The creative process is difficult to adequately capture or describe in simple technical terms.
For many companies and organisations the need to create new ideas and turn them into products, ways of working or services has never been more important. Yet in my work I keep finding places where the creative process is squeezed out by the pressure of ‘real’ work just when leaders should be exploring new ideas.
In order to help some individuals who claim not to have any creative capacity – a fact I never agree with – I’ve been working on some metaphorical ways of considering the creative process. These metaphors are included in the following poem which forms one of an eventual set of 70 – one for each characteristic of the Ceannas Leadership Index.
Creativity
We change our world,
With the power of ideas;
Which gently lift to view,
Like quiet sunrise,
Diminishing the shadows,
In gradual revelation;
Or softly grow,
Through passing days,
Nourished by the soil,
Tended into life,
By careful hands;
Or simply beaten into being,
All smoke and noise,
Shaped and formed,
Then tempered in the forge;
Yet see that instant,
Where life takes hold,
Where moments earlier,
None existed,
In vitro of the mind, synapsed,
Arcing across divides,
Our own Large Hadron Collider,
Hurtling idle thoughts,
Towards each other,
Ever accelerating, until,
Exploding,
Fragments coalesce,
Changing our world,
Never to be the same,
One particle,
At a time.
