Chapter 7: Where can creativity be revived?
Casing out the potential rescue locations
While the personal app that identifies criminal hotspots (introduced at the start of chapter 3) is a relatively recent invention, the idea of mapping the locations where crime most frequently takes place is not new. The influence of statistical analysis on criminology began with Quetelet’s observations in 1842 that some parts of France produced more crime than others. In Minneapolis more recently, a comprehensive analysis of 323 000 calls to the police found that a small number of hotspots (3 per cent of the city) produced 50 per cent of police call-outs.1
If rescuers can be dispatched to all areas of the organisation, but particularly to those that have been identified as ‘hotspots’, and if the resuscitation devices are on hand at all times, the creativity crime rate should be dramatically reduced. Conversely, potential hotspots for creativity development need to be elevated and more widely recognised in the organisation. Creativity should be free to move around all places in an organisation through non-siloed collaboration.
The common association between creativity and artistic originality often leads to confusion about the appropriate place for creativity in the organisation. Most people assume that although creativity killers hang out in more tightly structured areas of the organisation, such as the accounting department, creativity should not be introduced here. In fact, about 80 per cent of managers say they don’t want creativity to be introduced into the accounting department of their organisation.2 When we told a good friend, an air traffic controller, that we were writing a book on creative thinking, he promptly responded, ‘But who on earth would buy a book on that!’ To him there was no place for creativity in a role that involved factual precision. He may not have recognised what many people fail to see: that creativity can make a significant difference in any organisation, and in any area of the organisation. Even for air traffic controllers, roster procedures can be improved, work techniques enhanced, management processes adapted. This same friend had not long before lamented about how the management approach never changed, and how intolerant and archaic it was. It is in just such areas that creative thinking can make a major difference.
Building innovation hothouses — revisiting the boss’s office and the coffee shop
If there are hotspots where criminals hang, there are also hothouses where creativity often lives. Funnily enough, as many people recognise, it commonly flourishes around the water-cooler, in the hallways or in the cafeteria, rather than formally established ‘work’ places in the organisation. Perhaps that explains why they are hothouses for creativity — because they are where people meet and talk informally, relaxed and out of earshot of overbearing characters such as Control, Pressure and Fear, who probably think that these places are not worth patrolling.
Clever workspace designers should look at creating environments that foster creativity. Factors that should be taken into account when designing workspaces include3:
• creating spaces for informal discussion (for example, large, casual meeting spaces and coffee rooms)
• contriving spatial closeness between departments to foster contacts between them
• avoiding large, impersonal offices that might discourage informal discussion.
Positive social environments that encourage creativity can also be provided through:
• common lunch breaks, which provide good opportunities for communication between employees in different organisational areas
• schedules that allow and encourage interaction.
Smart leaders will recognise that the work environment can inhibit creativity and will ensure individuals maintain a creative development focus. Management guru Jim Collins consciously spends only 50 per cent of his time on administration tasks. To ensure he stays focused and creative he turns down many speaking opportunities, consulting jobs and even the temptation to expand his company. He is so adamant about this key point that he logs everything he does, including his sleep. He knows that at those times when he is overworked with administration, his creative thinking and ability to focus on developing and researching new ideas suffers.4
Organisations of the future will need to work harder to engage increased dimensionality and foster greater creative thinking. The design and innovation consultancy IDEO, in Chicago, exemplifies the way work environments will need to evolve to support creative development. In this office an open studio is surrounded by project rooms, demonstrating the principle that open thinking and experimentation combined can lead to positive practical results. The open design encourages collaboration between individuals. The studio is seen as a space where employees from different disciplines, such as engineers, designers, business strategists and programmers, can also collaborate effectively. The IDEO building includes a central cafe and forum area combined, along with a dedicated prototyping workshop. The open rooftop community garden provides a communal focus and stimulates the imagination.5
In the past companies valued tight top-down controls. Now, though, it is most important to mobilise resources for innovation and entrepreneurship. As a result, argues Harvard professor of management Christopher Bartlett, there needs to be a shift to empowering people right through to the lower levels of the organisation, because the freshest ideas will often come from the brightest young minds. ‘There is a shift to a much more empowered organization,’6 he says, ‘in which you have to shift the power away down to people who have access and who understand technology, to those closest to the customer and able to develop the ideas.’7
In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Steve Ballmer, CEO of MSN, is reported to have told business leaders of the company’s strategy to ‘systematise innovation’,8 but Alan Noble, a senior Australian engineer with Google, challenged this approach to innovation. ‘What Ballmer presented was pretty much a top-down driven response, almost reactive in that he said “we need to figure out how to innovate better”,’ said Noble. ‘If it’s so central to your culture there’s nothing to systematize. It’s there, it’s like the air you breathe — you innovate to survive … it’s just what you do.’
