How To Cultivate Your Creativity

You don’t have to be a “creative” to practice design thinking. But creativity is an integral mindset of the method. The good news: You can learn how to flex your creative muscle!

What is creativity?

We can learn a lot about creativity from writers, artists, and anyone else who has devoted their life to creative pursuit.

According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love fame, creativity is “the relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration”. She shares more of her generative process in this TED Talk and her book Big Magic.

Co-founder of the Monty Python comedy troupe, John Cleese, believes that “there’s a myth that creativity is something you have to be born with. This isn’t the case. Anyone can be creative.” He lays out his creative process in the book Creativity and this video where he translates creativity research to the business world.

?

Where do we apply creativity in design thinking?

According to innovation research , creativity is both an attribute and outcome of design thinking.

While creative thinking permeates all of what we do in human-centered design, we heavily use creativity during the ideation and prototyping stages of the framework.

I have found that generating and conceptualizing ideas is hard for non-designers like Human Resources professionals. We all were born creative but unless we’ve worked in artistic professions, that muscle has not been exercised for a long time. Think about it: When’s the last time you were asked to come up with a creative HR solution?

I continue to experiment with ways to help unleash our innate creativity when it comes to crafting solutions for an employee experience opportunity.

?

How can we practice creative mindsets, methods, and habits?

As outlined above, we can cultivate creativity if we are intentional about it. Here are a few hacks that I have found helpful for my own creativity practice and by coaching hundreds of HR professionals:

• The author Warren Berger recommends in The Book of Beautiful Questions to remove the fear of getting started with creativity by NOT asking these six questions: Am I creative? How creative am I? Where will I ever find an original idea? Where will I find the time to create? How can I come up with an idea that will make money? Where do I begin?
• Build a daily habit around flexing your creative muscle. I crafted a few 1 Minute Exercises for you to get you started.
• Experiment with design thinking ideation methods to build what IDEO founder David Kelley calls “creative confidence” .
• Explore and practice the three science-based creativity hacks that Stephen Kotler shares in this article : 1) Space 2) Time 3) Constraints.
• Think about what you need inside your ecosystem to sustain your creativity efforts. Stanford professor Tina Seeling shares in this TED Talk the importance of culture to sustain creativity.
• Don’t forget - you are not alone! Join a community like the HR.Hackathon Alliance to build design thinking skills with peers.

?

What do you think: Can creativity be learned? How are you cultivating your creative muscle?

?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Design Thinking for HR is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter that aims to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the human-centered design framework. The newsletter is curated by?Nicole Dessain who is an employee experience consultant, design thinking workshop facilitator, and Northwestern University instructor. Nicole is currently writing her first book about Design Thinking for HR. Join the Early Readers’ Community here .