creativity, but also introduce issues around the source and center of creativity.

For example, if creativity is a superpower does that mean that not everyone has it (no), you have to be born with fully developed creativity at the peak of its powers (no), or be involved in some radioactive incident and turn green when you’re creative (also no).

The Wellspring as a metaphor helps us get back to the source, pardon the pun, and it ties nicely into The Well, and The (water) Wheel ideas I described in the last two articles.

It’s an organic and human idea first and foremost. This point of view might seem quaint in an era where we’re deluged with breathless social media posts about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over, disrupting and even “destroying” the need for human creativity and jobs.

Except that, through time, it has always been the creatives that have utilized and pushed the limits of new tools, helping define and refine the possibilities of new technologies, which eventually flow through to business. Do you want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution.

As far back as IBM’s widely shared 2010 CEO study, creativity was being lauded in the sense of the employee’s ability to deal with disruption and complexity, not only in the sense of the need to develop new products and services.

If the “carrot” for creativity is personal freedom, flexibility, growth, fulfillment and a crack at your true potential, then the “stick” for leaders and those in professional jobs is to help offense and defense against disruption and against the loss or sidelining of those same jobs.

There is no foolproof panacea to job/income security concerns, but ignoring them and being reactive is definitely not the way. Instead, we know that we must think about the unique differentiated value that we personally bring to work, how to increase that value and make it even more unique, or get creative in how and where we trade our time, energy and experience for money.

Creativity in the broadest sense helps you see clearly, develop ideas that solve problems, and helps you have the competence and confidence to put the ideas into practice individually, and organizationally.

The Wellspring is in here, rather than out there.

Creativity and the unique value that I’ve been talking about grows out of empathy, experiences, knowledge and feelings first, then we lay the creative tools and techniques on top of that, and that includes analyzing and testing and strengthening the ideas, and putting them into practice in the real world.

You get in touch with your customers’, clients’ or users’ wants, needs and feelings, by first getting in touch with your own. We so often make decisions based on feelings and then justify them with logic, even in business. Being more creative enables you to sell, market, partner and co-innovate with clients. Again, you’ll see a theme in how I'm talking about creativity is switching between personal and professional creative breakthroughs, between driving business results, and life results.

A wellspring metaphor also ties neatly into being a source of vitality (as well as creativity), and life more generally. It ties into the (quite overused) idea of wellbeing, creativity is not only about making money or stuff, it’s about living well, in the broadest and most transcendent sense. It’s about being healthy and happy enjoying your success. It’s about being more whole and complete as humans, increasing empathy and consciousness, and positive outcomes for society.

Wellspring - The Model

In addition to being a metaphor, The Wellspring is also a framework or model that you can use to help develop your own creative ability. The specific aspect of the creative process that I’m targeting with the model is “turning on the tap, or spigot”, getting your creative flow going.

Here is a picture of The Wellspring model:

You have a bountiful creative source within you (the inner turquoise circle/hexagon), but what you initially experience at the surface (outer blue circle) are drips and dribbles of creativity, an inconsistent flow that seems go up and down at random times.

One of the reasons for this inconsistency is that there are blockers that stop the creative flow getting to the surface, represented by the gray circle, what I’ve playfully called “impermeable rock”, so that if you remember what that means from school, you’ve finally used that knowledge.

When you begin your creative journey, one of the most developed existing creative channels for most of us, one that breaks through the “rock”, is problem solving. Even though we might not even equate problem solving with creativity.

In the diagram this is represented by the purple arrow. We experience a problem and our conscious and subconscious mind gets working on it.

Survival, in the sense of adapt or die, has meant that our creative brains are tuned into problem solving, even though many creative problem-solving examples in our day to day include more pedestrian things like where or what to eat, what to wear, how to juggle work tasks and so on.

We look for a solution in our databanks of memories, knowledge and experiences, and if one isn’t there then we automatically synthesize a solution after a period of time. Having at least a short so-called incubation period between problem and solution allows us to come up with more novel solutions to a problem if that is what's required.

The solution or answer, represented by the orange arrow in the diagram, to our felt problems comes back into our conscious mind, and off we go!

Although the arrow is labelled creative ideas/seeds, for where we’re going later on, many of the ideas or solutions that come back in our daily problem solving don’t meet the academic definition of creative, being a “new” and “useful” idea.

In these day-to-day types of situations, we’re usually looking for an “adequate” solution, rather than one that is totally new to us or the world. We often settle on the first thing that comes to mind and is workable, even though there might have been other, more optimal solutions had we stuck with the process a bit longer, researched, got other’s views and so on.

Although we’ll get into it much more in future articles, improving problem definition, and the ideation and selection process (including not necessarily running with the first idea that comes to mind) are trainable creative skills, that can measurably improve the quality and consistency of outcomes, particularly as we apply them to more complex and important problems, at work and in life.

Despite the blockers, some creative ideas still bubble up to the surface in random places. Through “fissures” the water finds a way to the surface. The challenge is that unless you know what you’re looking for, and have your senses tuned, then you might even miss these ideas, or worse see them as negative or a “distraction.”

