Goodbye 20. Hello 21. And all that jazz
What did we learn last year that we’d like to pass on?
Read on dear friend…
Necessity is the mother of invention
By Ian
I sat in creative partnerships and multidisciplinary teams for decades. Then I found myself sitting on my own...for a long time.
This necessity opened some doors that I’d deliberately avoided or had lost the key for.
So I purposefully worked on developing lateral thinking as a solitary as well as team exercise – pushing myself to new solutions by breaking with old habits. And I got there in no small measure through jazz.
It was my least favourite form of music - until opening that door.
It’s meandering structures and flights of unexpected virtuoso fancy took me to new places.
Jazz has joined another technique – not sitting at all, but taking a creative problem for a walk.
Go on – do something you’ve avoided and see where it leads.
Necessity maybe, but invention cannot truly happen without diversity
By Beth
Honing your own lateral thinking is vital to creativity, but it’s nothing compared to the leaps in thought that come from cognitive diversity. And that relies on different perspectives, insights and experiences coming together.
In a year when the BLM movement and The Social Dilemma film cast a powerful light on the bubbles we exist in, lockdown only served to limit those bubbles further. And at a time when the scale of the problems to be tackled - in individual businesses or in society at large - demand we consider the widest possible range of viable solutions.
While we might despair at this, we should perhaps be grateful to 2020 for revealing the starkness of this contradiction. In being impossible to ignore, it fuels the impetus to act. It’s provided the inspiration too - just look at the multiple groups of scientists working on multiple solutions to a vaccine that have produced viable options in record time.
Well. For me, procrastination is the mother of invention
By Nick
I’ve always been useless without a deadline. Daydream, daydream, PANIC! Exam revision. Birthday gifts. School runs. I’ve managed to get good at working really quickly when I need to, but when you’re not looking, I’m staring out of the window. I feel quite guilty about it.
But, working in 2020, I found I couldn’t daydream so much. Covid-19 meant home-schooling, blurred boundaries between home and work life, and worst/best of all, my wife working on the desk next to me keeping an eye on me. I had no opportunity to just let my mind wander. I got stuck in loops, and my creative and critical thinking suffered. More focus meant I got less done, not more.
I’ve now begun to realise procrastination is part of my process. As soon as I started giving myself time back and occasionally enjoying the unstructured thinking from being a lazy sod, as well as the pressure from guilt and deadlines, the thinking started up again.I suggest you give doing nothing a go.
Adversity is the mother of invention
By Sarah
For me Einstein’s take on this phrase sums up our current situation perfectly.
“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity”.
Lockdowns have to an extent forced our lives to become simpler, many of us will have reflected on ‘the way things were’ vs ‘the way things are’ and phrases like ‘the new normal’ have become part of our everyday vocabulary.
Out of the hardships of this pandemic, let us grow, let us make positive choices about the way we live and work going forward, how we spend our time, and which relationships we choose to nurture.
Lateral thinking, cognitive diversity and visualisation (or daydreaming as Nick calls it) will serve us well as we move forward through 2021.
And of course...a little bit of Jazz now and again!
If you’d like to find out more about how we ignite creativity in Purpose, People and Culture for business growth – get in touch