Creativity and risk taking - Finding your Element by Sir Ken Robinson (RIP)

I am about to finish reading Ken Robinson's "Finding your Element" book.This year of 2021 I have given myself time to think about my vocation.  This book has been very helpful to let me understand myself a bit more.  It has useful exercises to get the reader to think about talents, aptitudes,  attitudes,  passions and other aspects of our personality.   It encourages reflection and self honesty about things we really want to do and are good at, even if we are to learn them fro  scratch.   

I studied computer science and systems engineering as it was the right thing to do at the time.  During my degree I learned how to program computers, and also to type and write bit more academically. I graduated and went to work on software development, process analyses and software selection.  

But something was off.  I could not really be happy knowing that there were politics when it came to work with technology users, consultants or software providers.  I left a technology career behind and studied systems thinking.  I found myself telling my research supervisor that I wanted a life change.  

Ken Robinson talks about taking risks when we feel that something is off.  In his book he gives lots of examples of people who changed careers, went to live in unexpected places, created businesses or simply turned away from what they were supposed to do in life.  To many of these people, comfort signalled a need to move on and engage in what they thought was 'next'.  

Robinson encourages people to take risks, given that life is uncertain and far from linear.  Taking risks promises that we can all start living more genuinely according to our Element(s) (where passions and talents meet).  In my own case, I took a bit of risk by getting into debt to pay for my systems thinking studies. I got the backing of my twin sister that acted as a financial guarantor of a scholarship loan I was awarded.  I will be always thankful to her, to my mum, my sister Clara, my other siblings and people who I encountered throughout.  

Thanks to life I keep encountering help. My guarantors have helped me to start a new life and to maintain it when things were not going well.  Graduating from a PhD with no job on sight and in another country was a challenge I did not foresee: the funny thing was that even getting a funded post-doc was seen as an alien thing by them.  This lack of approval affected my mental health and it took some years of counselling to accept that being a researcher was what I wanted to do, despite my previous technology education, my loyalty to loved ones, my anxiety of not being good enough, or my conservative attitude to life (and risk).  

I agree with Robinson that life is full of risks.  But I now find myself questioning if when taking them we are to involve our loved ones to act as 'guarantors' (the ones picking up the bill if things go wrong).   It is worth pursuing one's own passions.  But at what cost?  And for whom And? And if finding one's Element is not a linear process that could also involving 'going back' according to Robinson, why the rush?  Why do we have to do things now?  Why the 'now or never' attitude? 

As I pose these questions, maybe I am also learning to accept that in our lives there will be always things that are 'off' and that there will be times when we need to live with such things: I am now living with anxiety and that is OK.  I did live with problems as we all do.  I cannot fully blame my taking of risks for my anxiety although I would say there is a fine line between taking a risk and becoming a neurotic (my therapist's favourite term).   In Robinson's account of finding one's Element, there does not seem to be any choice but to pursue it (with guarantors, debts and anxieties involved).  Even of that involves small steps. The issue becomes: "do something!".  It reminds me of a wrong thing to say when one is mentally ill:"man up, get over it!". 

To this choiceless invitation,  one my psychotherapists would say something similar: There is no other choice but to be truthful to oneself and professional, so that we measure more carefully what we aim for.  There are some anxieties we can live with, and there are others we cannot.  And there is no shame in not being able to develop a 'thick skin' about anxieties as Robinson's examples seem to suggest.   

Both Robinson and my therapist will acknowledge that some form of 'guarantor' is needed.  Lucky if we are able to have them I think.  Maybe we need to ask for true help in our lives.  Help that tell us what risks are worth taking or when to take them.  

So what could be next? 

Out of these ideas and also echoing what Gabor Mate says to his younger self, my creative one would say:   "Worry, but not too much.  There is no need to pursue perfection.  Young or old, time is on your side"

And as I finish Robinson's book and review some of its ideas, I find myself feeling grateful for this year of 2021.  I can say that I am not yet sure what my Element is.  It has to do with connecting people to learning opportunities.  It also has to do with slowing down and saying no to things I can do but do not really want to.  There might not be big risks yet for me on this.  And time is still on my side.  

