Preferences Can Hinder Creativity

She struts confidently into the room.  Puts her things down at the table and walks up to me and tells me, "Ma'am we have a problem with delivery.  Production was not able to deliver what they committed."  I looked at her and asked her what she did and she told me, "Me?  What else can I do?  They are the ones who know what goes on in the floor, why should it come from me?"

This mentality is a dangerous one.  It makes you hard to work with.  It makes you limited.  It makes you confined to only one comfortable place: your preferences.

Circumstances are mixed with a lot of preferences coming from different people.  Some people prefer fast paced interactions.  Some are slow and easy.  Some prefer long discussions.  Some prefer short and straight to the point.  Although I cannot judge people because of their preferences, I would say in some situations, preferences get in the way of allowing people to work together and come up with creative solutions.  

"I prefer to be updated as soon as there are changes in the schedule."  She says.  What happens if she is not updated?  How will she navigate the circumstance?  These situations happen everyday and managing people who have this mindset is quite a challenge.  It somehow limits my own creative inclinations as well.  It limits how I can approach the situation.  It limits what I can express in a situation.  It limits how I think about a person and how I can work with them more productively.  It limits what we can create together.

It's disappointing when I see someone struggle with having to stay stuck in their preferences.  They become slave to them.  I've always been someone who allow myself to appreciate others' preferences while also acknowledging that I have some of mine.  

Still, it's a Friday and I look out at an orange sky and thank heaven for the past two days that have been filled with creative conversations despite the limitedness of business situations.

the skyscrapers outside my window 

Desperate Acts of Creative Resuscitation

from adimari's album "quotidie"

I lose all my drive to keep up with the work when I encounter people who suck the life out of the possibility for more improvement.  

It happens.  

It's 7:30am and you eagerly want to take on the new day.  You come in extra early because you want to sensitize your mind to the work ahead of you.  You open your laptop and get a cup of coffee and stare out the window just to catch a glimpse of empty space and be amused at the green vine that climbs up the stonewashed wall.  You're breathing it all in and your mind relaxes and finds its creative rhythm.

You open a spreadsheet filled with numbers and get ready to take on a report that's been a day late.  You list down the people you need to talk to about the information you need to produce.  They shuffle back and forth their desks because they're not ready for the information you're looking for.  They call you impossible.  You call them lazy.  They ignore your comment and pretend they didn't hear you call their name.  They look at you with fake smiles but at the back of their they want to skin you alive as they grit their teeth and say, "Yes Ma'am."  You try to exercise a bit of encouragement and feel positive about the day ahead so you take out your wallet and give them money to order pizza for lunch.  It gets them feeling better and they carry on with their work with half-heartedness.

A colleague comes in breaking your quiet reflection and the cursor pauses in the middle of a sentence you're constructing that's supposed to get you going on a momentum that will make you speed up and finish the report ahead of time.  You wanted to hit your record time of writing 25 pagers in 2 hours gets halted because of a complaint gestating from the rumble in her throat about the new performance appraisal system she cannot finish because she has no time.  

You try to break it down for her.  Understand her situation and talk in a calm tone so she knows you're listening.  You give her a sympathetic gaze for not having slept for days as you size up her unkempt hair and pale skin.  You assign one of your staff to meet up with her so that she can get started up with the work she needs to do in identifying what she wants to appraise her team for.  

You helped her in good faith.  And 6 months later, she tells your boss she is  uncomfortable with you and wonders why she becomes your subordinate now.

I wonder what people get when they do these kinds of things.  Does it make them feel better about themselves?  Does it make them feel more capable about the job they do?  Does it make them finish the work?  

I'm a stickler for principle centered leadership.  And though I fumble with this sometimes I have learned that there is no other way to navigate through a journey of change and transition unless you are anchored to a set of firm beliefs that illuminate how you make decisions.  This is my current struggle and I cope feebly with it by jotting down my random thoughts in a notebook or spending some time on the internet looking for articles that would resonate with my experience.  I'd step out of the office and buy a tall cup of caramel macchiatto and enjoy the walk under the sun for 10 minutes.  I'd buy some books in the bookstore that I'll just stack up in a pile cluttered in my room waiting to get dust and tell myself "I'll read them someday." as a way of pushing myself to finish all the work so that I can get to that finish line where these books become a trophy of success.

