Why Creativity is Broken
We have celebrated the solitary creator for too long. We have placed names on doors and built entire systems of recognition and reward around the mythology of
If you’re interested in joining the first of many March First events; we’re running The Quiet Revolution online session in May which will include pre-reading takeaways, and a participatory session to explore how we as leaders can reclaim our attention, stay present, and ensure ethical clarity when the world around us is designed to take them away from us.
It’s a first, so it might be clunky, but I’m excited to explore some of the themes I’ve been writing about in this weekly essay over the last decade; themes that sit in the intersection of leadership, creativity and doing meaningful, ethical work with people who see the world in the same way as we do.
A friend and I spent last week driving through Victoria’s south eastern regions visiting where we spent time engaging in conversations with seasonal and migrant employers and employees; dairy farms, vast landscapes and 2hr drives between destinations.
We’ve been doing community engagement for a while now and if we learn one thing about the work we do it’s that creativity is communal.
We have celebrated the solitary creator for far too long. For the better part of a century, placed names on doors and built entire systems of recognition and reward around the mythology of individual genius.
You know how it is, the lone visionary who, through force of intellect and will, transforms culture and society. Or at least the gushing comments on LinkedIn imagine him to do so. I say ‘him’ deliberately because, unfortunately, we both know why. It’s so often a him.
This narrative has become so deeply embedded in how we understand creativity and leadership that we barely question it anymore. We treat it as common sense and it sits comfortably nestled across generations. But this is a profoundly limiting inheritance we have come accept; one that has rusted onto our thinking about what creativity actually is and what conditions allow creativity—true creativity—to flourish.
The idea of the lone creative genius is a mythology, and the cost of this mythology is not merely conceptual, it is something very real.
Mythological-realism if I may.
