Since I had been searching for a suitable topic for this article for a long time, I turned to a tried-and-true creativity technique: using random stimuli as a source of ideas. I grabbed a folder with notes from presentations over the past few years. The first mention referred to a story about an art patron who asked the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí if it was difficult to paint a picture. Dalí's answer?
"No, it is either easy or impossible."
What a great quote! Concise, to the point, capturing a much deeper truth … and yet completely useless for someone who needs to be spontaneously creative in a work or organizational setting.
If creative activities come easily to you in a professional context, it is highly likely that your results are not particularly remarkable. On the other hand, if your creative project is an unsolvable challenge, even the boldest ideas are of no use if they cannot be implemented.
Even outside the art world, the answers "easy" and "impossible" to the question "How difficult is it for you to be creative?" are problematic. In both cases, it is crucial to apply strategies that quickly turn creative extremes into manageable challenges, leading to creative success.
4 Strategies for Effortless Creative Work
- Review Your Best Creative Work – Instead of resting on past successes, challenge yourself to get significantly better. Take your previous creative projects, look for small flaws that others might miss, and turn them into masterpieces! Integrate them better into your strategy, make them more elegant, spectacular, or captivating – you know the idea! Pushing yourself to be far more creative is harder, but it pays off.
- Make a big, public creativity pledge – Maybe (and by “you” I mean “I”) you tend to underestimate your creativity and deliberately set expectations at a comfortable level that you can easily achieve without overexerting yourself creatively. Stop taking the easy route and set an incredibly ambitious creative goal (think JFK and 'Send a man to the moon'). Share your bold, daring goal with others to hold yourself accountable. You'll have to push your creativity further to achieve truly outstanding results.
- More Risk – You may know exactly what is needed to achieve your creative goal and have all the necessary resources. Dare to fundamentally change your plan by reducing resources. Shorten the project timeline by starting later or committing to an earlier completion. If a team is working on your creative project, free someone up for another project, thereby creatively challenging the remaining team members. By pushing your creative limits, you will be forced to further develop your skills and strengthen other creative competencies to fully achieve your goal.
- Fundamentally transform your creative process – Bruce Springsteen is the best example of this. At the height of his success with the E Street Band, he began to significantly change his musical approach multiple times: an acoustic solo album that he recorded at home, other “solo” albums with varying accompanying musicians, and an entirely new band to reinterpret songs by Pete Seeger, a folk legend. With each change, Springsteen consciously avoided “easy” creativity and instead used the unknown to explore new creative paths.
4 strategies when creativity seems impossible.
- Lower your expectations – If your project as a whole seems impossible to you, lower your goals. Analyze the individual components of the project and identify what is achievable amidst the impossible. Consider what could happen in the worst case if the impossible parts are not realized. After finding alternatives for the impossible, focus creatively and fully on what is achievable.
- Project Break – The pressure to be immediately creative can hinder your abilities. Instead of feeling forced to start implementing right away, take a break and really think things through. Develop strategies. Gather ideas. Let someone build on your thoughts. Perhaps you might also dedicate yourself to something completely different. Use this pause to let your mind wander and make unconscious connections that can spark new creative strategies.
- Get support in implementation – your feeling that creative work is impossible may be due to weaknesses in your own abilities. If that's the case, start the creative work by looking for talents who can help you make the impossible possible. Put together the best team to kickstart, develop, and bring your previously daunting creativity to life.
- Change the rules of creativity – If a creative task seems impossible to you, simply redefine it! Instead of thinking about what creative activity actually is, consider what goal you want to achieve. Then look at the various ways you can achieve your goal creatively in different ways. Often, this is exactly what’s needed to take on a new challenge, where you can tap your creative potential much more effectively.
Use these eight strategies as needed to unleash outstanding creativity every day!
Day-to-day creativity is neither a spontaneous fluke nor an insurmountable barrier, but a skill that can be managed and directed using practical strategies. The ability to shift work from the "easy" to the "excellent," and from the "impossible" to the "achievable," is essential for continuous innovation. IceHrm supports the execution of these strategic shifts through its robust goal-setting and development tools. When a creative project seems impossible, the Performance Management module can be used to "Lower Expectations" (Strategy 5) by breaking down the daunting goal into smaller, achievable milestones. Furthermore, the Training and Development features can identify areas of weakness and facilitate the process of "Getting support in implementation" (Strategy 7) by connecting employees with internal experts or necessary online courses, ensuring the team always has the competencies required to turn bold ideas into realized value.