The article goes on to outline some of the unusual strategies Google has used to ensure innovation becomes a part of the system. These have included allocating 20 per cent of their engineers’ time to design (Google’s web-based email service came from ideas explored during this time), and decentralising their research facilities (about 40 of these have been established internationally, which saves on red tape and fosters more rapid generation of ideas). These strategies provide more independence and agility, and ensure that fresh ideas are coming through from all levels.
Another striking advertisement from Shell that reveals how it can work in practice states:
Do you see solutions in unlikely places? Shell engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen watched his son drink a milkshake, using a bendy straw upside-down to reach the bits of froth in the corners of the glass. Hey presto, the snake well drill was born. Inspired thinking, innovation and even leaps of imagination are part of our daily lives at Shell.9
It is not so much that we lose our creativity as we become adults; rather, it seems that we lose our creative confidence and as a result need to work harder to regain it. In the adult world, the right environments and opportunities are not being built for creativity to flourish. We must reverse this in order to ensure we can all cope with the demands of the future.
Potential rescue site 1: the boss’s office
IBM’s survey10 identifies the qualities that characterise creative leaders (qualities that tie in closely with our seven strategies). The survey results indicate that creative leaders:
• expect to make more business model changes to realise their strategies (strategy 1: cultivate curiosity)
• are comfortable with ambiguity (strategy 2: accept ambiguity)
• invent new business models based on entirely different assumptions (strategy 3: unleash the imagination)
• score much higher on innovation (strategy 4: access both sides of the brain)
• invite disruptive innovation (strategy 5: reconstruct current concepts)
• consider previously unheard of ways to change the enterprise (strategy 6: explore different paths)
• are creative and visionary enough to make decisions that alter the status quo (strategy 7: embrace optimism).
Furthermore, since the top-performing organisations are 54 per cent more likely to respond swiftly with new ideas to address the deep changes affecting their organisations, CEOs must learn to make clever decisions fast, and this involves disciplined creative thinking.
Potential rescue site 2: the boardroom
Healthy boardroom dynamics are critical for open dialogue and therefore for boardroom success. One of the most significant points that governance experts agree on is the need for open and challenging discourse with the CEO. Constructive critical dialogue is the single best indicator of board effectiveness. Trust and confidence are built on open relationships in which people can ask questions and offer different, perhaps challenging viewpoints. Ensuring diversity and a heterogeneous mix is also important. It’s not enough simply to have different backgrounds represented; variations in perception must also be encouraged.11 The boardroom must be open to ambiguities. This means including paradoxical pairings such as creativity and criticality, cohesion and cognitive conflict, trust and distrust, independence and involvement, engagement and closeness but also non-executive distance. Managing these ambiguities involves an approach that accepts tension and is open to creative thinking.
Potential rescue site 3: accounts/finance
It might not be a surprise that the accounting department was ranked very highly (by both our seminar and online survey participants) as a likely location for the murder of creativity. Only 6 per cent of survey respondents indicated it is a place where creativity can be revived. Recently we stood before 60 Financial Controllers of the (InterContinental Hotels Group) IHG to challenge them on this topic. We asked them to respond to these accusations, and we were impressed by their articulate answers. The Financial Controller we were working most closely with explained:
At IHG we view the Finance team as ‘trusted & valued business partners’. We moved away from simply being the number crunchers a number of years ago. Today we attempt to support IHG’s strategy and ensure it is supported by the right resources.Other departments value the input from Finance in decision making and planning. So I don’t believe the Finance department is a big killer of creativity. Do they need to ensure decisions are commercial? Yes. Do they need to ensure there is an appropriate balance amongst various stakeholders (owners, employees, customers) when making decisions? Yes. Do they need to ensure certain compliance and governance is in place? Definitely. As long as Finance can logically support their views then I don’t believe they are killing creativity. At our recent Australasia Finance and Business Support Meeting we recognised individuals who have performed exceptionally throughout the year. For the first time we had an award category for ‘Best Innovation’. We can’t have the attitude that ‘this is how it has always been done’. Interestingly, I think we have been innovative in our region because we have had to be to remain competitive. Due to the connotations around the term ‘creative accounting’ we certainly tend to speak more to ‘innovation’ at IHG as opposed to being ‘creative’. Being creative in the finance field is more associated with doing the wrong thing, cutting corners, unethical behaviour etc. Innovation, on the other hand, is perceived differently and is aimed at changing or implementing processes to improve either efficiency or effectiveness. Innovation can be thinking outside the box, utilising your ‘savvy’ to come up with new solutions to issues we face.