Again, we’ll get into this more later, but creativity is often asynchronous, meaning that thinking of the problem and arriving at the solution often don’t happen at the same time in the same sitting.

As you’ve no doubt experienced ideas pop up at all times, when you wake up, in the shower, while you’re walking and so on.

While creative novices might treat this as a “cute” idiosyncratic aspect of creativity, the stages of priming, incubating and ideation actually form a process that can be learned and improved and depended on.

Plus, you’ll learn to expect and capture ideas whenever and however they arrive, and experience the value and fruits of doing so.

Part of increasing your creative flow, and realizing the truth in The Wellspring metaphor, is about recognizing that ideas that you already have popping up! It is legitimizing, in your own beliefs, the value of this creative process and the ideas that emerge from it.

One aspect of increasing or improving your creativity will be training you not to automatically reject partially formed ideas, and instead look for any seeds that exist within them, and can be further developed. It’s often the case that sensible and safe ideas only lead to incrementalism, and that ideas that might initially seem left-field, but contain a strong “truth”, lead to transformation.

Now let’s talk a bit more about some of the blockers to creativity.

One of the first blockers is negative perceptions and incorrect ideas about what creativity is.

We equate creativity with artistry, which is a related but separate idea. We see something creative as inherently risky, a shortcut or unsustainable. We believe that creativity is a distraction, that it will make employees harder to control and lacking focus on “serious” business outcomes. We believe that being more creative will somehow change us for the worse. That we’ll cease to be able to do our jobs, or that people will think the less of us, “in the real world.”

We hold some of these perceptions even as we look up to companies like Apple, and to tech billionaires who’ve disrupted whole industries, and even despite some of us being aware of academic and applied studies of innovation and creativity as a "hardened" and learnable process and capability. Such is the dissonance around what creativity is. Not helpful. I’ve found that, if anything, creativity makes you more of yourself rather than less.

Another couplet of limiting beliefs is that creativity is “born not learned”, and we don’t see ourselves as creative, the second belief reinforcing the first. Creativity is something that can be learned however. I’ve seen teaching aspiring creative leaders and professionals that it’s dependably possible to give someone a creative experience in a short amount of time that transforms their belief in their own creativity.

A common analogy for creativity is that it’s like a muscle, the more you use it the more it grows. Yet our beliefs and societal reinforcement that we’re not creative, or even not supposed to be as mature adults, have meant that often the creative muscles we had as children have atrophied.

Our situation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, we don’t believe that we’re creative so don’t invest in developing our creativity to the point where it can generate transformational results. We fail to engage in exactly the types of experiences and learning that would develop both our confidence and competence in creativity.

We might have even had one or two negative experiences where we’ve tried something creative and it didn’t work straight away, and that confirms our preconceptions of the limited uses, and our limited abilities, in creativity.

Until now, there has been nobody prompting you to get back on the creative “horse”, perhaps by now work is also screaming for innovative solutions and approaches. If not you, then who etc.?

The good news is that although your creative journey can continue through life, you can begin to see positive and useful results over the course of an in-person session, and over days and weeks, rather than years.

From an organizational perspective, it can take longer, months and, yes, years to fully develop a sustainable creative capability that produces dependable results, but we know how vital culture is to performance and that often comes from the top.

If we can change the minds and experiences of leaders, you, through a short intervention, that creates the space and oxygen for new ideas to come to the table, and to see existing ideas in a new light.

Having worked with many big corporates as a consultant, having being an entrepreneur twice over, and an artist: filmmaker, music producer, author/screenwriter, this is why I’m so upbeat but also clear-eyed about the potential for an improved generalized creative capability to transform business, society, and life. Even in 2023, and beyond.

Wellspring – The Experience

The best way to understand The Wellspring is, of course, to experience it for yourself.

I’m working on how to deliver the types of experiences that can transform your creativity and vitality through content, in-person experiences and virtually, through courses and storification/gamification, and literally through virtual/mixed reality experiences.

Until that time (shortly), I hope that by sharing the metaphor and model of The Wellspring, this will have already helped to attune your senses and conscious mind so that you experience a process that is already going on for you, and within you. When an idea pops up while you’re having a shower, for example, then that is The Wellspring in action. Write the idea down.

In a previous article (linked below) I outlined my point of view that creativity can be thought of as a process, and I described what that process looked like. The Wellspring is represented by the front end of that process.

It’s about framing, ingestion, synthesis and ideation, to use the terms in the creative process article.

We’ll get into that a lot more in future articles and content.

For now, I want to leave you where I started, with a personal view of creativity.

What was the moment when I turned on the spigot of my own creative flow?

Firstly, I’ve already talked about the idea of bubbling up. I could highlight countless times in my life when I’ve come up with cool inventive ideas, we all could if we tried, perhaps with some prompting. These are important but isolated moments, not a flow.

Where the flow began for me was in 2014 around the time of the birth of my son, and after I’d started attending a weekly writer’s group meetup and open mic. It was an emotional time, with complications in pregnancy that threatened whether my son would even live, and the looming change of life that would come with fatherhood. I was pondering my future direction. I had a lot I felt that I needed to express, and that emotion got me over the tipping point of the effort to actually find and attend a writer’s group.

