Seye Joseph

My Coming Month of Creativity

As long as I can remember I’ve been labeled ‘creative’ by those around me. Family, friends, colleagues, and people I’ve just met who barely know me. Yet I’m not creative in the traditional sense of the word. What I mean by that, is that when creativity is thrown around as a concept people expect it to express itself in some form of the arts. Painting, dancing, music, drawing, poetry, sculpture, etc, etc. If you’ve seen me participate in any of those, then you may be confused that I am so often labeled ‘creative’. When it comes to artistic talent, I’m right at the bottom of the food chain. My abilities in these endeavors are the reason so many other people continue to explore these particular areas in their own world : ) Honestly, I really have no idea whether the clothes I put on every morning match or not? If I want to match, I dress from memory. Someone once said I look good in that combination, and I repeat the combination. Most days I dress by feeling. That is, I feel like that shirt, I feel like those pants, I’m in the mood for those shoes. How it fits together never crosses my mind. There’s been many a day I’m sent back home by family and friends to change an item : )
I’ve been involved in numerous projects in which my creative contribution has been used and even praised (I’ve also had plenty of duds). I have a fairly good idea where my creativity lies, but I have no idea how it found its way into my body, or how it continues to express itself consistently? I don’t see myself that different from those around me, and I believe that creativity resides in every human being. I think something happens somewhere between the age of 5 and 18 that knocks it out of us, rarely to be seen again.
I get to speak at conferences (yes I know, what else would a keynote / conference speaker do at conferences) about creativity and innovation, and one of the questions I always ask the audience is for the creatives to stand up? Only 5%, give or take a few, ever rise on the occasion. I’m often left confused, and frankly don’t think the remaining 95% are being honest, or perhaps more accurately, have long ago stopped nurturing themselves in a creative context.
In leaving TomorrowToday, one of the thingies I agreed to, was to to rename the presentations I took with me by the end of they year (2011). This has been a wonderful gift, in that not only is it forcing me to find new names, but in doing so, am spending time refreshing and re-thinking the IP that originally went into them when they were created.
I’m working on a few simultaneously (that’s a long word) and one of them is the innovation presentation. I’ve renamed it – INNOVATION! EVERYBODY! – I turned the word Innovation upside down in the marketing blurb (creative eh?). I’ve always believed that when it comes to Innovation (which is the 3rd step in the process after Imagination and then Creativity), everybody in a team is involved. There’s a reason the popular idea exists that most inventors die poor (I don’t know if it’s true), and that’s because they’re often playing in the ‘imagination’ and ‘create’ space. Innovation requires that something not only be executed, but that value is generated as well. In today’s environment this is definitely a team initiative, requiring all sorts of people with a variety of skills and ways of looking at the world.
I am, therefore, going to spend November and a chunk of December re-reading, and discovering new thoughts in this space. Less so around innovation, and far more so around imagination and creativity. I have a sneaky suspicion that if we can fire up people’s imagination (or more accurately get them to fire up their own) and build creativity into people’s lives as part of their regular routine, innovation will begin to flow, eventually like a fire hydrant.
If you see me walking around dressed weirder than I normally do, or catch me behaving in some very interesting ways, and you approach me, I’ll blame it on this month of focussed exploration : )
Certainly I’m looking forward to a refreshed, deeper and more useful framework (presentation and workshop) from Jan 2012 and beyond.


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