So what could be next for me?  Let people do things bit more, let me do bit more of aside art and writing, let me do more walking or swimming if not cycling.  Time is on my side I think! 

And for you?  

  

Forthcoming Book: Creativity in Management Education - A Systemic Rediscovery

I have pleasure to announce my new book which is due to be published by September 2020, and which I talked about previously in this blog.  

(Click on the image to go to the publisher's website)

The book is the result of critical analyses of management education and myself as a student and currently an educator.  I venture to explore a number of ideas to help us all rediscover ourselves and regain a sense of creativity and transcendence, for our own benefit and for the benefit of those people around us.

Educational institutions are now being challenged to offer new forms of delivery, and with it a rethink of their roles in societies.  In this regard, this book could offer insights on what to do and where to start.  Among other things, I speak about compassionate and technology mediated interactions, which could help us keep ‘soft’ educational tyrannies at bay, and enable us (re) discover different roles and practices to redress power imbalances generated by such tyrannies.  

So if you want to know more about educational tyrannies, myself, my experiences of nurturing creativity in and out of the classroom (the good and the bad, the ethical), buy the book or recommend it to your librarians or sponsors.  

There will be an electronic version available by August 2020 😁😁.

Further links: 

Link to Springer (has PDF promotional flyers)

Link to Amazon’s website (has bit more of detail)

A toast to silent creativity

I propose a toast to silent creativity,

that muse that comes uninvited, when we give her the chance.

That creativity that encourages us not to boast but to work diligently,

to be honest with ourselves and ask:  Why is it that we do what we do?

If we are seeking fame, money or ego aggrandizement, she will walk away in the same way she came in. And we will not notice.  

She will wait 'outside', patiently, for us to prepare our hearts,  to find ourselves in our work.

She will visit us in our dreams, whispering a word, an idea, a feeling,

for us to wake up and get back to work, now with humility, zeal and passion.

If we are lucky, she will keep doing this, and when we feel we are ready, we can defend her in court.

The prosecutors will argue that she is passive, useless and mystical.  

The public will get impressed by the lack of evidence.  

Most of them perhaps will ask for a refund, they thought this was a show! 

What shall we do as her only friends in the room? 

Just listen to what she whispers:  

I am with you, do not worry, just keep doing what you love doing. 

Retreat if you must, but remember your dreams, my dreams, who you are.

Seek solitude, seek friends, seek your old diaries, I will be around... 

Cheers!  

My creativity syndromes

After my last post on creativity habits, which I hope sound positive and encouraging, now I would like to share my 'negatives' about creativity.   I decided to call them syndromes, as this last word seems to be more recognized and acknowledged.

A sticker from Hyper-Japan Fair,2019

My creativity syndromes are certain habits and ways of thinking about myself and the world that do not help me.  In a nutshell, they keep me with fear and doom about my creative work.   They are now easy to spot, but difficult to manage, specially because they are ingrained in how I think about myself and the world around me.   

I seem to have acquired them when growing up. They probably helped me for a while, but now they seem to be in the way of me trying to live more creatively.    They drain my energy, and make me feel miserable at times.  

Because of these and other reasons, they need to be identified. So here they are:   

• Misplaced loyalty: I tend to overcommit to clans or tribes.   My commitment of saving the world by writing about it often leads me to say yes without thinking too much.   I give my allegiance to people and causes which, after a while, end up draining my energy because they do not align with my inner values or motivations.   I overdo helping those who have trouble in their academic careers, those with few friends, those who insist in working with me or those who praise me. I create unbalanced relationships in which I am willing to give more than what I receive. 

• Perfectionism.  I grew up thinking that I could become one of those ancient Kings (including Jesus Christ) that I read about in a book of Sacred Religious Catholic history: Noble and helpful, one which never complained and did good to everyone around; never tired, living according to high moral standards.  When I talked about this to a psychotherapist many years ago, he told me that I had a wrong idea about being 'good':  Jesus Christ expelled those who were trading in a sacred place!. It is difficult for me to accept failure and I fear failing.   So I often decide not to try, specially when there is strong competition around me. However, I also react when I see that things are not right.  

