Zen and the Art of Creativity

By Wiktoria Galara

Ever-curious about the Science of Creativity and how we can apply it to our day-to-day creative practices, we’ve been exploring the links between creativity and health. In this article we’ll be exploring the topic of mindfulness and creativity and how bringing mindfulness to your innovation practice could be deliberately harnessed as a tool to boost the creative power of teams.

Bringing Mindfulness to Your Innovation Practice

Broadly speaking, mindfulness can be defined as the quality, or state, of being fully present and conscious of where we are and what we’re doing.

Everyone has the potential to be mindful. Some of us can engage in mindful behaviour unprompted, while others may need a little guidance—much like creativity.

What Does Science Say About Mindfulness and Creativity?

One school of thought is that creativity is a mindset or headspace that we can choose to enter into. Current research literature shows that mindfulness and creativity are both associated with the default mode network (DMN), areas of the brain which involve self-related thinking and mind-wandering. This network is active when an individual’s mind is at rest and not focussed on the outside world, or a specific task. Interestingly, it’s also referred to as the task-negative network.

When engaged in creative tasks such as idea generation, individuals often enter a state of internal reflection. It’s when aha moments and breakthrough ideas often arise. And, it's where our DMN comes into play, allowing the integration of diverse information and the formation of novel connections—both essential aspects of creativity. So, in this sense, mindful meditation can help us enter a calm headspace, activating the default mode network and making it ready to receive creative thoughts (Beaty et al., 2014).

So, how might we apply the science to our creative practice?

Five Constructs for Mindfulness in Your Creative Practice

In creative practice, we can apply five constructs of mindfulness that each relate to an aspect or activity in creative, innovation work. These constructs are: observation, attention, non-reactivity, non-judging and describing.

Whether it be a sensemaking task, an alignment working session, or an ideation workshop, whatever part of the innovation process you might be in, you can dial-up or dial down how you apply different techniques for each of the five constructs to achieve your desired output. And, regular application of the constructs might help you be more mindful, not only in your creative practice, it may also have a positive impact on your health and well-being as well.

So, let’s dive into each of the constructs and how they might help you and your teams.

1. Observation

   Often the first step of mindfulness, observing is the act of paying close attention to your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.

   Observation of external environments can provide a rich source of inspiration. If we are open to observing what’s around us, we’re more likely to make connections between what’s seemingly unrelated, or see things from different angles. Observation of our internal thoughts helps us to be more aware of our mental and emotional patterns, so we might respond in a consciously, non-habitual manner.

   In the context of innovation, unconscious habitual responses, or our biases can hinder progress and even limit the generation of novel ideas. For example, confirmation bias—the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Yet, once we are aware of such bias(es), we can take steps to tackle this by ensuring diverse perspectives are gathered on a specific problem, or by using an evaluation criteria to objectively test what makes a novel idea.
   

   How to activate observation? 

   • Try open monitoring meditation—it encourages your mind to observe the present with no specific focus, you can try it out here. Research shows this is beneficial for divergent thinking and tasks such as ideation when we are observing and looking to be inspired by new things (Colzato et al., 2012).

   • And, what if you are experiencing a creative block? Try mindful observation—intentionally engaging your senses throughout the day by taking time to pause and observe sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures in your environment. Pay attention to details you might usually overlook. Check out this video to give it a go! 
     
     

2. Attention

   Attention to what is happening in the present, being in the moment, and focussing on one thing at a time.

   Engaging attention can enhance your creativity, helping you stay fully engaged with a task or solving a particular problem. Research shows that when you give your undivided attention to an activity, you're also more likely to access flow state—a cognitive mode where creativity flourishes. 

   Attention is extremely valuable during convergent thinking tasks. For example, when you are sensemaking insights, making critical decisions, or prioritising on critical next steps. It can, at times, feel uncomfortable or cognitively challenging, but it does become much easier if you are able to engage a level of flow state whilst being present in your task-at-hand.
   

   How to activate attention? 

   • Try attention mindfulness—dedicate your full awareness on a specific object, sound, sensation or feeling to cultivate a strong sense of attention. Research shows this can facilitate better convergent thinking, but do be aware of your mood as a mediating factor (Yoshida et al., 2020). 

   • Try the Pomodoro Technique—a method that helps activate sustained concentration and reduces mental fatigue by focussing on a task for 25 minutes at a time. And, for those of you who like listening to music whilst you work, the Practise Flow Podcast provides beta wave music in short chunks to help you keep focus.
     
     

3. Non-reactivity

   Not reacting impulsively to thoughts and emotions.

   When trying to come up with a new idea or solving a complex problem, we may get stuck and instead of rationally dealing with what we can, in a structured way—we can become increasingly agitated, which ultimately impacts our rational, creative output.

   Instead of impulsively reacting to uncomfortable creative challenges, non-reactivity encourages us to calmly assess the situation, consider alternative approaches. This helps keep our brain in that creative state with the default mode network activated to maintain cognitive and creative momentum.
   

   How to cultivate ‘non-reactivity’?

   • Make sure to build regular breaks into your working sessions in order to pause and reflect. This is especially relevant for ideation work as it will give you a chance to recognise your emotions and reflect on how they might be influencing the task-at-hand.

