A close friend challenged me to paint with my eyes closed. A seemingly impossible and useless task. But it was in that freedom from comparison, perfectionism, and all the pressures from all the places that my best work developed.

We think creativity happens in bright, open spaces, messy studios, and brightly colored rooms. We envision manic experimentation at 3 AM or disorder and chaos in the midst of heaps of inspiration. We don’t often picture the middle of the work day.

And while the action and stimulation can be true, it is also true that creativity and innovation happen between 9-5, in a conference room or a cube, with people wearing shoes that might be a little uncomfortable. This is the curiosity and the ingenuity that we must intentionally foster. Creativity is a business asset. We all need people who are willing to innovate. We all need people who generate new ideas and provide new perspectives.

From the Creativity Journal, there is support to connect art thinking and design thinking. The creative process typically includes a few phases: preparation, incubation, ideation, illumination, and evaluation. These are reflected in design thinking, and hopefully can snap us out of the drudgery of doing work with little innovation. With emotional engagement, intuition, and ambiguity art thinking supports, we can also achieve a more robust and profound level of daily innovation with the structure of design thinking.

Just as creativity is not only for spaces at 3 AM, design thinking is not only for people who have been deemed creative. Have I ever sat at my desk and closed my eyes in the hopes the most innovative solution would come to me? Not yet, but this creativity fostered in a work environment, and more importantly the freedom to foster creativity in a work environment is the key to growing and sustaining organizations in our ever-changing world. While I haven’t closed my eyes at work to beg the art gods for inspiration, I do employ design thinking on a daily basis to stimulate the iterative and dynamic process that I also utilize while painting.

design thinking.png — What is the marriage between art and work? How do we create space to play while simultaneously solving issues in the office?

Designing thinking has the ability to pull those fearful or hesitant to break into their wild side of creativity with more structure, but also more fun. Merging the freedom of eyes-closed creation with the structure of design thinking, the possibilities are endless.

1. Understand and empathize.

As an artist, when you close your eyes you get to look inside yourself. When working, you need to look inside the issue (or the person with the issue) to define what it is you’re working toward. Frequently we jump right to solutions without clearly understanding or defining what we’re working toward.

2. Iterative learning by doing

As an artist, layers upon layers of paint (or any medium) eventually make up many versions of a finished product. Similarly, problems are rarely solved perfectly on the first go. Add, build, cover up, and continue to solve minor problems along the way. Fail fast, fail often, and rebuild always. Sometimes the greatest solution to one problem comes from a failed solution to another.

3. Flexible and holistic thinking

While an artist may spend hours on a tiny corner of a piece of art, they must take into account the bigger picture. This is the same in the workplace as we solve the one-off problems, none can be so much bigger than the common goal. Without the clear vision and the thinking to support it we are solving nothing. How is your innovation building upon the big picture?

Not only is creative confidence building through this process because failure no longer exists as a challenge, but The Academy of Management (2019) explains some of the benefits related to stress:

“Creativity can allow one to flexibly respond to stress, such that when in a creative state, people may be able to spontaneously generate alternative interpretations, options, and responses to stressors that might not be apparent to them in a less creative state.”

Have you ever been so overwhelmed by your to do list that you’re unable to select a direction to move in? Less stress yields a more productive workspace. More creative problem solving with quick iterations means more answers to fewer problems. Creativity breeds powerful ideas.

Ask yourself, if I am sitting still in my innovation during good times, what opportunities am I missing?

Close your eyes.

Encourage wild ideas.

Creative Confidence through Design Thinking