In the 7th grade we were forced to take an art class, and surprisingly my pastel drawing of Georgia O’Keefe’s White Flower on Red Earth turned out pretty good. It’s the only piece of art that my mom framed, although it sits in the laundry room. I guess that’s what happens though when you’re the least artistic of four children. Luckily though, artistic isn’t the only characteristic of being creative although this is what I first think of when thinking of creativity.
I’ve always seen myself as more of an “analytical person” and struggled early in my career in retail management with the visual merchandising aspect of my position. Normally people that exceled in visual merchandising were “creative types” that were naturally artistic. My manager at the time vowed to help me figure out how to make the store look good aesthetically. We would come in 3 hours before the store opened and he would destroy the store and I would have to remerchandise it. I was trying to be creative and it was forced and just left me feeling especially uncreative and often times frustrated. I ended up enrolling in a visual merchandising class which taught me the skills I needed in the learning modality that I needed. When I went on to run my own store, and was given more creative freedom, I was able to create beautiful spaces and was recognized for having one of the best visually merchandised stores. I realized or thought perhaps that creativity could be a learned skill and enjoyed reading the article because it further supported that thought.
However, I also believe that there are people who are more creative or maybe I’m once again confusing creative with artistic. This summer I interned at Nike, which is ranked as one of the most innovative companies in the world and I was surrounded by people who before reading this article I would have defined as “creative types”. In addition to our individual projects, we had to do cross-functional projects where we worked in teams consisting of people from different departments; design to engineering to sales, to graduate level and undergraduate level interns. We went to a workshop on the Medici Effect which is about intersectional innovation. “It looks at how individuals, teams and organizations can create an explosion of remarkable ideas at the intersection of different fields, cultures and industries”. It is quite fascinating and it is how Nike has come up with many of its new product designs such as Flywire which was inspired by a suspension bridge. I was reminded of the Medici Effect when the article mentioned that Steve Jobs said “creativity is just connecting things”. Another aspect of the Medici Effect is to reverse and thus challenge assumptions of a concept or situation or product, which allows you to view a situation from a completely different perspective. It’s an interesting concept and leads to interesting insights, but I’m still not sure how useful it actually is.
In addition, our project was to design a framework to foster innovation within the Supply Chain/Operations organization. At first I was not excited about it, (Supply Chain is not as sexy as social media), but in the end it allowed me to meet and speak with some of the most “creative” people at Nike. Nike does an amazing job at fostering innovation and dedicates whole teams to just that. They create environments to foster thought exchange, whether it’s the actual space like not having cubes or having white board desks or a comfortable space to voice ideas and “tear the crap” out of them.
I think you are capable of being creative by yourself, but I think having others to bounce ideas off of leads to more creativity, especially if that group is diverse. A group within an organization is capable of being creative, but similar to the task my group was faced with, there has to be a framework in place to foster the innovation. Nike is known for innovation, yet one of their departments, probably stereotypically known for not being innovative, was struggling with it. Thus, similar to this article and what seems like a new focus for business is the thinking of how to create those environments.
It was also interesting to work with extremely talented design students on this project since our skills are so different. Natasha would come up with ideas completely unalike than mine and when she would be at the white board during our group’s brainstorming sessions she would always draw what people would say instead of the bullets I would make. She couldn’t believe how easy it was for me to make outlines and I was astonished at how she could turn my bullets into beautiful visual displays. I thought we just didn’t think the same way, but together we were able to come up with a well-organized final project and even enlisted each other’s help for our other projects. I have always envied people who were naturally creative, whereas I felt I had to work at it. I enjoyed being around Natasha and tried to understand the way she approached problems and outlined her ideas. She shared books that she used for design which were so interesting to me and made me feel that she too had to work at being creative. I realized I had done just what the article said, “hang out with friends in different fields”, and I am fortunate that I had the experience where I was introduced to people with such different skills and hopefully will be able to continue making those connections.
Another line of the article that resonated with me was: “If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.” I think this is a great piece of advice for not just trying to be more creative but just in general, for life…and something that I have been and will continue to strive to do.
