It's a cliched topic. It has come up in many ways than we have thought. But the intensity and relevance of it came to me with my new work life. There was a duality, a conflict, that I was beginning to notice. The conflict between the creative and the disciplined use of my mind.
The new work commands that I invest almost half of my energy into creative thinking and the other half into something that needs a strict, disciplined approach of mind to succeed in it. Reading a Business World report on some of the industry leaders like Mittal, Ambani, Tata and others, I realized that even these guys are called in to manage similar conflicts, albeit on a larger scale with rampant consequences. On one hand they need to continuously innovate to stay alive in the industry and at the same time operate with the ISO discipline to sustain and achieve the objectives.
Lets deal with the creative part first. Its a delight that one is called upon to establish his creative credentials. All of us know that creativity does not lend itself to right-wrong approach and as such it may at the most display a degree of acceptance like Good, Better and Best. And in turn show dominant trends of successes and failures. Creativity requires that we are relaxed, informed, aware of our surroundings for critical inputs coupled with a penchant for finding alternative solutions. Work pressure and the consequent stress is the greatest enemy of creativity. Targets, deadlines, time-lines, meetings, commitments create stress and pressure. With stress, creativity takes a beating. It starts a panic race to reach the goals (however one can dispute this by quoting several incidents where stress and pressure have infact brought out some hidden creative solutions) However, work pressure cannot be completely ruled out of work life.
But what is equally and perhaps more dangerous than the work pressure is, the WORK itself. The kind of work we do largely decides how effective we are as creative individuals. And that brings me to the next part of my work that requires a discipline. It has structures. It has rules and whole lot of repetitive and mundane tasks that include Ctrl +C, Ctrl+ V, Alt +F and so on. Often they wear-out the mind leaving me with no energy to think creatively.
And all this comes in a Time bomb. Yes, time is yet another enemy of creativity. The 9.30 to 5.30 job that commands the world with entry and exit points at work place. On top of it, if you happen to have something called as the task sheet, you can be sure, it is tailor made to kill your creativity. Task sheets look so nice to look at. The serial no., particulars, time, day, status of the work given, et al. They tell the story of "a day in the life of an employee". But the point is missed. The entire life gets tasked. A task sheet is a huge structure and structures do not take kindly to creativity. Over a period of time, the organization will have huge number of sheets that display
what the employee was doing but not
what he could have done if he had been given a free mind to work. Creativity requires free mind and by
implication some free time. Accepting the fact that organizations do not have unlimited time, there needs to be a system in place that makes space for
creativity.
And till I resolve the conflict, the work goes on as usual.
It's a cliched topic. It has come up in many ways than we have thought. But the intensity and relevance of it came to me with my new work life. There was a duality, a conflict, that I was beginning to notice. The conflict between the creative and the disciplined use of my mind.
