Crashing Into the Creative Age

The trending topic on this month's episode of Creative Studies that Geoffrey ponders in his audio and written stream of consciousness meets gonzo editorial is:

• Crashing into the Creative Age. Economics and markets have a tendency of giving us a glimpse of what the world might look like. Too bad we just don't pay attention because we have to keep the treadmill moving and the charts always going up and to the right.

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The data revolution is over.

Any company getting into data to monetize it should find another airplane (if they can right now) to fly elsewhere. There's no money to be made in that field anymore. And honestly, why bother?

Creativity is the new buzzword.

The problem? It's not as cut and dry as an A/B test where you can sell Software as a Service to someone who has no clue that with the touch of a button their work will all be done. This is sort of where we are in 2022 when it comes to economic forces. We now know we can take a bunch of data and use it in a variety of ways. The issue is how do humans use it in ways that are most creative? And get other humans to pay for what it is you do?

Who is creating the Big Data moment of the next 20 years?

Blockchain? Crypto? Some tech company that delivers food?

Give me a break.

Many for the last 20 years have put tech solutionism and data at the core of the future. That tech and information (data) would be the sole design prototype to define where we go, what we do, how well we measure ourselves as a society. This makes sense. The influencers of this age came up in times of the early information economy. The personal computer. Management software. The early World Wide Web. Throw in some new fancy finance tools and before you know it, we all assume the future is this place where you push a button and then go create art the rest of the day while counting your crypto.

There's just one issue with this attitude. Human creativity is and always will define how we want to organize societies, equalize citizenry and foster future organizations. We've had an interesting two years during the Pandemic to try and figure out how we want to live, work, collaborate, communicate, enjoy leisure time and even be entertained. And of course, many have been a blockade to this, nervously typing, "Let's get back to normalcy." A good learning throughout all of this, is that to say only technology should be the guiding answer to our biggest problems is missing the focus of what most of the last two years has really been leading us to.

Human connection and creativity.

In a lot of ways the reason we keep hearing about digital transformation and the information economy being a part of what drives markets is because we're at the tail end of it. We're trying to cross the chasm into a post-digital age. Not one void of technology, but where technology isn't front and center to the human experience. It's immersive. Like the nice wallpaper in your bathroom. Or the paint on your walls. It sets a tone and mood but isn't front and center. That's because it replaces its fixed place as the main driver of society back toward where life should be focused on.

Human empowerment.

The information economy has been in existence since the beginning of civilization. The need for societies and individuals to understand the meaning of something. How it works. Why it works. Why we're here. The last 60 years has digitized much of this information and persuaded us it's the only answer to all of our ails.

This led us to the Big Data revolution. But big data was poor at curating and making other humans understand it in human terms.

Enter creativity.

Big data alone is not enough for where we need to evolve next.

If markets are any indication, tech is crashing as an investment because it is not the sole beneficiary of the future. It is one half of what gets us to where we need to go. And thus, a correction of sorts.

It's why we're crashing literally into the creative age.

What is the creative age? It’s an era in which the practical skill sets we’ve come to rely upon are no longer enough. Success demands creative thinking to use our progress and technologies in different ways to solve new and lasting problems. The core of it actually begins with art and design. Now I know what you're thinking. That is not part of STEM! But it is. Art and philosophy are the core to any STEM education. But in our yearning to catch up quickly to where we thought we needed to go, we over-indexed on technical skills while not balancing those technical skills with a mastery of other skills. Specifically more human or creative skills.

Successful creatives are able to think holistically, see different perspectives, imagine new possibilities and think differently to devise innovative solutions to very complex problems. They have a robust understanding of the tools that can be leveraged to overcome a challenge. Perhaps most importantly, they have the patience, persistence and drive to try countless approaches until finding the one that works the best. They think in ways that are new to those of us who have not yet fully developed our own creative skills.

And this new way of thinking is what the Creative Age will require. Artificial intelligence and automation will only continue to grow and will change many aspects of the way we work and live. Past societies would see these areas of growth and run toward them, tipping the scale until society was unbalanced. My call to action is to balance the scale. For every computer science solution, ask what the human design response would be. For every problem we think that can be solved through communication and design, ask questions about what technology could do. To be successful in this new era, we will need creative leaders who are able to use imagination, to identify novel applications of existing technology, to envision new possibilities, to see different perspectives, and to have the persistence and drive to explore many different solutions that address the problems at hand.

Creative leaders bring never-before-imagined proposals to the boardroom while also understanding the tactical requirements for an organization to implement them. In the past, many organizations outsourced creative thinking while keeping strategic operation roles in-house. But in the Creative Age, I advocate for any corporation, nonprofit or other organization to have an artist or designer in the boardroom and outsource operations. Just like we focused on IT solution providers the last 40 years and brought that in-house before pushing it outwards with the momentum of cloud computing, artists and designers must be part of the leadership blueprint to help navigate where we could be going. They, more than any others, will have the holistic and creative way of thinking required for meeting tomorrow’s challenges. Their experiences in cycling through many different possibilities before landing on the right solution makes them resilient in the face of setbacks and able to find novel approaches to execute an idea. Designers and artists are also generalists. While they may be good in one area, they have more of a V-shaped view of the world. Almost like a creative director in that they have a wide field of view in many areas and can also go deep in a few.

Creatives will be able to both set the vision for their companies and drive the creative teams that work behind the scenes to achieve that vision.

It is clear to me that the Creative Age and this new economy will be led by those with a well-developed foundation in creativity combined with technical mastery. We're already seeing it in so many new areas of the economy and some don't even exist as true companies yet because they haven't gotten past the imaginary phase. But creatives have this unique skill set and will be best positioned to lead this new era. While we read news on why many things around us are tanking from governments to financial markets, we don't realize the era of creativity is here to replace what will not be left behind after automation eats up the remaining crumbs.

The issue right now is how to measure creativity. But maybe this is the wrong question being asked by the wrong people still in leadership at companies afraid of creativity because they don't know how to harness it. They don't know how to measure it. They don't know what it should be used for. They've relied too long on yes/no answers to very simple questions. What happens when simple questions with simple answers aren't enough anymore?

The age of creativity is supposed to be turbulent. It's supposed to cause chaos. Math supposedly makes order out of chaos but what if math makes more chaos out of chaos because math is science and science is not finite? What do we use to help bring an understanding to this chaos?

Answer that last question is using creativity in and of itself.

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