Dr. Chris Show

Many types of creative work require a set physical space or specialized equipment. And the place we are has a much more profound impact on how we feel than we think. In their book “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans they remind us just how different we feel in a football stadium than we do in a cathedral.

In addition to the where of our physical space, there is also the what, and how it’s laid out.

Chefs, for example, may need need to work in a kitchen and often set up their workspaces with almost ritualized precision.

Knowing how you need your space to be the most efficient and effective is the first step

Some of us are lucky and are able to work from coffee shops or paint “en Plein air” in that case it is a combination of finding the right workspace and ensuring we have what we need.

Do you have a dedicated place to work, be that a studio, a coffee shop, or a corner of the laundry room?

How easy is it for you to walk away from a work in progress and return to it without needing to pack up or change the use case?

If you work “en Plein air” or coffee shop style are your supplies kept packed and ready to go? How is your bag or laptop?

The underlying idea is that you will have a dedicated workspace with all of the tools and supplies that you need to do the work that needs doing.

Most of us understand what a routine is. But building a solid routine and intentionally setting our habits to work for us can free up the mental energy for our creative work.

In the book “The Power of Habit” Charles Duhigg reminds us just how much of our lives are made of habit, routine, and ritual.

The ability to add a routine to your day can help preserve that mental energy that comes from making small decisions. There are several ways to build routine into your day.

Personally, I use two old standby tools. A calendar and a todo list. And if you don’t think the word routine works for you choose a synonym. Ritual is a favorite of mine.

With instructional design being a creative act it's important for us to practice, but what good is practice if we're practicing the wrong thing or moving in the wrong direction. In order to make practice work most efficient, we need feedback.

One of the things that I enjoy about my time in academia is that just about anything done in academia is met with a "peer review" a chance for feedback. This practice of peer review can work wonders as a creativity boosting tool. It's one of the reasons so many writers join writing groups.

There are many ways we can solicit feedback, and I'm partial to the ones from the book "Show your work" by Austin Kleon. In fact, I'm such a fan of the book I need to buy yet another copy because I keep giving them out.

What are your thoughts on ways to solicit feedback with instructional design work? Especially with so much of our work being proprietary or behind NDA agreements it's another argument for having a set of our own work that we do as a personal practice.

It's undeniable that having knowledge and skills related to a certain domain will give you a creative advantage in that game. That is why knowledge and skills are a key pillar of creativity.

Sometimes people are lucky and their paid work gives them an opportunity for daily practice and growth but not always.

In order for us to be our best creatively, we need to strengthen our knowledge and skills. Luckily for instructional designers, we are quite skilled at helping others develop their skills and knowledge. This is simply where we need to do this for ourselves. And we know the drill, it's repeated intentional practice.

Another thing to watch for in this pillar or domain of creativity is that our eyes learn much faster than our hands. Meaning that we will begin to see good work and be able to judge good work long before we are able to produce it. Our standards rise faster than our ability to produce.

This makes it important to practice and stay positive. This taste vs production gap can be very demotivating to some, it can make them quite, drink, or fall into a depression. But if we know the gap is normal it also has the possibility to be a source of inspiration, the fact that you are seeing the possibilities means that you are on the path to being able to execute with enough practice.

With creativity being so central to our work as instructional designers it's important that we do all that we can to boost our creativity. And since most of us came into the field because we wanted to be creating things that boost our creativity are usually valuable in other ways too.

The third pillar of creativity is one of those things that can spill over benefits to other aspects of our lives quite easily since it's the importance of our physical health.

It can be helpful to think of our health in a couple of different ways, there may some things that are completely out of our control and then there are the ways we can manage our day to day such as moving more and eating better.

Doing what we can to stay healthy can boost our creativity by removing the stress of being unhealthy as well as giving us more physical energy because creative work is exhausting!

So get out there tomorrow and go for a walk, or better yet put a walk into your schedule at the same time every day for the next few weeks and try to make it a habit.

One of the most fundamental things we can do to be more creative and have more creative output is to connect with the importance of our work.

This can mean connecting with the "Big Why" regarding what we do, or it can be the little every day "whys" such as helping out our coworkers or overcoming a small technical challenge.

Reflecting on the "big and small whys" can reshape the way we approach our work and help us find the energy when we need it most which is a great boost to creativity.

Divergent thinking is the act of coming up with as many ideas or options as possible, and in creativity studies, divergent thinking gets a lot of love because it's relatively easy to measure.

Convergent thinking is the ability to come together and find the "ONE" answer for a given problem. Equally important for creativity but less simple to measure.

You can exercise your divergent ad convergent thinking muscles with a quick tip. Make a list of 10 to 15 things every day and Rank the list. Your personal collections of lists can be work-related or completely personal it's the act of making then ranking that exercises this muscle and helps boost your creativity.

I've always been fascinated by the creative process and probably a bit more about how some people can't seem to see their own creativity.

Creativity and our ability to be creative and be productively creative can be strengthened. And this is huge for those of us who work in creative fields.

I've been reading on the subject for years, boring academic papers that I won't bore you with, and I've been experimenting on myself as well. Below are my 12 pillars to creativity. And strengthening them can increase both our sense of creativity but our creative output as well.

1. Convergent and Divergent thinking

2. Having a strong purpose

3. Physical health

4. Skills and knowledge

5. Feeback and having a tolerance for failure

6. Routine

7. Our physical space

8. Incubation time

9. Curiosity and a tolerance for ambiguity

10. Motivation and ambition

11. Autonomy and the ability to make choices

12. Self-confidence and a supporting belief system

Instructional Design is a creative act. One of the reasons that many instructional designers find their way into the profession is for this reason.

And this also means that the creativity boosting pillars that work for other creative pursuits will also benefit instructional designers. Today I share one of the most classic and timeless.

When you find yourself stuck. Go for a walk. That extra incubation time can do wonders.

There are many models that try to describe what happens to transform a group into a team. One of the more common and popular models is the Tuckman Model"

Bruce Tuckman was charged by the US Navy to determine and describe this process and he came up with four basic steps that teams go through:

1. Forming: This is when the team comes together and starts to get to know everyone and figure out what's going on. The leader's role is to establish clear instructions so people can get to work quickly which helps people get to know each other better.

2. Storming: In this stage like hens in a hen house the group tries to figure out the "pecking order" and determine who's really in charge. It can be frustrating for everyone involved and the role of the leader is to continue with clear working directions and sometimes to give guidance or intervene with social or personal issues as well.

3. Norming: This stage is when group norms are established. These expected and behaviors within the group add predictability and stability. Members begin to understand their role as well as the roles of the other members. Respect grows and people start to help each other. The role of the leader at this stage is to help support the development of the norms and to connect people so they can help each other.

4. Performing: This stage is the stage where everyone is working well and things are getting done. The role of the leader at this stage is often just to be a resource and to shield the group from outside interference.

Since teams change in the modern workplace a number of people have added a 5th step and called it a variety of different things from Adjourning, Mourning, Transforming, etc to describe what happens when the group breaks up or changes in some way.

Which is an important consideration, since it's likely that from time to time a change in the situation or group membership can knock this lovely linear description on its head and you may find your group back in an earlier stage of development. Because try as we might to explain the world in linear ways, the world is rarely linear.

Have you observed this pattern in the groups you've been a part of?