   • Try to use evaluative techniques such as ‘Rose, Thorn, Bud’ to add a level of objectivity and well-thought through evaluation of what you have achieved, whether it’s reviewing a complete project or small stages such as the outputs of a user co-creation working session. 
     
     

4. Non-judgement

   Non-judgement involves accepting your thoughts and feelings without evaluating them, or labelling them as good or bad. It is a fundamental aspect of mindfulness and being a design researcher.

   In design research and exploratory insight work, non-judgement allows us to hear what consumers say and feel as we stay open-minded to learn from their attitudes and opinions—helping to build empathy and create stronger outputs from our design research efforts.

   It is also critical during ideation work. A key tenet of good practice in brainstorming is to defer judgement, allowing you to explore early ideas without self-criticism, fear of failure, or suffer the judgement of others. It creates a sense of psychological safety and will help teams happily get to stronger ideas.
   

   How to cultivate ‘non-judgement’? 

   • Try to identify moments in which it is hard to defer judgement. These are moments to watch out for—when we are able to recognise judgemental thoughts and label them, we can more easily work towards non-judgement and accept our thoughts as observations rather than fact.

   • Apply ‘Yes, and!’ thinking—borrowed from the world of improv theatre, we use ‘yes, and!’ not only as a mindset but as a practice to help build on the ideas of others, as well as your own, no matter how unconventional or imperfect they might seem, at first.
     
     

5. Describing

Bringing thoughts, ideas and experiences to life through words.

In innovation, so much of what we do is rooted in telling compelling stories about the ideas we generate and the concepts we build—it’s critical to creating tangible products, services, or user experiences that land. 

Being able to articulate your creative vision by describing your ideas doesn’t just help explain your thinking to others, it also helps bring clarity to your own thoughts. And, it’s important to remember that non-verbal communication can be just as useful. Whether it’s role playing a series of actions, capturing a short video, or drawing some quick sketches.

How to cultivate ‘describing’?

• Try creative writing or journalling—two common techniques used to help translate our thoughts and emotions into written or spoken words. The more we practise expressing our thoughts and feelings, the better we become at being able to use them in the act of describing. 

• Use guided imagery or visualisations techniques—build a vivid image in your mind of concepts or scenarios you might want to explore, conjuring all the tiny details of different textures, sights, sounds, even smells that help you paint a richer, mental image. It will be easier to describe. Fun fact: these techniques are used as a form of guided meditation and by pro-athletes to help visualise their wins.

In Practice

Ever curious, we’ve been exploring mindfulness within our team, running small experiments to test the five constructs. In order to benchmark our performance before and after mindful activities, we have each measured our individual trait mindfulness—a score which reflects individual differences in levels of mindfulness across situations and time.

If you’re interested in how your mindfulness measures up, you can find out here.

And, how do we apply the constructs in our work?

In a recent workshop, we ran a short meditation exercise after a busy morning, before diving into ideation activities. This helped to refresh the team and bring them back to a focussed yet exploratory mindset during a critical stage of the process.

Many of the team members also felt an increase in energy by simply taking time to pause and reflect, showing the great potential of using meditation as an energiser during a workshop or a long meeting. We’ve even been told that the team have adopted short walks in place of quick round table meetings!

In Conclusion

The role of mindfulness in enhancing creativity and its potential applications for both individual and group work are becoming increasingly recognised. And, there exists a significant body of research, specifically in neurobiology, that demonstrates a link between mindfulness and creativity (Lebuda et al., 2016).

In our work at INDUSTRY of Us, we see the potential of mindfulness through the application of five constructs: observation, attention, non-reactivity, non-judgement, describing. Applying each of the constructs could help individuals and teams unlock creative potential, and boost mental health and well-being at the same time!

As with all skills, it’s important to nurture and strengthen our capabilities. And, in doing so, we can uncover the mindfulness tools that work best for different situations and for different people. So, we look forward to experimenting more with our constructs and further integrating them into our creative practice.

What mindfulness tools or techniques do you use? And, what techniques or exercises do you like to do, to boost your creativity, or your health?

A few interesting references

• Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Lykins, E., Button, D., Krietemeyer, J., Sauer, S., Walsh, E., Duggan, D., & Williams, J. M.(2008). Construct validity of the five facet mindfulness questionnaire in meditating and nonmeditating samples. Assessment, 15(3), 329–342.

• Beaty, R. E., Benedek, M., Wilkins, R. W., Jauk, E., Fink, A., Silvia, P. J., Hodges, D. A., Koschutnig, K., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest. Neuropsychologia, 64, 92–98. 

• Colzato, L.S., Ozturk, A. and Hommel, B. (2012). Meditate to create: The impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 3. 

• Kazuki Yoshida, Kenta Takeda, Tetsuko Kasai, Shiika Makinae, Yui Murakami, Ai Hasegawa, Shinya Sakai. (2020).Focused attention meditation training modifies neural activity and attention: longitudinal EEG data in non-meditators, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 15, Issue 2, Pages 215–224.

• Lebuda, I., Zabelina, D.L. and Karwowski, M. (2016). Mind full of ideas: A meta-analysis of the mindfulness–creativity link. Personality and Individual Differences, 93, pp. 22–26.