Harnessing creativity

I shudder, and not in a good way, when someone asks if I consider myself creative. I understand it though. I call myself a designer because that’s my day job. And there are disciplines within design that are full of creatives. It’s not a stretch to form the association that designers are generally creative people.

But I couldn’t bring myself around to the idea that I was, as part of my identity, a creative person. Creative people perceive novel details or aspects about the world that others miss out on. Creatives seem to have some innate ability to draw on their underlying creativity and express it in their output. They have taste and passion for art, music, architecture.

To be fair, I can say that I’ve had creative moments. At work, having the idea for a different approach to the UIs we’d build to tackle a particular customer problem. Outside of work, that might be stirring in a different ingredient for a recipe to see if I like it or not. Or trying out a different hand position when attempting a bouldering problem.

Yet for me, creativity felt momentary. Spontaneous. Sometimes happens, and sometimes not. Not a constant. And so I shied away from labeling myself creative.

Multiple managers have told me that my senses about business mechanics, product discovery, go-to-market, and collaborative product development are on-par with senior designers. Yet it was painfully clear that my outputs as a designer were clearly not at that senior level. My solution options were more like variations on the same solution, rather than truly differentiated solutions. Senior designers presented options A, B, and C where each option was novel. By comparison I was presenting A.1, A.2, and A.3. If the root A was invalidated, I went back to the drawing board.

And this caused a spiraling professional identity crisis. Why did it seem like I couldn’t draw on my creativity? How could I be a great designer without creativity? Other designers seem come up with way more creative approaches than I do, so how can I compare or compete with them? What if my latent reservoirs of creativity are smaller and less than others’?

Being let go from my last designer role because of my gap in marketing, brand, and graphic design skills felt like proof of me being less creative. Maybe lacking creativity is my reality. If abundant creativity is quintessential to being a designer, maybe I don’t actually have what it takes, and should bow out.

I was cleaning out some boxes of items recently and I stumbled on the notebook I’d used while training to be a designer with General Assembly. And in it, I happened to flip to the Ideation part of the course.

SCAMPER. Substitute, Combine, Adjust, Modify, Put-to-another-use, Eliminate, Reverse/Rearrange.

Staring blankly at it for a moment, I began realizing that nearly all of my design work had utilized one or more of these methods. SCAMPER provided a ‘how’ for ‘how might we’ sessions and a direction for Crazy8’s sketching. It was a way to interrogate a user journey map to understand what viable solution spaces might exist.

I felt like I had found a way to compensate for what I had attributed to an innate lack of creativity and deficit around ideation.

But this unlock about my struggles with creativity and ideation highlighted that somewhere along my career I had internalized that creativity is somehow a known yet amorphous quantity that people either have or don’t have, and that being one of the have-nots spells doom for your career as a designer.

I still don’t consider myself as a creative person. But now, I’m coming around to the idea that with some guidance and structure, consistently harnessing creativity is possible.