When I was a child I had big dreams. I created with abandon. I didn’t care what people thought. Somewhere along the way I learned that creating & dreaming meant risk and that risk was bad. And that everyone would simply laugh at me if I failed. And they encouraged me to just do what was safe. And so I did.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a musing similar to that in the last couple of months. It makes me kinda sad. I think it’s great that we’re aware of our society’s tendency to kill creativity and that we want to try to change that that future generations. But how?
How do we stop from simply reacting to that process and instead proactively change the process? Prevent the squashing of creativity before it happens. Can we have streamlined organizations that run efficiently and value individual creativity at the same time? Should efficiency even be something we strive for? Do organizations need to be smaller in order to accomplish this? How many generations will it take to make the change?
Clearly I have more questions that I have answers at this point. But I’d love to hear your thoughts because it seems this whole idea of creativity being squashed is a recurring theme. And I think there’s probably a reason for that.