The accounting department itself is not the only suspected murder loacation here, of course. There is also the accusation that the Finance focus can actively kill creativity elsewhere. Social psychologist Sam Keen believes that this focus has a stranglehold on too many areas of a company and raises an imaginative, perhaps even inspiring proposition worth considering:
It would be interesting to see what would happen within corporations if, for one hundred days, it was forbidden to talk about profits, losses, stockholders, competition, or market share. Some workers might wonder out loud if what they were doing with fifty or sixty hours a week truly reflected how they wished to spend their fleeting years. Others might wonder whether the product being promoted was ecologically viable, or if their contribution to a global economy was likely to benefit those on the planet who needed it most, or whether we might choose to measure the success of our society by gross national happiness [as they do in Bhutan], rather than by gross national product.12
Potential rescue site 4: executive offices
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hospital-acquired infections in the US account for an estimated 1.7 million infections and 99 000 associated deaths each year. A 2003 CDC study reported that 52 per cent of US doctors did not wash their hands between patients.13
Knowing that doctors tended to be reluctant to take direction from others, Connie Jastremski, chief nursing officer for Bassett Healthcare Network, knew she had a major challenge on her hands when she was called in to help deal with the hygiene problem. The creative idea of having all clinicians wear a badge reading ‘Ask me if I washed my hands’ was introduced, but it was not readily accepted. Jastremski recalls how in the beginning the badges were actually thrown at her, but eventually she was able to change the culture — with remarkable success.
Health executives are usually subject to the pressures of government regulatory requirements, so it is often difficult to generate creativity and innovation in this context. The Bassett Healthcare Network introduced a ‘paid sabbatical days’ system that places a big emphasis on ensuring leaders have the time and space to explore creative ideas.14
In all organisations, the executive offices will need to acknowledge, embrace and actively promote creative development. They will also, in turn, need to be supported to ensure that they have the time and the space to be innovative themselves.
Potential rescue site 5: research and development
To build a truly creative environment in the R&D department, the R&D team will need to have the opportunity to follow through on innovative ideas and see them to completion. More than just artistic achievements or products and ideas that are ‘similar but slightly different’, real innovation is both novel and useful. Innovation cannot be occasional or erratic; rather, it needs to be systematic and purposeful.15
For creativity to thrive in R&D over the long term a culture of innovation needs to be created. Such a culture can be represented as four quadrants of a system formed by the two axes ‘Introversion (internal care) — Extroversion (external organisational awareness)’ and ‘Flexibility (adaptability) — Control (top-down management orientation and bureaucracy)’.16 This system is striking in that although the concepts at the extremes of the axes appear incompatible, both extremes can provide the openness needed for transformational change and the readiness to take risks. Both can help to create a culture of adhocracy (as opposed to bureaucracy) in R&D if similar values are inculcated and if creative thinking is actively promoted as they reflect the need for both diversion and conversion. Adherence to strict rules and hierarchical systems are clearly detrimental to the establishment of an adhocracy culture, so it is important to ensure R&D is not limited by these.17
In order to involve people at all levels of the organisation in the R&D process, Toyota was clever enough to give everyone in the organisation a ‘quality control’ role. This immediately empowered people to make suggestions to head office about what could be done better, generating more ideas by involving everyone in the creative process. By moving this element of R&D to the factory floor, they effectively upskilled shopfloor employees to active contributors on a higher level.
R&D must learn to persuade finance, CEOs, boards and executive offices to contribute new ideas, helping all to understand that R&D is a valuable central (but not exclusive) place for creativity to be cultivated. There can be a reluctance to invest in R&D, as it is not possible to ‘plan’ creative outcomes. Many a company, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector, has been burned from poor results in R&D. But stable funding provides more freedom for innovation and ultimately produces better results.18 Pressures from the Fear Family must never be allowed to shut down ideas in this department and must be dealt with swiftly.
Potential rescue site 6: sales and marketing
After the bustling New York City metropolis, the town of Kingfield in Maine offers a stark contrast. It has one main street, one petrol station, one post office — probably just one of everything that might be considered vital to a small community. Everyone knows each other here, and has done for generations, which explains why the crime rate is low. When we fly in from the city we notice that everything is crisp and clean, from the fresh air to the pure snow, and there is no evidence of pollution. We’ve always been fascinated by the chutzpah of companies that can successfully market and sell something that is already plentiful, and the town of Kingfield demonstrates in practice exactly what ‘selling snow to Eskimos’ really means.
