Your Creative Solutions

If you want to torture me mildly, read me a story about a creativity consultant advising a major company.

Among the suggestions in this article:

- Get out of your boring office environment.
- Make sure senior exectutives are on board
- Listen to your customers.

So creativity is a good excuse to go to TGI Friday's and raid the suggestion box over hot wings and margaritas with the VP for accounting. This is not creativity. This is new-agey feel good garbarge whose purpose seems to be to create an impression of a creative environment to displace the threat of a genuinely creative environment.

I obviously have little experience with business, but I do know the value and difficulty of creative work and something about how to teach it's practices. Here's my consultation:

Capitalism has precious few genuine virtues, and theoretically, creativity is one of them, that is if the markets are open. But a company by its nature depends on a certain conformity of behavior, and as companies get larger and less responsive, employees are more and more reduced to tradable commodities. Anonymous, interchangeable work-product and worker replaceability seem to have an great economic value for companies, but this is acetone on the stryofoam of creative work; in the modern economic environment, we get creative in America or we ship our work overseas.

Creavity flows from a mystery about which you build knowledge. The new knowledge will itself create mystery, which creates another possibility for knowledge-building. The mystery is in any direction of observation, internal or external, about anything at all. You know much less than you think you do. But Don't Panic.

People who are not curious are encouraged to leave.

For example, traditional drawing teaches you how little you know about looking at your own face. More than a few young women in my classes have been distressed to discover their lack of perfect symetry in a self portrait. The self-portrait is always the first lesson because it teaches both the deep mystery lying within the most familiar, AND a way of asking and answering new questions. You can begin any creative process by the most careful examination what is relevant to your problem. You will always be surprised; one of the most common questions I ask of students is: what surprised you? Surprise is unexpected knowledge, the very such stuff of the creative.

Essential to the creative drive is the ability to follow an possibly irrelevant, but not random idea, an explored branch that grew from new knowledge - collected surprises from a working process. That requires a dedication to disciplined work time to pursue its permutations. It requires an ability to spend substantial resources, in time, in wages, in analysis, in physical resources like space and materials, assigned to an activity that cannot be guaranteed to pay off. It requires a respect for the intellectual difficulty of creative work, and it requires surrender of power on the part of leadership. It requires above all the ability to make choices, at every level of a project, and risk failure.

In drawing and paintings an urgent task is to be able to make productive choices without perfect knowledge and without guarantees of success. The interference with the abilityof employess to make choices about the substance of their work is where I suspect managers most hamper creativity (not that this isn't sometimes necessary, like creative accounting, or creative ways of getting out of tasks). Creative choice-making requires substantial autonomy.

By the way, there's a threshold point for resources to foster creativity, I think, not a linear relationship - once you have the basics, don't keep piling on the money. There is a reason the great majority of artists through history were more or less middle class. (I do tell students that if you're not willing to dumpster dive you have no business being an artist). To describe the trade-off I need to name a new paradox: say the Paralysis of Resource Freedom - too much money and leeway and all choices appear equivalent, and so no choice is made. If you have too little resouces, you are at the mercy of circumstance; too much and circumstance is at your mercy- I believe that one effect of too much power is that one tends to see all other things and actors as interchangeable, creating indifference through lack of need, which tends to eliminate the drive to create. Keep 'em hungry, but never starving. Real starving artists just plain die in the guttter of heroin overdoses. But real artists also don't go to expensive retreats and participate in creativity seminars.

Creativity can be fed by high expectations of leadership matched with necessary material support, and destroyed by the stale breath of the words "inappropriate" or worse, "whatever." "Whatever" is my most hated word, Mr. Lipton. It's used specifically to destroy enthusiasm, and humilate people for the attempt. Airy indifference and easy cynicism murders creativity.

Pressure, even unpleasant pressue, can help. Creativity sure isn't about feeling good for it's own sake- the product or process itself is the goal. Artists face how difficult their task is compared to how extremely unclear the method to perform the task is. Real creative work can be depressingly difficult, particular when it approaches a high level of refinement, and part of the discipline is learning to become comfortable and even dextrous within extreme uncertainty. That requires a lot of repeated exposure to uncertainty - something you would think "businessfolk" would understand. But while uncertainty is a generally a bad thing in economics, art cannot exist without it.

Serious artists turn towards difficulty and uncertainty. If you are merely doing what you already know how to do, that is closer to craft and illustration; ordinary work is the application of technique, reduced to production from philosophy.

Creativity also depends on an enviroment of openness and freedom that protects disciplined work based on a depth of knowlege. In this environment all questions may be asked, but some questions are much better than others. I like to use the metaphor of the "game;" the rules, say of football, create by the very fact of limitation an infinity of new choices and possibilities, which would not have existed without the rules. Freedom and boundary-making seems contradictory: but as an example painting is -literally - the "box," and at its best an artist thinks, very, very deeply inside the box, the artificial boundaries that demand a mastery of rules, whose governed interactions open new thinking. Breaking the box is pretty easy, actually. Contemporary art is often vacuous when it makes rule-breaking an orthodoxy of its own, without an understand of what is being broken.
(This all goes back to Critical Theory and strattegies of negation and that's a whole other Philosophy Department.)

The single most difficult day-to-day thing about fine art as a genuine career is protecting work-time from all other demands. No one needs to paint, at least not in the course of any particular day; the same way no soprano needs to practice her aria that particular moment. But against all other demands, to get done it must be choosen, to the very real exclusion of friends, family, fun, love, security and money. And what must be abandoned first is certainty of success.

The art market -like I think all markets - does not generally reward the practice of creativity - it rewards certain products of creativity. The distinction is important. Markets want more of what they already know is successful, but those products require creativity to exist. And creavity cannot, almost by definition, produce anything with a guarantee of success. Economic frustration ensues, creativity withers, and you get, say, contemporary country radio, which is to music what truck store pork rinds are to food. It's also why movie stars get paid so insanely far above their actual artistic value- trading on an identity is a strategy of avoiding risk, and avoiding risk in a creative business particularly is worth gazillions.

Some principles:

1. Authority over a creative enterprise should flow from mastery, not position.
2. Creativity requires freedom plus mastery plus experimentation plus resources, but resources alone, even large amounts, cannot buy creativity; in fact the expectations associated with large resouce allocations will tend to constrain creative work. Keep it small and autonomous, but regularly and clearly evaluated.
3. A culture of indifference is the most toxic to creativity.
4. A culture of questioning everything is critical; but while there are no stupid questions, there are certainly a lot of irrelevant ones. Focus on building experience in a open environment protected from competing pressures.
5. Setting even artificial boundaries with the idea of people pushing hard against those boundaries can be an effective creative strategy. By contrast, setting boundaries just to establish authority will tend to kill it.
6. The pleasure of Uncertainty, mystery, and surprise not seen in awe-struck wonder but as causes for exploration, are the key motives for creativity.

I've gone on too long already.