The human condition that helps creativity.

Nature is rarely kind to us. I guess we shouldn’t expect her to be after the way we have treated her. We age. And as we age, we gain a little flab in the wrong places, we lose hair in the wrong places, wrinkles appear in the most visible places and before we know it we become like trees, a wrinkle represents a year in our lives. At least it feels that way.

But this condition called ageing, for all the ills it brings, can actually do some good. While some parts may dull, others sharpen. Creativity is one.

“Bollocks” is the reaction I hear, especially from agencies who are adverse to hiring anyone over the age of affordable.

Here’s the thing about the ticking years and creativity.

For a start, you don’t have time to waste. The clock is your biggest enemy so you don’t spend precious minutes mulling over stuff, grabbing a few lattes, recovering from hangovers. What you have learned to do is search through years of experience just like an internal Google and get to the heart of the problem, or brief, or issue as fast as humanly possible.

Time brings with it a sense of clarity. You can look at a brief and decide almost there and then what the real task is.

You then move onto the idea. What the years has given you is the uncanny ability to scroll through solutions and get a quick sense of, not necessarily what will work, but certainly what won’t work. The elimination bit.

Creativity has always had its roots in culture and human emotion. The more you spend time understanding culture and living with it, the more you spend time observing people, the more depth and empathy you have to connect, surprise, provoke and disrupt.

So yes, creativity can and often does improve over time.

LinkedIn identified five soft skills that companies are looking for when they hire. At the top of the list is creativity.

“Creativity as it is applied at work is not necessarily about art or design, but is more often about devising fresh solutions to old problems, synthesizing heaps of data into actionable insights, and drawing connections and conclusions between seemingly disparate ideas.”

But what companies say and do are not entirely connected.

I was chatting with a board member of a tech company recently. This particular company has eight board members. He revealed the board was made up of engineers, technicians and investors.

Most board meetings covered process and profit.

But if the board itself was a balance sheet, there would be a column missing. In this case, a human perspective. That board member who brings creative thinking and creative solutions, delivers a perspective on relationships, and takes planning beyond the expected. Beyond engineering, technology and finance. In other words, all the ‘soft’ stuff that is so critical to balancing the business and brand, not just the board.

If there’s a point to all this it’s simply that if companies truly believe in the importance of creativity, then they should hire accordingly. 

The best place to start looking is to those who have not only aged wisely, but with minds that are more creative than they have ever been.

In music, literature, film, theatre, art, architecture, those with timeless creativity are sought and respected. It's time the corporate world did the same.