Many brands of bottled water in the US boast that their water offers the pure taste of ‘Maine spring water’ in a bottle. The water from Maine is so good that people are happy to pay for it all over the country. So the irony is not lost on us when our friend, an outdoor enthusiast who moved to Maine to enjoy pure country living and have this wonderful Maine water on tap, points out that the lady in front of us at the supermarket checkout is purchasing a large case of bottled water. Yes, you guessed it, Maine spring water! A four-year scientific study recently made public by the National Resources Defense Council found that bottled water sold in the United States is not necessarily cleaner or safer than most tap water, and we’d imagine nowhere could this be more true than in Kingfield, Maine. Yet some clever sales and marketing person had managed to sell Maine spring water to the people of Maine.
When you come to think of it, the very idea of selling water in a bottle is an incredible S&M coup. Thirty years ago bottling water barely existed as a business in the United States. By 2006 Americans were spending as much as $15 billion a year on spring water, more than they spent on iPods or movie tickets.19 Perhaps, like ordinary run-of-the-mill water, creativity has had poor branding for many years. Perhaps an association with dope-smoking artists engaged in not much more than cloud watching and navel gazing has meant that Creativity has not been given the serious attention it deserves. Until recently it has been difficult to convince companies to invest money on creative thinking skills because of the perception that it will involve no more than an irrelevant feel-good workshop or a fun day out. Now, however, there is a recognition that creative thinking is an investment in the future. Perhaps S&M should be utilised internally to help create a more positive and innovative culture.
Bottled water isn’t safer or healthier than tap water; in fact, in some cases bottled water has been found to have more bacteria. Anyone who chooses to buy water instead of a soft drink from a vending machine is undoubtedly making a healthier choice, but it’s still not a necessary choice. In most developed countries you could bring a bottle of water from home. In developing countries any source of clean water is so incredibly appreciated we forget that we have that option so readily available and free of charge. There are many who have to travel miles every day to collect clean water in a bucket to carry back home. And that water is not necessarily safe or clean. If an innovative S&M team can sell bottled water in Maine, perhaps they could think about solving global water access problems.
Creativity has the opportunity to thrive in the S&M department. Whatever starts in S&M can and should bring hope to all. They can certainly start by using their skills and a persuasive and integrated process to sell the need for creativity within the organisation.
Potential rescue site 7: the coffee shop
Why was Starbucks such a huge success when it started? And why have many other independent and chain coffee shops imitated the Starbucks model? Because they came up with the revolutionary idea of setting up coffee shops as if they were open living rooms. They recreated a home environment, designing a place where you could sit, relax, read, surf the net and wind down through long conversations with friends in comfortable, casual settings.
Many people felt it was the end of an era when we started watching video movies at home instead of going to the cinema. Now there has been a revival of interest in movie-going. In the same way, there has been a revival in the communal coffee culture. Lloyds of London was originally named after a coffee house. Influential scientists Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley solved significant scientific problems together over a freshly brewed pot of coffee.20 This culture is now being brought back into the organisation. In the new office building of One Raffles Quay, Singapore, where the Barclays Bank offices are located, a luxury coffee shop area has been designed for employees and their guests to connect over coffee. Electronic Arts (EA) in Singapore has gone one step further by adding a games room that encourages people to play together, including a basketball net and EA video games.
Of course, the coffee shop will fail to provide the environment for open thinking if it is seen as just another location for continuing work. We have developed the erroneous belief that the more work we create, the more productive we are being, and yet sometimes it is only when we switch off that our mind is really free to be creative. Yes, coffee shops may be a nice place to continue working while enjoying a change of scene, but they should also be a place where it’s possible to connect with other people and completely switch off in the middle of a busy day. Every day we should set up ‘Purposeful Opportunities’ (De Bono’s POs) to give our minds the chance to wander freely, and the coffee shop just might be the ideal place for this.
Potential rescue site 8: the lecture room
When you spend four hours a day walking through dangerous guerrilla territory and rugged terrain just to go to school, you need to be serious about learning. We spent some time teaching about learning and development on a large island in the middle of the Philippines, and during our time there we interviewed impoverished school children who did just this. We have never seen students who were more alert and enthusiastic or with a greater thirst for learning. Despite the challenges, or perhaps precisely because of them, there was an appreciation you seldom see in children from more affluent areas. In stark contrast to the indifferent, unenthusiastic or even hostile attitude of many of the children we had worked with previously, these children valued the opportunity to learn and to better their lives through education.
