Later this year I will be teaching an international post graduate cohort about managing creative teams. This is challenging and has already led me to do a lot of research and pondering. Much more to come I’m sure.
One of the avenues of pondering has been about my own creativity. I trained as an artist and have spent many years working in business. Not at all creative you may think?
However, for a decade it was my job to find solutions to problems that I didn’t necessarily have much direct experience of (I’d like to think that I hadn’t created them at least).
The solutions had to work. Again, blindingly obvious you might think. However finding a solution that will work within a given culture is not the same as finding a solution in the scientific disciplines. People make solving problems challenging. Culture is deep seated and largely invisible. Ways of not changing are many and various.
However I was generally pretty effective at finding and implementing solutions that actually worked. Hence I kept my job for many years.
In pondering my latest teaching challenge, I wondered how come. How had an arty type managed to find real life, pragmatic, working solutions to complicated business problems?
The answer struck me as I was going back through some of my working notebooks (of which there are many). I struggeled with the problems for longer than most people, visualised possible solutions, and made them explicit in the form of visual representations.
I created an environment where possible scenarios could challenge one another to prove the greatest viability. I prototyped in a design sense, made options believable and shared them with colleagues who had personal investment in the issues.
I realised that I have been practicing my Real Treasure Map approach for at least ten years without ever actually realising or articulating it to myself before.
Only now that I have reason to explore the link between creativity and management has the true value of curiosity and the ability to see possibilities in the minds eye become evident.
If you can see it and make it live in the world as a visual representation, it becomes believable to others. Once its believable, it’s eminently doable.
Thank goodness that I kept all of those notebooks safely locked away all of these years.
