How creative are you at work?

And no, I don’t mean the colorful Diwali rangolis or the Christmas bay decorations. I mean creativity in your actual work. Before you decide that this blog isn’t meant for you just because you are not in the “creative” field, just read on a bit more before closing off the tab!

We as employees were hired by our employers to do something and get paid for it. By default, we want to be good at what we do. Or rather we want to be the best. Thus, we naturally fall into the proven success process. We go about our day trying to optimize the defined procedures and celebrating our capabilities to do so. This thought process inhibits us from making use of the creative side of our brains.

What exactly is being creative at work?

Being creative doesn’t mean finding different ways of doing something that you are supposed to do. Being creative means that you are willing to solve interesting problems. The problems that haven’t been identified or defined, yet. The problems that have been termed as “difficult situations” and classified as impossible to solve. Accepting that there is a problem becomes the first step onto the creative side of things.

The hiccup in this whole creative process is that there is a huge chance of failure. Even before you attempt to take a step towards a solution you might come across valiant stories of how people tried to do things differently and failed in the process. Of course, no one wants to be an add-on to that list and so we go about doing things in ways that have proven to work.

We rarely get encouraged saying “It’s ok if you fail.” Even if we set out to think creatively, we have the pressure of being “right”. But, at the end of the day, it’s not failure that we should be afraid of but the absence of creative thinking.

Let’s go back to a time when there were no cameras in our cell phones, those ancient times indeed. Cell phones were celebrated for having solved the problem of lack of connectivity. Technically, there wasn’t anything to be solved anymore.

As insane as they might have sounded back then, a team somewhere in the world pondered on the question of why a camera couldn’t be added to a phone, and voila we got the ancestors of our double/triple camera phones of today.

If that team hadn’t been working for a phone company maybe cell phones would have died at the same speed as they had come. If that team had been working on a new camera design, maybe they would have added calling features to a camera. Anything is possible.

The point is that, even though failures are tough to handle and come with terrible consequences, we got to hang in there with our creativity. By stating the impossible we narrow down to the possibilities. Look around you and get distracted at work. Voice out your crazy ideas!

Here goes mine…

What if your cell phone could purify the air around you?

Sounds impossible now, but who knows. And if this were to become a reality, I want you to remember that you read it here first!!