The Secret Life Of Creativity in the Workplace

A few years ago, I did one of those 5 minute online tests, designed to discover what kind of work I was best at. The results showed my inclination toward creative work was so strong that there was no room for anything else. I wasn’t especially surprised, but it did make going back to my data entry, cutting and pasting, Excel sheet-laden job the next day particularly depressing. Insert oversized sigh here. I didn’t have a solution to the problem right then and there, but I tucked it away to ponder on at a later date.

Fast forward a couple of years and I found myself in a job that looked terribly corporate from the outside. After a couple of months I realised that something felt different; I could no longer hear the quiet yet insistent voice inside me plaintively asking to be fulfilled. I was surprised to discover that I actually liked my job!

When I examined it more closely, I realised that the large amount of time I spent in problem solving was immensely satisfying, and completely satiated my desire to be creative. The job didn’t look like what most people would imagine to be creative; I wore a lot of navy, read and wrote tonnes of emails and used the words ‘stakeholder’, ‘KPI’ and ‘logistics’ quite a lot. Nevertheless, it was unbelievably, off-the-charts creative. And I loved it.

With this in mind, I have been thinking a lot lately about the role creativity can, does, and should play in people’s lives. Maybe it’s not obvious at first glance. Maybe it’s easier to come by than people think. Maybe we could all do with a little more. I decided I wanted to talk to some other people about their thoughts on creativity and the role it plays in their lives. Over the next little while, I'll be posting about these conversations in a loose kind of series.