• Being an imposter.  I keep thinking:   Did I really deserve praise?   Do people really value me or my work?  Combined with the above misplaced loyalty and perfectionism, I have these moments of anxiety where I decide that what I do is not enough and I fear that someday, someone is going to 'find out', so I work harder.  

Life has taught me (sometimes the hard way), that these syndromes are not good for my health and thus for my creativity.   I now recognize more often and earlier when these syndromes show up. When they do,  I try to give myself a hug and say:  I am OK, I am good enough.   Work is just work.   Life is bigger than this or that situation.

I recently heard someone suggesting that we need to look at our relationship with both success and failure, so that we keep a balance in the stories about these guys that we entertain in our minds.   Wise words...

This guy will always make me feel special

I also try to remind myself now and again that what I creatively do has to do with my own personal values, and that they are good enough.   When I feel anxious, I talk to loved ones, to colleagues that do not take life too seriously, to people who know what I have been through or .  Or even if they do not know, they who are not judging me as hard as I judge myself.

To my dear creativity syndromes:   You are welcome to visit, but not to stay too long, I have more important things to do in life, and that includes being creative!

More Mundane, Humane Creativity? Anna Craft's Little C Creativity (LCC)

Professor Anna Craft (1961-2014) was a leading researcher in the area of creativity and early education.  I did not come across her work until recently, when deciding to explore what happens with creativity before my students arrive at university.  

This coincided also with my review of Csikszentmihalyi's model of creativity as part of a new book project already mentioned in this blog.  Craft seems to have adopted a systems view of creativity, only that she was interested not in the eminent but in more mundane forms of creativity when people like myself want to do something about our lives.  

Craft's notion of Little C Creativity LCC stroke a chord with me.  She regards this notion as one that can be enthused in children.  We can nurture their desire and intention to change things, and we can also inspire them to have a vision of what they want to do with their lives.   This is not to say though that as educators, we are to define such a vision for them.  Rather, we can enable them to explore and find out things for themselves.  We can also encourage them to channel their energy to identify obstacles and frame problems as challenges which they can then set out to overcome.  All of this under a 'can do' attitude that sees life as a big domain to learn and act on.  

All of this by thinking that we as human beings do not need to be recognized as eminences in our efforts to live meaningful lives.  

My son Fabrizio is going through a phase of not liking school and fearing to be bullied.  My wife has encouraged him to talk about what goes on, and together we have spoken to teachers at his school.  At times he feels sad, other times he is very happy.  

I still have not found a way to use LCC fully, only we have been able to ask him to identify a problem.  Afterwards, maybe he can then decide how he wants to solve it.

Within LCC, there are two elements that are included within it: play and imagination.  They both can help a person to pose questions and explore possibilities to address a challenge.  They both also imply a relationship with something and someone.  Fortunately Fabrizio has Sofia to talk about things.  He also has found a friend in the neighborhood and yesterday he confided in him about his fears.  When he came back, my wife tells me he was a different person, the bubbly one we normally see hanging around and teasing others, the one who plays (and has learned to download and play lots of electronic tablet games!).  

Perhaps LCC needs guidance in whoever wants to use it to positively move on in life, in particular if we are to consider self-determination, development and depth (the left hand side system in the figure above).  Perhaps its reliance on the 'can do' attitude needs to be taken a step back so we can ask questions like:  What if we are sad or depressed to even consider that we can do something? Maybe these and similar questions are ones we can pose in our search for possibilities to positively move on.  For Fabrizio, playing and imagining seem to apply more at the moment.

Perhaps we also need to have a bit of faith that things have a way of working themselves out...so we can imagine that bad situations are just temporary, and that we will find appropriate support to get out of them.  We can imagine that we can talk to friends, to listen and be listened to.  

For my management students, I think LCC and its elements shown in the figure as two systems (self-determination, development/change, depth in having identified challenges and conventions about a problem, innovation, conscious risk taking, play, being imaginative, being open to possibility and posing questions) could help.

As educators we could instill some of these elements in our classes, and we could connect these systems as we see fit.  How we do so would need a more conscious reflection of who our students are; what are their motivations, and what they want to make of their lives.  

We could instill their desire to be who they are, to be human.  

Thank you Anna for your gifts to the rest of us !

