Reimagine Imagination: Strategies to Fuel Your Creative Potential

The average American touches their phone 2,617 times per day according to Michael Easter in his book “The Comfort Crisis”. This number is shocking confirmation that humans today crave digital activity and are decreasingly reliant on our surroundings and own imaginations.

The idea that we lose our imagination talents as we age is a myth. Contrary to popular belief, adults have a superior imagination to children according to Andrew Shtulman, professor of psychology at Occidental College. He points out that children lack the expertise or knowledge that adults have which is key to contemplating hypothetical ideas or counterfactual events. The truth is we rarely find ourselves in pro-imagination environments and we are uncomfortable once we do because they are so unfamiliar.

So how can we exercise our high performing adult imagination the way we could when we were a child? In our careers, how can we use our vast amount of knowledge and experience to imagine innovative solutions to complex problems in a natural way? The key is creating the environment, being present, and getting comfortable letting you and your team’s imagination run free.

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I. Create the Environment

If your workdays are filled with meetings and duties only, you do not have the environment to fuel your creative process. The same is true for the teams you manage. If this sounds familiar you should consider an adjustment to break the cycle.

Addressing meeting overload can be accomplished with a short yet insightful exercise called the Ideal Work Week. Start with having each person on the team draw a blank seven-day calendar like you would see in Outlook. I prefer using a spreadsheet because it allows you to make quick edits. Next, layer in activities in time slots based on your personal commitments, working preferences, and required project outcomes. Including early mornings, evenings, and weekends with personal time will give you a full sense of how you wish your work and life to be structured. Compare schedules to identify opportunities to adjust standing meetings, align on ad-hoc meeting windows, and designate focus time. The power of this exercise comes from driving the schedule from the team’s lives and working styles rather than tweaking the team’s traditional norms. Be sure to wrap with practical actions or follow up items.

If you are weighed down by weekly duties, consider listing them with average hours per week and noting which ones you like, tolerate, and dislike. Share this list with your manager and consider delegating, automating, or ignoring (personal favorite!), if possible. This exercise also works best as a team, either privately or openly, so that managers can ensure duties are allocated appropriately. A side benefit of this activity is to share the list down to your direct reports to give them insights into how you are spending your time and what a future role for them may entail.

If you have already adjusted your schedule and refined your duties, the last option to create space for yourself is to work longer. It is helpful to frame working units in terms of energy instead of hours. When I first heard this concept, I was skeptical but there is legitimate truth to it. A long day full of enjoyable activities is less energy draining than a short day full of mundane activities. Using your imagination is a joyful activity and an extra hour can pay dividends as you come up with new ideas otherwise locked in your mind. In these extra hours you may identify an opportunity to work less in the future by automating or refining an existing process.

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II. Be Present

Being truly present like you would at home, your child’s baseball game, birthday party, etc. is the best way to maximize your time. The most obvious way to truly be present at work is to be in-person listening, looking people in the eye, and being yourself. Giving your undivided attention is a valuable activity for both you and others.

Putting your phone out of reach is an effective way to limit subconscious desire and distractions. The best way to change device-dependent behavior is to fully understand the behavior you wish to change. I encourage you to review your personal screen time details. Find patterns and set realistic limits you can commit to.

Engaging in light physical activity is another method proven to unlock your imagination. Before you go on a walk or bicycle ride select a topic to ponder just as you would select a route. A similar option is to plan creative time directly after these activities.

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III. Get Comfortable

Performing creative work can feel vulnerable and dissuade people who typically produce work that is objectively measured and easy to defend. Sometimes creative work is brainstorming or drawing diagrams which can be difficult to quantify as a stand-alone achievement. Teams that track production based on longer term business outcomes will better support and encourage their staff to embrace creativity.

With the pressure on all levels to be productive, it is a natural feeling for most people to be busy every week, every day, and, for some, every hour. Consultants understand clients are investing in productive time. Software developers know that every iteration has goals that need to be achieved. Business unit owners know the level of scrutiny that goes into financial performance. There is constant corporate encouragement to keep moving, as if any pause is a setback. However, true progress comes from thoughtful planning and purposeful actions.

Managers should be creative in their evaluation of success and avoid tracking metrics that are easy to retrieve but do not correlate to desired outcomes. This success criteria and how it is measured should be defined during formal planning activities but reevaluated periodically. Most importantly, managers and staff should foster a culture where everyone is bought into the goals and should feel invited to challenge or ask questions. Teams that check boxes will be outperformed by those that are comfortable directly working towards objectives.

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Creativity In Practice

Creativity in solving problems and designing solutions sets knowledge workers apart. While completing repetitive tasks is certainly part of the job, it is not the transformative behavior our clients and employers desire. Serendipitous conversations with coworkers and individual reflection produce the best ideas – not structured meetings or tedious tasks.

The best work we do does not actually require a lot of ‘work’ to produce. Does it require heavy consumption of experience and skills? Yes. Does it require you and your teammates’ imaginations? Yes. And it certainly requires being present and comfortable in an environment where you turn your imagination on.