Can creativity be tamed?

If you are a designer like me, you probably wrestle with the creative process daily. That's why designers and I often seek a healthy and evolving design culture when looking to land a new job. But here's the kicker: as a company, reaching that peak is about as challenging as finding a document written entirely in Papyrus and taking it seriously. With ongoing projects, sometimes the creative spark gets lost.

We're all guilty of wanting to create mind-blowing products, so we pour every ounce of our energy into the projects. But amid the frenzy, we tend to forget the importance of flexing our creative muscles. Fear not! We firmly believe it's possible to strike a balance.

Seizing the spark.

Creativity and inspiration often go hand in hand, although they are not exactly the same. Inspiration assumes the role of a catalyst, propelling and fuelling creativity. It ignites the spark that sets the creative process in motion. On the other hand, creativity is the tangible outcome of giving shape, substance, and expression to those inspired ideas, infusing them with purpose and significance.

What sets creative minds apart is their ability to attentively recognise and preserve those inspired ideas. Either in a notebook, on the computer, on a photograph or a napkin… you name it. It really depends on when and where these ideas come to mind. At Significa, we all get to be a little bit creative with our note-taking on Notion, even if it’s only picking an emoji!

Personally, I see creativity as a continuous absorption of the world surrounding us. I know this sounds a bit cliché, but being mindful of the path one takes each day and storing either digital or physical things that hold meaning or twinkle your thoughts can take us to unexpected results.

Last year, I attended Gemma O’Brien’s conference at the OFFF Design Festival, where she shared her notebook collections — an overdose of visual findings encountered throughout her days. It was a beautiful, inspiring testament to the power of finding meaning in the seemingly random.

David Carson, who also lectured at this festival, also proved to be a fan of collecting bits and pixels of inspiration… just look at that desktop! Funny enough, if you look at his work, the same vibes are there.

What can we do to nourish creative energy?

Thinking through sketching.

All jokes aside, sometimes the hardest part is not having an idea but having the tools to capture it and communicate it to others, especially when the creative spark is being ignited with colleagues in brainstorming sessions or during a particularly interesting conference.

At Significa, we consciously close our laptops and continuously go back to the drawing board. Designers often structure their thoughts with sketches, an essential part of our creative process.

If you are not quite sure where to begin with turning ideas into notes, take a look at Verbal to Visual: their mission is to turn note-taking into a visual sketch noting into a superpower anyone can yield!

Failing as a method.

On the other hand, welcoming failure, chance and nonsense can also be a very fertile ground for discovery. Erik Kessels swears by it and has proven it quite fruitful considering the amount of magazines, books and exhibitions that blossomed from it. FAILED IT is worth taking a look at, as is the kesselskrammer publishing collection.

Not taking ourselves too seriously is another way to nourish creative energy. Take courses on subjects you know nothing about, try unconventional foods, and face your irrational fears like I did when jumping into a room full of balloons at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. It turns out that this experience sparked what I needed to set the bouncy tone for the redesign of the Significa website we completed last year. When I say we, I mean the whole team, so it is quite logical I went on to my peers to gather their thoughts on taming creativity.

Thoughts from our designers.

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Safety and Creativity. A match made in heaven.

As my colleague Manuel put it, dialogue is an essential part of fostering creativity — and people need to feel safe to voice their opinions. As human beings, we often struggle with the fear of judgment, which can suppress our creative flow by inhibiting us from doing so. But our self-doubt isn’t the only factor to blame. Anyone who has experienced working in a team characterised by silence and an inability to speak up knows how frustrating such a dynamic is.

In 2012, Google invested considerably in Project Aristotle, aiming to understand the factors that impacted their teams' effectiveness. Unsurprisingly, their research concluded that who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together. The most important factor was psychological safety, a belief amongst peers that it is safe to take risks, express ideas and concerns, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fearing negative repercussions.

Effective management practices are crucial to creating a psychologically safe environment. These include establishing clear norms and expectations to foster predictability and fairness, encouraging open communication, actively listening to employees, ensuring team members feel supported, and demonstrating appreciation and humility when they speak up.

This year, during a one-on-one discussion, I questioned how we can stimulate confidence when reviewing others’ work. My colleague answered, “We value someone who can make decisions. If the outcome is not ideal, we, as a team, are here to deal with what comes after.” This kind of feedback perfectly encapsulates the concept of psychological safety.

Want to know more?

Discover the dynamics of effective teams first-hand from Google!

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How we foster Creativity.

Creating a culture of creativity is all about embracing vulnerability and encouraging openness. These elements are crucial for cultivating trust among team members and, ultimately, building better products. However, design teams often struggle with sharing their work early on because they haven’t quite gotten “there” yet.

To work around that, we have established a rotating buddy system. Every two months, designers are paired up in pairs so that both can be involved in each other’s projects. This encourages a dynamic exchange of perspectives and skills, allowing each designer to benefit from each other's insights and strengths, support one another along the way, and keep a high morale, especially during long projects.

However, our collaborative spirit isn't limited to just our assigned buddy. While this system provides a helpful framework, we’re encouraged to also reach out to other departments. Moreover, taping into the diverse expertise available at Significa with open-ended questions stimulates critical thinking and helps us articulate our thoughts to better present our work to clients, for example.

Another initiative we find particularly effective is whiteboard challenges. These pose a controlled failure environment, as they offer structured exercises where people can freely explore new ideas without the fear of catastrophic failure that client projects can bring. While these exercises may not always lead to definitive solutions, they undoubtedly stimulate many interesting new ideas and bond teams further.

Our unlimited learning stipend combined with our cooldown periods — time reserved to pause between one project and the next — allows the team to continue experimenting on multiple topics which are not necessarily directly linked to any client deliverables.

Curious?

Good! Get to how we keep the design vibes flowing at Significa, we've got an article where we spill the beans on our design culture magic.

Read it

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Eureka!

While inspiration may ignite the initial spark, true creativity is the product of dedicated effort. By intentionally nurturing our creative energy, we can transform momentary ideas into impactful results.

Individually, cultivating curiosity, observing the world, and challenging ourselves to break free from conventional thinking triggers fresh perspectives and innovative ideas.

Collaboration is another key ingredient. Partnering with others promotes trust, reduces the fear of judgment, and allows for a dynamic exchange of perspectives, enhancing individual creativity and leading to richer outcomes.

We all start our careers with fresh ideas and a willingness to try new things. But over time, comfort can set in. By embracing a beginner's mindset, where taking risks and learning from failures are seen as stepping stones to innovation, we can feel empowered to create exciting things. Companies that want to reignite this spark need to cultivate a safe space where vulnerability is seen as a strength, not a weakness.

By adopting these practices, we can move beyond the myth of the nine muses and cultivate an environment of creativity that drives innovation and success.