How to keep sabre-tooth tigers out of your creative space.
I want to play a game...
Imagine something that truly makes you feel uncomfortable: big hairy spiders crawling over your arm, having to speak in front of an audience of peers ₍₁₎ or, God forbid, a new Nickelback album.
If you fully went along in the suggestion and invoked discomfort on yourself, part of your spontaneous creativity has now been taken hostage. No worries, we’re not after a ransom, if you finish reading the article, we’ll get things back where they belong.
Creativity is not a skill that you create out of the blue by digesting copious amounts of theory. It is rather built up by hitting the mental gym, where, like in a real gym, you reach your best performance when you are nicely warmed up, have stretched a bit and ensure there is nothing restraining your mental movement. That, and a regular training pattern of course. Creativity is not only needed in January, so please don’t treat it like a new year’s resolution…
But let’s zoom in on the preparation part: how do you make sure you are in the best possible shape to be creative on the spot? What you need, is a so-called “open mind”. But what does that actually mean?
For that, we’ll have to go back in time a bit, say a good 10.000 years. Imagine being a cave(wo)man, sitting in an open field, wondering how on earth you are going to transport the gigantic piece of meat you have just hunted down. With the thrill of the successful hunt still lingering and not a single visible threat in the neighborhood, you can allow your mind to wander, make some scribbles in the sand and who knows, get pretty close to a primitive prototype of the wheel. But then suddenly, out of nowhere, a sabre-tooth tiger who picked up the smell of your trophy, comes running at you at full speed. Whether you then choose to fight it, start running away, or just freeze in your spot, your invention will be the least of your worries at that moment...
Flash forward to today again. Even though we don’t have any sabre-tooth tigers around anymore, our brain still has some remaining primitive behavioral patterns. When we are uncomfortable or stressed, our brain wants to get that problem out of the way asap, and has limited capacity available for creativity. It is only when we allow ourselves to relax and get in a good mood, that we can reach our full creative potential.
Knowing this, you can see that it’s no coincidence that a typical Design Thinking room is not located in a deep dark basement, but in a colorful, bright location. A stimulating environment definitely helps, but what is essential is that everybody also feels completely at ease with the group of people they are working with. That’s why we recommend you to focus first on a significant amount of easygoing “brain stretching” and icebreaking activities to make sure everybody can reach their full potential. Omitting this and directly pressuring people to be creative on the spot is the mental equivalent of unleashing a sabre-tooth tiger in the room…
So yes, you can expect that people are “instantly creative”, but only if you give them the room to warm up and feel at ease in the group. Not sure what the best way to do that is, or what concretely to do once everybody is in the right mindset? Snoop around on www.tiltlearning.com or send a mail to info@tiltlearning.com and we’ll take it from there!
Knowing that we at Tilt – Improv Based Learning have got your back on this, you can now fully relax, thereby releasing your creativity from its hostage situation. And just in case that’s not enough, we’ll throw in an extra picture of a fluffy bunny. Happy creativity! (and apologies to people suffering from Leporiphobia…)
₍₁₎ You can find many lists of biggest fears and phobias for people, but the fear of public speaking is consistently found back in the top 3. We’ll talk about public speaking in a future blogpost.
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