Creativity in a crisis
By Peter FullagarWhat role does creativity and innovation have during a crisis? We explore four important types of creativity from personal to transformation and how they can play a role.
What role does creativity and innovation have in the current global crisis? With the urgent, pressing matter of saving lives, isn’t innovation and creativity a luxury for more prosperous and stable times? Many may think it’s time to retreat, reduce to skeleton operations, furlough, defer innovation initiatives and wait to see what the world looks like afterwards.
I’d argue the opposite is true. That in this time of crisis, creativity is more important than ever not only as a critical part of the response, demonstrated by many examples seen in recent weeks but just as critically, as a fundamental tool to adapt, rebuild and move forwards in the post-COVID 19 world.
Here we look at four types of creative response to the current crisis, inspired by the 4C’s model of creativity developed by Kaufmann and Beghetto. The 4C model spans a spectrum from the personal, everyday creativity to transformational game changers and demonstrates the different ways individuals and organisations can make novel and useful contributions to the situation.
Personal Creativity
At the simplest level, there is a role for individuals to use creativity in their daily lives (known as mini-c in the 4C model). This type of creativity isn’t going to change the world but with life in lockdown, this is the type of creativity can help mental wellbeing and develop solutions to those everyday mini-challenges.
These ideas often can feel novel and useful to you but won’t necessarily be to others. In the current crisis, It’s in how families redesigning daily life to cope with the challenges of homeschooling. It’s trying video-based apps like Houseparty as a new way to socialise. It’s getting experimental in the kitchen - like sprinkling coffee granules and cocoa on vanilla ice cream to make a mock Tiramisu. (Trust me, it’s better than it sounds!) This is personal creativity that’s new and useful to you personally.
What can you do? From hobbies to cooking, to coping with isolation, now is a great time to get creative in your personal life. But don’t just settle with your first idea, look for inspiration then generate a range of solutions first. What’s your most creative answer to the question?
Experimental Creativity
At the next level up (known as small-c) we see a groundswell of enthusiasts, individuals and communities flexing their creative muscles and experimenting with ideas not just for themselves but for the benefit of others as well. A recent good example is National Health Supporters, a network of medical students not experienced enough to help on the front line, but offering practical support instead to NHS staff, including childcare, grocery shopping and pet care.
We see communities of 3D home printing enthusiasts coming together to become micro-factories producing free PPE visors for frontline workers. Teachers, thrown in at the deep end, are for the first time now running virtual classrooms and making video lessons. Or check out Excellent Ideas Only, a website built to offer coping strategies and activities during the lockdown.
With Experimental creativity, you will often see experimental combinations of existing ideas brought together to answer a new need, and new skills are often developed in the process.
What can you do? What are the new needs that have emerged that you think you can help solve? What’s your equivalent of a 3D printer, or website building skills that can be put to good use elsewhere? You could find a hackathon to join, such as coronavirus hackathon, where virtual groups are getting together to developing new solutions for the post-COVID world. Or sign up for open collaboration programmes like openIDEO’s COVID-19 communication challenge.
Adaptive Creativity
This third level is the realm of professionals (also known as pro-c) where experts in their relative fields respond creatively by adapting their know-how, capability and resource to the crisis. One of my favourites is the UK governments solution to the need for more hospital beds by adapting empty conference and entertainment venues into the temporary Nightingale hospitals in a matter of days.
There are many other examples here including all the firms responding to sudden unfulfilled demand for ventilators and PPE. Dyson and F1 teams were just some of the businesses to offer engineering, design and manufacture knowhow to respond to the government call for Ventilators. Burberry recently announced they are converting one of its coat factories to make hospital gowns. And it’s not just big brands, local Bristol gin distillery Pyschopomp have switched to making alcohol as hand sanitiser.
Outside of the health sector, companies are also having to offer adaptations on their offers. Tourist businesses like airBnB and Hasting Contemporary Art Gallery are trialling virtual experiences. The Scouts, an organisation synonymous with the great outdoors has inverted its offer to promote ‘the great indoors’ by suggesting activities to entertain and educate children stuck at home.
What can you do? What are the new constraints in your business and what are the ideas that pro-actively respond to this constraint? Is it time to gather new insights on how your users' world has changed? Is it time to give more internal freedom to employees to explore ways to adapt, like google 20% time spent on self-directed projects? It may also be time to reconsider existing ideas that didn’t fit the old world but could be relevant for now or the new future. There is also funding for ideas that respond to the impact of COVID-19, for more details check out these KTN resources.
Transformational Creativity
The largest scale of creativity (known as Big-C) is the rarest, yet has the biggest impact. It’s kind that wins Nobel Prizes and transforms the way we live and think. History shows that crises are often stimulus to transformation innovation. Just look at the transformations that resulted from the crises of WWII and the ensuing Cold War - development like radar and jet engines that enabled the modern aviation industry or the race for satellite technology that has led to the GPS technology that we take for granted. (Well, we did when we were allowed to leave the house that is!)
In the current crisis, it is too early to say what will be remembered as the transformative innovations. The labs currently working tirelessly on vaccine development are likely to create the first, much needed, examples of transformational creativity, but history will no doubt reveal the less obvious examples.
What can you do? Transformational creativity takes time, often decades of work, and is often not recognised at its moment of genesis. Those exploring the next generation of transformational ideas are likely to be building on years of previous work and investigation, like those who were already working in the field of pandemic vaccine development. It’s more a matter of sticking to conviction, like Picasso who continued to paint while based in Paris throughout the Second World War.
Creativity from constraints
For many, the current crisis will be seen as a constraint that restricts creativity and innovation, however, history shows that crises are often times when we see an acceleration. A recent study in the science of creativity by researchers at City University showed that creativity and constraints have an inverted U relationship. Too many, or too few constraints that are indeed restrictive, but having a degree of constrains does, in fact, help boost creativity.
Actively exploring what constraints you face could, therefore, help move towards generating new solutions. Take the Hastings Contemporary Art Gallery as an example. They can’t have visitors during the lockdown, so have been experimenting with a robot from Bristol Robotics Lab that goes around the gallery a virtual gallery guide, arguably allowing them to now meet a much wider, global audience. Innovation writer Steve Johnson, uses the term Exaptation, to describe this kind of adaptive innovation. Taken from a biological term meaning the process when features acquire functions for which they were not originally developed.
While the immediate focus has been on alleviating pressures in the medical system, attention is now beginning to shift to the longer-term response and making sense of this brave new world. Finding a path out of the crisis will take all four types of creativity: Personal, Experimental, Adaptive and Transformational, and ultimately, through embracing creativity in a crisis.
We’d love to know what you think and hear about your examples of creativity in a crisis?