The process of the group was to prepare some writing each week that you could optionally read out to the group, and get feedback on if you wished.

Having to present, meant first having to write something, which was good pressure to tap into whatever material was top of mind that week.

I wrote about my son, and then feelings about life, and then about stuff going on around me in New York where I was working at the time. I captured the ideas in the notes feature on my phone, sometimes writing most of a poem or piece while I was waiting for my dinner to arrive at a restaurant, while dining alone, or afterwards while half-watching some late-night TV.

The writer’s group not only acted as an accountability group, like a writing personal trainer, but a sympathetic audience and source of inspiration and technique, and a prompt to have fun with it and try new things.

If you’ve read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and it often comes up in lists of recommended creativity books, you’ll have heard of the so-called “morning pages” a daily stream-of-consciousness exercise, that drives at the same type of idea that I’ve been talking about.

The morning pages, and similar exercises, force you to get what’s inside, out of yourself, and that can be effective in tapping into your inner source, and building creative flow.

Although I’ve read a good chunk of that book, I never did the morning pages (others have and swear by them).

I liked the challenge and thrill of preparing something for “production” and to present and perform for others at the writer's group. This was a different type of vibe from accumulating pages that would just go into folder somewhere.

There was never a week when I had nothing to present, and although not all pieces had the same impact, the quality generally trended upwards as my skill levels improved and I got to know the audience better.

Positive reinforcement, and real world “safe fails”, prompted me to get better.

Wow, looking back, it's funny how infrequently we get outside our comfort zones. You might not think that you're lacking confidence, a world I've used a few times already, but are you really only confident about the narrow slice of the world you work in (and how would you even know)? Are you growing?

My answers were yes and no, respectively. I'd been doing the same thing for 20 years, and when I did something new that I cared about, and wasn't immediately great at, it made me frustrated. And then I grew.

What came as a surprise after attending the group for a bit, was that I was suddenly able to write songs and melodies too.

I’d been a professional DJ more than 20 years before that point and had tried my hand at writing electronic music, even getting some of it played on public radio, and in one case sharing an idea with another DJ who went on to get a Top 40 hit with the song.

But this music production quickly petered out and never went anywhere at the time. Decades later and more 40’s than Top 40 and I suddenly had this new ability to write songs. So I did, and continue to!

I gained a confidence that I was able to take inputs and convert them into an output, writing, a song, and this made me believe that I could tackle bigger things that had nothing to do with writing.

Eventually that confidence was enough for me to change careers. I read years after that about the concept creative confidence, in the Kelley’s book of the same name, based around psychologist Albert Bandura’s ideas of self-efficacy that I’d first learned about in my MBA a decade earlier.

In short, do small but increasingly difficult challenges in a safe environment, and you can overcome significant personal challenges and even phobias, and doing so gives you a generalized creative confidence that drives you to tackle much bigger challenges, which often have nothing to do with the original topic.

What does a Wellspring idea arriving feel like? Our minds can feel like they’re continuously full of chatter, so for me these ideas that bubble up often feel like you’ve been walking through a forest and you enter a clearing with the idea at the center.

Other’s report that the idea just feels different, or is in a slightly different voice.

You get a sense of it just "appearing."

Pay attention to the feeling when your next ideas arrives in the shower, or walking or when you wake up, or wherever and whenever they arrive. Is the sense of the idea arriving different from what normally is in your mind?

To trigger these ideas, you need to have somewhere for them to go.

Once you can believe that you are creative and creativity is valuable then you begin to pay attention differently, and this becomes a virtuous cycle with your senses and creative sense getting ever more refined and sensitive to seeds of ideas.

Even if writing them down is where the ideas go first that still counts. You become a subconscious detector and farmer of ideas everywhere you go. This is the idea of The Wellspring, it eventually becomes an automatic and subconscious process.

For example, I remember driving to a co-working space I was using one morning, and feeling a bit tired for the second or third day in a row, I asked myself “when will I feel good again?” Even as I was saying it to myself my antennae picked up, and that emotional line was the genesis for three different songs, the latest in the soundtrack for a short film I’ve written.

I’ve had other ideas “in a clearing” relating to my business, to articles or the books I’ve written (a book contains many of these moments), to other creative projects, and to ideas for others. Later, we'll go to industrial strength creativity, but to start I want you to be aware and tune in to your own creative voice.

I hope the idea and model of The Wellspring is useful to you.

For homework, pay attention to the ideas that already bubble up to you at strange times. And try thinking deeply about a felt problem and the context of that problem (the real outcomes that solving the problem will give you), something you have stakes in getting a solution to, but one that doesn’t need to be solved today.

Don’t try to solve it then and there, move onto something else. If any ideas pop up then just write them down without trying to over analyze or assess or judge them right now. Regroup several days later and look at the problem again, and what you’ve come up with. Do you see the problem in a new light? Was this wait and build process beneficial?

Of course, we’ll return to problem solving techniques in a much more systematic way.

I just want you to get used to starting to pay attention but in a partially detached way, not trying to solve everything right then and there.

That opens the door for truly creative ideas to emerge.

It turns on the spigot of your creative flow.