The creative process

Hey there, welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

I’m learning to draw. Well, actually that’s debatable. I’m taking drawing lessons! Why? Because we need to intentionally find more creative ways to see the world. Sir Ken Robinson said, “Creativity is as important as literacy . . . and human children are bottomless resources of human creativity.” Until we kill creativity with education. Robinson also considers that “Formal education is an organising exercise. There is the curriculum, there is teaching and there is assessment.” This focus on outcomes continues through our lives.

We lose the joy of the process. The creative process (aka process of creation) becomes routine.

What proportion of your week is spent creatively?

(Write it down)

Consider: what are the inputs for your output this week?

Practice: disrupting your own process with new inspiration.

Decide to: inject creativity into your way of working – this could mean drawing your ideas, explaining your work to a child for feedback, finding clues in your dreams, working in a completely different physical space. Connect creativity to your work.

The Creative Process

If we desire to be a more curious leader, then we need to endeavour to get ‘out of the bubble’ when possible. The creative process applies to most work. Not just artistic masterpieces. There are many points in the process of creating our work that we can seek out new influences, ideas and experiences that will help fire up the desire to learn more and dig deeper. Innovators are renowned for intentionally seeking out new stimuli to disrupt their traditional thought patterns.

So, just because you might be, like me – stuck on stick figures instead of flipping out Rembrandts, doesn’t mean you’re not creative. Bringing creativity to your work is about what you draw on, not what you draw.

Love your Mondays