After up to 14 years of schooling our children receive a relative ranking and mark that is supposed to reflect their level of intelligence and capability. By the time they hit the workplace many will see learning and development as a ‘tick and flick’ process which will be dictated by HR and/or training. Some may value this as part of their personal growth and development; others can become cynical about the usefulness and purpose of it. By the time we come along to run workshops for organisations, sometimes we find that 80 per cent of our effort needs to go into developing an appreciation of the learning process. We are constantly battling against the problem that many people feel it’s simply not worth taking time out for personal or group development. Participants sit in a workshop worrying about the work that will be piling up in their Inbox. Worse still, some continue to check their email and field calls during the day on their tiny mobile offices.
Where organisations continuously transform themselves through wisely facilitated learning opportunities, individuals benefit and the organisation flourishes. The organisations that learn and adapt the fastest will best survive in changing times. On the other hand, organisations that are trapped by established mental patterns and fail to learn flexibility will inexorably flounder.21
An inventor is someone who hasn’t taken his education too seriously.22 While failing exams is an indication that you are not up to standard in the education system and can mean it’s the end of the road for you, inventors must learn to fail over and over again and believe that what they’re doing is still valuable and worthwhile. In the education system it may take only one failure after a series of successes to be cast out of the system, but for an inventor it takes only one success after a series of failures to achieve a positive outcome. Failing intelligently — learning from setbacks, and growing through them — is the single most important survival skill; it will motivate people to learn and propagate creative thinking for life.
Potential rescue site 9: the playground
Google is undoubtedly high on the list of ‘best places to work’. Apart from the allocated hours employees can devote to creative thinking pursuits, Google also offers great benefits, such as free meals and doctors. The Silicon Valley Google office is not just a great place to work, it’s also a great place to play!23 With a swimming spa, on-campus beach volleyball courts, foosball, video games, pool tables, table tennis and roller hockey twice a week in the parking lot, one wonders when the employees find time to get their ‘serious’ work done. It’s not surprising that Google receives 1300 resumés a day.24
Free play creates a mental state in which it is possible to feel safe to explore ideas without restrictions. Parents who try to maximise their children’s education opportunities by shuffling them between countless after-school activities and planning rigorous study schedules may actually be in danger of shutting down the innovative, creative part of their brains as the exhausted children struggle to get through their day. Free play, as we have mentioned, is one of the conduits needed to divert brain resources from dealing with the primitive survival functions so they can access creative thinking. If creative thinking is not accessed regularly, strong pathways in the brain cannot be established, and the ability to think creatively can actually wither away.
Some may complain that there is no space in their workplace for play. But play can be a state of mind or an attitude. A creative mind doesn’t distinguish between reality and imagination, so mental exercise is a powerful way to play no matter where you are, and it undoubtedly keeps the morale up.
Behavioural scientist Jack Stuster spent time in Antarctica to research how to keep isolated teams motivated. His research findings would be applied to isolated teams in a variety of environments, including on space stations. Stuster discovered that the physical environment makes a huge difference to team morale in these situations, right down to specific details such as the colour of walls. As he says, ‘Researchers have discovered that the less meaningful the work is the more important aesthetics should be. The paradox is that people can endure and perform under amazing circumstances But a good environment enhances the chances of success’.25
You may not be able to change many of the specifics of your work environment, but you can at least ensure that your own workspace and those you may have influence over are conducive to creative thinking and have a positive impact on morale. It might not be a world-saving project, and not everyone can build a playground to make work more fun, but we can all be responsible in some way for helping to build a playful, creative environment. And we can start to appreciate how a playful state of mind can seriously contribute to genuine development.
Bringing the bedroom to the boardroom
It’s a common fear that more crime takes place at night than in daylight because the criminal has more cover — although British Home Office statistics show that most criminals need light to see what they are doing! It might be discomforting to know that 60 per cent of burglaries in the UK happen when the home is occupied, often while people are asleep.26
Creativity killers are all around us and can strike anywhere, at any time, but the resuscitators are on hand too. This emergency rescue crew is always on call to come to the place they are most needed. In fact, one of the busiest times for creative revival is at night while people are sleeping. Sleep is an important opportunity for the brain to rejuvenate and recover from the day’s activities, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is also when the most profound creative development can take place.
