“Creativity thrives when there's space to be curious, time to stay with uncertainty, permission to think sideways.”
AMC's story
At our recent Unjudged session, our friend and colleague AMC shared her story of creativity. She gave us permission to record the story part of it – click here to watch it now.
AMC is a creativity facilitator, and founder of her own business: Creative Orange Studio. After a career in textiles and fashion, she studied innovation at Central Saint Martins, and now she works with teams and individuals to shift how they relate to creativity.
Without spoiling the story in anyway, let us simply say it started in 1998 with a broken cassette tape (for those young enough to not know, AMC defines this as “a Spotify playlist trapped in a plastic box”)
Her story and the ensuing conversation was eye-opening and thought-provoking. Below are our reflections…
A quality or an action?
One of the key things that struck me was the language that AMC uses about creativity. She talks about it as a practice, a doing, an action. During the course of the session we even invented our own language of “creativity-ing”.
This stands out to us because there’s one particular connection activity that we often do on our leadership programmes that regularly causes people to say “I’m not very creative but…”.
But more generally, it feels really freeing to move creativity from being a label, something that is either true or not true, to something that we can practise doing. It gives us the space to say sometimes I do creativity and sometimes I don’t.
Expanding our view of creativity
As well as shifting our language from a quality to an action, AMC also beautifully opened our eyes to the many ways and domains in which creativity can show up.
Have you ever considered that when you arrange flowers in a jar, or vegetables in the allotment, or files in your computer, you are practising creativity?
Do you ever adjust a recipe, or reuse something for a different purpose, or take an alternative point of view? That’s creativity.
Would you consider a scientist or an engineer or a doctor to be ‘creative’? Any profession that involves experimenting, trying alternative approaches, testing to see what works… that all involves creativity.
Training our creative muscles
So AMC asked a thought-provoking question: “What if we stopped treating creativity as a gift that’s only some people have and started treating it as a practice that people can develop?”
- What if there were exercises that we could build into our days that were about experimentation and play?
- What if we had ways to practise safely failing and trying again?
- What if we could hire a personal trainer to build our creativity muscles?
The value of practising creativity
And, if the questions weren’t thought-provoking enough, AMC reminded us of the burning need for creativity in our world. She quoted the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs 2025 report which found that companies ranked creative thinking as the fourth most critical skill that workers will need.
And she referred to a NASA study that found that although 98% of 5yr old children test as “creative geniuses”, by adulthood this number has dropped to 2%.
Build creativity into life
AMC left us with a question:
“What if people can learn to stay curious and develop the courage to experiment?”
Doing this will require each of us to sit with some discomfort – to be open to feelings like failure or embarrassment and to experience thoughts such as “you won’t be able to do that” or “this is going to go wrong”.
And so this is where we hit the nexus between AMC’s work and ours. If you can learn the flexibility required to sit with that discomfort, then you can open up the possibility that creativity is not some special gift, granted only to a select few. Creativity will become something that each of us can practice, rediscover and set free.