And thank you Fabi for giving me all these life lessons! 

My Creativity Book Tour - Third Stop: Manchester and Hull in the UK

Have I been preaching to the converted when presenting my book about Managing Creativity at Manchester and Hull in the UK? 

Not really 😁.  

I have visited colleagues in Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Business School, and Hull University Business School,.  I want to thank them and the fantastic audiences that my seminars had.  

Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Business School

At Manchester, I was asked about individual creativity, and how I see it.   In my book (Chapter 1), I venture to lay a distinction between individually and collectively oriented creativity. 

The creativity field has progressed in consolidating a sort of established tradition of the first one, not so much in the second one, which was one of the reasons that led me to write the book.  Systemic creativity, or conceiving of creativity as resulting from creators and their circumstances, could find a place under the second one.  

Green square in front of MMU Business School

In between these (which the sociologist Andrew Abbott associates to lineages or branches on trees as the picture on the right aims to emulate), I see a great deal of creativity research that is focused on the processes associated with creativity, be them internal (cognitive) or external to a creator. Whichever lineage or body of knowledge we consider in creativity, what is becoming clearer is that in each, there are different criteria to study and assess a creative process, idea or individual.  The audience at Manchester also saw that creativity needs to consider environmental constraints and tensions, many of which shape such success criteria.  

I was also asked about how I plan to continue developing my ideas.  Since finishing this book, I have continued looking at creativity, this time in management education   My claim so far is that we as management educators have narrowed down our ideas about creativity, and have become somehow passive instruments of a big trend in digital innovation.


To overcome this situation, we will need to develop more ethical awareness and choices in relation to creativity.  I want to further research on how creators (students, educators) could assume more ethically driven responsibility for our own creativity, a responsibility that also implies engaging with others and accepting that our life and work has some inevitable 'shit' we have to deal with.  

The renovated Hull University Library

At Hull, the discussion and questions after my presentation moved towards how creators need to learn a specific domains of knowledge, in order to be able to improve them.  But how far do creators want or have to go when  learning something new? What motivates them? What criteria of can we then use to assess our own creativity and that of others?  

In my book I present how I addressed a situation which required knowledge about inter-disciplinary creativity.  I found myself having to learn about the domain of creativity and also having to follow certain conventions about how knowledge in an inter-disciplinary research proposal was to be generated.  This situation led me thinking about the risks of following conventions to the letter, in particular if we as creators have to flexibly deal with challenges that we encounter along the way.   Add to this the need to look after our own well being, and the picture becomes more complex.

I was also asked about what notion of creativity I use in my book, which perhaps by now you as a reader are also intrigued about.   My response was that I do not subscribe to a particular one, except that I am aware that in the creativity field some attributes to something creative have been defined:  Novelty, Value and Implementation.    An idea, person, process or product needs to be seen as novel, valued by others and it needs to 'fit' or to 'work' somehow in a situation or context. 

A view of Ferens Way, Hull

On further reflection about these and other questions, perhaps not all creators want to be worldwide recognized eminences in a domain of knowledge.  Not everyone would aspire to write academic journal articles or win prizes or research grants at all times.   This is a lesson that has been difficult for me to accept and assimilate.  Partly forced by circumstances, partly motivated by curiosity and interest, I decided in the last few years to write my latest book instead of writing high impact journal articles.  Writing a book made more sense to my family situation and health.

Now I am pursuing another book project, am putting more effort into this blog, and am collaborating with others in writing some journal articles.  This to me means striving for success using my creativity.  However, and because I am a perfectionist academic, it is still not easy to see myself as different from colleagues or previous role models both in academia or elsewhere.  There is the daily temptation to look at my academic citations and compare myself with others.  

Centre for Professional Success at Hull Business School

There is a lesson from the above:  Perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves and say something about the inner motivations and the external pressures that guide us as creators, and how we could take them forward. Achieving success (fame, economic benefit, fitting in within a community, or even pleasing those who we think deserve credit) needs to fit in with who we want to be.  There is a need to better link creativity with ethics, and do that through education and reflection.   

Many thanks Manchester and Hull, see you soon, with new ideas about creativity and how best to make it happen!