It has been clearly established that sleep deprivation can be detrimental for performance and judgement. For example, when lab rats are kept awake for hours by providing them with stimulating activities and toys, it has been found that small groups of neurons begin flipping over into a sleep-like state, eventually impairing their judgement and performance.27 Lack of sleep has also been linked to aggression and disordered sexual behaviour as well as depression.28 Professional athletes are often advised to take a short nap before competing to ensure they are in peak condition. Chronic sleep loss can lead to a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in glucose metabolism, 11 per cent reduction in the time it takes to reach a state of exhaustion, and lapses in attention and reactivity. Extra sleep improves split-second timing, reaction time and alertness.29 Other benefits of a good night’s sleep range from weight loss to improved heart health.
We know intuitively that ‘down time’ stimulates creativity. When we suggest to someone that they ‘sleep on it’ to help them arrive at a solution, we are allowing their divergent thinking to work and giving their imagination room to breathe. It increases the total space in the brain that is open to new ideas. ‘Free thinking’ time allows the mind to wander into new territories and stumble on new ideas; the brain can slip into alpha brainwave activity, during which the mind is not specifically focused. As Csikszentmihalyi, reveals, ‘The content of the conscious line of thought is taken up by the subconscious, and there, out of reach of the censorship of awareness, the abstract scientific problem has a chance to reveal itself for what it is.’30 Unfortunately these days, as most people’s time is strictly scheduled and structured, there is very little time for ‘free thinking’.
The mind uses sleep as an opportunity to reboot and problem-solve, says Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett. In one experiment, Barrett had college students focus on a homework problem each night before they went to sleep. At the end of a week, about half the students said they had dreamt about the problem and about a quarter had ‘a dream that contained the answer’. According to Barrett, in the same way that our brain works to solve problems when we are awake, the mind also works at resolving issues when we are dreaming.31
When people are asked to name a place they’d most like to be, they don’t say ‘in the middle of a busy, crowded city’ or ‘in a high-rise office’; they most often name a calm, peaceful place of natural beauty — a pristine beach or a mountain retreat. By escaping to such a place, whether literally or simply in our mind, we can induce the calm state that will foster creative thinking. By mentally switching over into a ‘psychologically distant’ state, we separate ourselves from the pressures and stresses of the ‘here and now’ and open up to creativity. According to the Construal Level Theory (CLT) of psychological distance,32 it is possible to create that same sense of psychological distance by simply thinking differently about a particular problem, taking another person’s perspective, or imagining that the question is unreal or unlikely. A team at Indiana University has found a clear link between the ability to increase psychological distance and creativity. They have demonstrated that there are a number of simple, practical things we can do to increase creativity, including travelling to faraway places (either physically or in the mind), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us and considering unlikely alternatives to reality. Travelling and living abroad have been found to be linked with creativity.33 It has even been suggested that our modern cosmopolitan communities, which enable contact with a wide variety of cultural elements (such as people, music and food), give us opportunities to think more abstractly.34
If at this stage in your life you can only dream about that exotic travel, then take a look around you. Next time you go to your local Chinese or Thai restaurant you might take the time to talk to the staff to find out how they cook and what makes their lives different. All cities have their culturally rich areas: in certain parts of Los Angeles it is possible to imagine you are in Mexico, London or India, and in most major cities in the world you can go to Chinatown, where you can feel like you’ve just stepped into downtown Shanghai. All cities have their areas of diversity, and rather than be threatened by this we have learned to embrace the experience, especially countries that pride themselves on multicultural diversity. Perhaps rather than focusing on the negative impact of the city (the pressures, the stresses), you can use the opportunities the city creates to find that psychological distance you need to be creative.
Of course, travelling to another country alone does not guarantee you will be more open to new ideas. You will find many Australian tourists travelling to Bali on their home airline (Qantas), eating Australian food (steak, peas and mash), drinking Aussie beers at Aussie-style pubs while watching Aussie football on TV, and staying at hermetically sealed Westernised hotels. These tourists somehow manage to completely bypass the local culture.
The lesson here is that open-mindedness is a state of mind rather than a location. Whether you live in an impoverished area of a city, a plush beachside suburb in the ‘insular peninsula’ region of North Sydney or an exotic tropical island, it is possible to learn to be open to new ideas and ways of thinking. So now you have a justifiable excuse to nap or daydream during work hours. But if you can’t afford to be caught sleeping on the job, and the boss won’t go with the idea that you are being creative, then at least try to change the environment you are in so that it supports creative thinking. Bring the bedroom to the office floor, and sleep on it.