On Creativity

What is my personal view on and experience with being creative?

I have always enjoyed being creative- in High School, this translated into writing. I started many (still unfinished) novels, constantly had new ideas for stories, and took a Creative Writing class my senior year. I wrote poems and short stories that got published in the school literary magazine two years in a row, and also entered several contests that I heard nothing from.

One challenge for me was bridging the gap between talent and how I wanted to be creative. I have competed in a poetry jam and written poetry contest the last two years in college; I won third place in written poetry, but never placed in spoken. However, I always found myself more excited to perform and read my work aloud than submit written poetry. Even back in high school, I liked to work on a few drawings and submit them to the literary magazine. I don’t think they ever got published.

I guess I mention that because I wonder whether we can measure how creative we are being based on performance measures, or rather what we enjoy and feel most creative in? My true passion is dancing, and I have taken several classes, performed a couple of places- nothing that got me any medals. However, I feel most creative with dancing. I can’t hear a song without choreographing in my head, and my favorite thing about coming home is a living room and hallways to dance around in.

And there have been several times when I have felt extremely uncreative. Not every problem necessarily calls for a creative solution- my math classes and science classes really just need a formula to be applied.

Of course, I have mostly talked about creativity in art forms so far. I think this is because most of my experiences with true, unbounded creativity have been in those aspects. But I would love to have more creative business experiences. I do think I have gotten to exercise some creativity in my time at McCombs.

My internship last summer, for example, introduced me to a company that values creativity. I think Target has made great strides in enabling their employees to be creative at the Headquarters in Minneapolis. As a Marketing intern, I was given a broad issue for my project, and encouraged to think out of the box. We had access to the Target Commons, across the street, where there were comfy couches and a lawn patio to work on, and ping pong, foosball, video games, bean bags, and more to play. There were barbeques there, as well as an intern celebration for us. We even had meetings where instead of sitting down in a traditional conference room, we “walked the skyways” which connect the downtown buildings. We were encouraged to “Work.Different” and I believe it truly fostered creativity. Getting the chance to get out of my cubicle and explore different environments gave me different ways to enable my own creativity, and the freedom to pursue the channel that worked for me.  

I also attended open houses in the office where teams shared information about worldwide trends in retail. This way, an employee that had never traveled for their position got the exposure to innovations in Europe and Asia, and consumer insights that could help them with their every day decisions. The members of these teams were extremely accessible as well, and I got to chat with them over coffee and learn more about what they do and their journey to that position.

One huge part that allowed me to be creative at Target is that the pressure of grades was taken away. I have found the same trend in school projects- whether individual or group, classes where I don’t feel as scared of making a bad grade let me be more interested in thinking out of the box and investing in a project for more than a score.

Can I be creative by myself?

I first answered this question with a confident “no,” citing that if someone lived their whole life as a hermit, they would not be creative- but that let me prove myself wrong. Because I feel they would be creative even in that environment. They would have issues or problems they need to solve in a creative way. They would have dreams and imagination and I’m guessing curiosity about the outside world. And there have been several times when my imagination has run wild and I’ve come up with creative ideas for clubs, initiatives, stories, art, dances, and more- by myself.

Is a group within an organization capable of being creative?

I do think a group in an organization can be creative. However, I believe the correct environment must be fashioned to allow this. The group should be a space every member feels comfortable sharing ideas. If the group dynamic is one that goes off topic, laughs together, and gets along well, I feel they will be inclined to be more creative than a group who is only focused on results, or worse, does not get along well. This has been proven again and again in my academic career. When you feel comfortable with your group, you can throw out crazy ideas- and veto them as well. You can think more about your cause or your project outside of the group setting, and thus have more to contribute at your group meetings. When you feel affection to your group or group members, I think you will be more inclined to think more creatively.

Are there different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?

Should we trust ourselves to know when we need one type of approach versus another?

I like the idea that there is structure to foster creativity. As the article, “How to be Creative,” suggests, creativity is not magic, but rather a skill to be developed. I think there are different creative types of problems and processes to address them. However, I feel it is better to have different creative processes that we can use our judgment to apply to the problems. As I mentioned before, I enjoyed having the freedom at Target to use the avenue I chose to pursue creativity. Sometimes I wanted to slave away on my project at my desk, sometimes I wanted to muse over it outside the Commons on a couch with the sun shining on me. I think we can view the processes the same way. They are frameworks that can be applied to different problems.

It’s hard to know which approach we need or which would work best. I think we can treat it as a framework, where the different processes can be tied to previous situations it has been used. Often, creativity is linking different experiences so I don’t think this would limit it in any way.

One thing I feel we need to keep in mind is that often, these processes may thrive when we are alone. In “How to be Creative,” there are several examples where a solution is thought of completely alone, after thinking about the issue over and over. We saw this with the development of post-it notes and with the creation of “I <3 NY.” In my own experiences, I often get “obsessed” with my most creative ideas, thinking, planning, and molding them in different places from the shower to the bus. The group setting is a great place to bounce of ideas or put solutions into action, but I don’t think we should use structure to label spells of individual obsession and imagination obsolete.