Of course, I pray.  I scramble upward that height of spiritual attunement until my mind finds its quiet rhythm under grace.  But this is not often easy.  The saints know how I slide back every now and then. They see how the devotional lying on my desk remains unturned from the last time I opened it.  The angels know how I doze off in the middle of a Hail Mary and they know I ache to finish a Rosary every time I drive to work in the morning.

How do I live with all this you might ask.  I don't.  That's why even in it's messed up state, I keep on pressing towards finding the peace hidden in the cluttered corners of these busy situations by whispering to myself "all things work out for the good..." and calling out to St. Monica the patron of patience that this virtue in me will increase and I can hold on till the day ends.  I do not allow myself to be satisfied with the status quo of disarray but I tell myself to accept that all chaos is a necessary prelude to all creative work and that includes building up my interior mettle to withstand the temporary discomfort of learning how to turn messy business situations into moments of opportunity.

St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine
pray for us.

Hopefully a Stranger no More

from adimari's album "quotidie" 

I sit late into the night and push my creative blocks and breaking my limits of wordlessness.  I push it because I've never felt this flow in such a long time and I revel in its mastery over me.  I succumb to the work and for these past 4 hours I am no longer a stranger to myself.  

Sight seems to have returned and what has been gestating for the past 2 weeks of longing to pour out my thoughts about what's been constricted and paralyzed because of so much work is now slowly coming out.  I have been wanting to articulate so much about this experience that has taken me captive. I feel like a prisoner of busy-ness and I'm trying to overcome.

In ten minutes I will be watching the much awaited TV series second season of Nikita.  Another chance to loosen up what has been coiled so tight.  I've forgotten how to entertain myself.  I shan't forget no more.

Is Creativity only found in Art?

from adi mari's album "quotidie"

I have learned that creativity isn't only recognized in the universe of art forms.  A huge amount of knowledge on this subject has already been explored by so many and I've only begun to touch its surface. Despite having been aware of the wealth and value of the creative mind and how it churns information, I have never attended to how I applied what I knew about it in my everyday life.  

Part of the exploration is observing how I'm growing creatively and how it has helped me cope with various circumstances.  I cannot afford to discount that this is also a matter of spiritual growth because the creative mind in a sense begins, at least for me, when I become attuned to the Creator.  

God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman's task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him. With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. (Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists)

This is hard to keep up with because in everyday life, creativity is often an act of will, relying solely on our own prowess.   At least for those who are unaware of its source.

You calculate digits and mark decimal places while feeling the pulse of the deadline press against your temples and giving you that unwanted migraine.  It's 5 minutes before 6:00 pm and you're supposed to pack your bags but then the phone rings and a caller says, "You need to submit the budget template tonight because it will be compiled by tomorrow."  They are oblivious of your need to breathe.  They fault you for lack of commitment when you do not appear for tomorrow's boardroom meeting because you had to speak with an employee who is concerned about the delay in his compensation's increase.

You chug down a bottle of lukewarm water because you don't have time to go down to the canteen and buy a cold one.  You open your lunch box and quickly mouth a fork full of cold spring rolls because there was no time to heat it up in the microwave.  Your eyes start blinking because it aches from the glare of the computer screen and still you type away squeezing all you can out of your mind until the numbers you calculate start to make sense.  You've repeated the payroll budget 5 times because of additional revisions in the org chart.  All this without a proper business plan framework.  All is done in one swing like shooting darts in the air aiming for an invisible target.  

But you choose this job because you don't want to be called a quitter and you want to test the limits of how far you're willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of gaining something more than monetary fulfillment.  It has to start with that.  It cannot be just monetary or you'll lose it.  You'll lose all meaning. You'll lose all purpose.  And you'll lose all sanity.

