Creativity means tearing up the rule book occasionally

When my kids come up to me and say they’re bored, I tell them to go and ‘do creative’. Not to be creative - that kind of pressure kills ideas - but to do something intrinsically creative, and see what happens.?

You can’t be creative on demand. But you can give yourself the tools for creativity, and the places to go where you can act in an unfettered way. That place might be physical or metaphorical, anywhere that’s a source of inspiration. If you have a place where you can tap into your creativity, you never have reason to be bored.

I often think the structure we put upon ourselves, and our processes (both in business and our personal lives) are unhelpful for creativity. I know we all need structure and processes. But we also need to break free from their constraints occasionally so we can tap into our creative instincts.?

I live in the countryside now, and work mostly from home unless I’m meeting colleagues or clients, but when I commuted regularly to London I’d get off the train at the same time, take the same tube line, get into the office and sit at the same desk. Repeat that five days a week and it doesn’t take long before you’ve built an unthinking habit. You become a drone. So I’d actively break that process - get off the tube at a different stop and walk a different way to the office, stop to get a coffee, miss my first meeting (which invariably wasn’t important), and only then sit down at my desk. I noticed that by changing things up, I’d think differently. I’d have better ideas.?

Sometimes, to awaken our creativity, we need to find another level in ourselves, where we can break free from all the rules and frameworks and processes, and go and explore things. We need to make crazy suggestions, experiment with ideas, have new experiences so we can change our perspective.?

Creativity matters in business. A study by IBM in 2010 found that CEOs value creativity as the single most important skill in navigating a complex business environment. At my company, Zenitech, everything we do requires creativity: we create technology (in a literal sense) to solve some really complex business challenges; and our approach has to be creative to come up with the right solution in the first place.?

And yet, often, businesses kill creativity in their teams by imposing too much structure and routine, making people work within tight rules, and restricting their ability to explore, to develop, to make things, to be brave.?

My creative place is music. I compose, and play, and collaborate. Music and technology are inexorably linked for me, and my experience in one helps my growth in the other. What we do outside of our work inevitably makes us better inside it. It makes us more rounded, better able to apply different perspectives, and more creative. That’s what I want for Zenitech - to be a business where everyone can find their creative place, their inspiration, and to be somewhere that inspires people, nurtures talent and supports growth, so they can achieve amazing things.?

Image: Markus Gjengaar https://unsplash.com/@markus_gjengaar

If we truly value creativity in business, we’ll give people the space to find their creative place. We’ll be flexible - with time, processes, our physical environment - so we can all explore creative moments when they happen.?

If that means staying up till five in the morning because you’re in a creative zone, do it. If it means taking a risk and trying something completely new at work, do it. Break routines, and tear up the rulebook every now and then. And see what happens.