Creativity And Design Thinking

People often tell me that I am creative. I’m flattered. After all who wouldn’t like to be creative! And sometimes I freeze under the expectation to be the one with the ideas. Recently someone said to me:

"You’re responsible for creativity in our project.“

Ouch! I feel performance anxiety. I get into my head, and there is: The Void.

Remember what state you were in when you were last bubbling with ideas.

I imagine you were relaxed and in playful exchange with no immediate target to meet. Perhaps you unleashed your creative part in your last coffee break, or back when you were a teenager. Whenever it was, we are all born creative. School and work have untrained us, but creativity is part of us. To be able to respond to our present days’ fast changing challenges we need to bring it back into our lives. But how?

Essentially it is about creating spaces for creative flow at work and at home with unstructured time and colourful rooms with whatever spurs our imagination, be it toys, inspirational cards or books, drawing pad and pencil, music.

Anything that invites us to play and access our non-analytical right brain. For playful co-creation approaches like Design Thinking create structures to guide groups through the creative process of identifying the real challenge, coming up with ideas to meet it, then prototyping and testing them. And iterating the process to redo or refine the problem, idea or prototype based on feedback.

When we get into the daily habit of short creativity sparks, it creates ripples in our organisations and lives. We start seeing possibilities when we encounter hurdles. Because bringing back creativity into our lives is essentially a mindset shift.