You are at your brink and you've compromised all that you know to embrace this environment that does not make sense and when you clasp your hands around it you begin to say, "I believe in God."  And then you find your second wind.  And you realize that you didn't die at the end of the day and you overcame the distress that battled with yourself.

Creativity doesn't only manifest in art forms.  It permeates life.  It is life.

On Sir Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity

I've watched this video almost 5 times already and can't believe how he's just right on the dot.  I've been resonating with any information that talks about creativity.  What stifles it.  What unleashes it.  What nurtures it.  I've been at it for the longest time.  Most of it has been a result of quiet desperation because of how I find that my circumstances always become a palette of creative repression or creative opportunity.  It goes to and fro.  This pendulum.  Sometimes it makes me crazy.  Sometimes it stirs up undiscovered reserve of strength.  

So I realized that I'm not an alien to be inclined to things like these.  But still it becomes a struggle when you walk around situations where nobody understands the language you speak and you feel like a foreigner in your own workplace because you just see things differently.   

It's always been that way for me.  Trying to fit in a linear mold.  In school.  In interactions.  In organizations.  In work environments.  I started discovering that not everything has to be linear when I joined an elective in graduate school that taught me a lot about creativity and how the arts tap into a reservoir of potential that lies inside yourself waiting to be discovered.  It seems ironic for business schools to teach their students how to view things in a creative way.  But for me, it was home.

I like the off-tangent metaphors that cuts across financial statements, operational workflows, leadership principles and faith fueled values.  It makes sense and I didn't have to turn my brain upside down to get it. I just did.  So this was how I approached everything onwards.  It was also what moved me to deepen my spiritual life because what didn't make wordly sense was something I could always understand in a spiritual sense.

Changing your mind about how you think about something is the hardest thing to do.  And I've had to change my mind again and again about a lot of things especially in the workplace.  It gets tiring, especially now.  But I'm hoping to keep at it and find myself growing my creative capacity and my spirit.

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know,  they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.  Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What  we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything  original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're  now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can  make. And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities. [Sir Ken Robinson]

adimari's album "photo stories:cebu"
this is me taken at an old museum during our trip together in 2007.

focus

obscurity has its tale to tell,
like the figure on the studio-bed corner,
out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.
Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable
making of a jar of pencils, typewriter keyboard more than they were.

veridical light.

earth budges.  now an empty coffee-cup,
a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on
their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand
of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.

- by adrienne rich

Uncovering

adimari's album "traces in spaces"

Imagine yourself sitting behind a desk with a lot of ideas running through your head.  They turn to a hazy wave of noise as soon as your phone alerts.  A text message.  "Following up the price quotation for the brochure..."  You're tapping you pen and waiting for 4 hours and still it hasn't arrived.  This price quotation that's supposed to tell you of your future ability to seal the deal by 2012.  On the other side of your brain you're thinking about that conversation you had with your boss about a disgruntled officemate who doesn't believe in your capability to lead the group because she thinks she knows better.  The phone rings, "Ma'am please help me follow up the costing department because they're taking a bit of time." Your account officer says in desperation.  

Your fingers start to feel paralyzed against the keyboard and your back starts to feel strained because of shifting and shuffling restlessly on your office chair.  You haven't eaten lunch and your throat starts to feel dry.  You're thinking about the press run of a book you're printing for the first time and how the proofreader missed out a very important detail that cost a huge a mount of waste because the error was spotted after everything has been printed.

The emails pour in and your requests for additional computers have been approved.  You're thinking about the limited space and how long it will take for decisions to be made so that you can get moving with the expansion project.  

It never ends.  It's like a cycle of events that loop endlessly like a broken record.  

This is how my life has been for the past 3 months.  But if I would characterize my life a little bit better, it's a constricted flow of creativity.  Always caged in and aching to be expressed.  In my resourcefulness I try to find ways of living with the limitations of the circumstances that threaten the full expression of creative potential.  I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.  

This page will hopefully chronicle these moments and in careful observation hopefully find answers to how one can live through these limitations and still find the fulfillment of being able to create and make a difference every moment.