Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Practical Creativity

Creativity may get overlooked and unfortunately taken for granted, but it has a big impact on our lives—including our work lives

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

I’ve always loved movies. Sometimes, even regardless of how good a movie is, I easily get lost in the stories and adventures and drama.

I’m also often impressed with how creative both the screen writers are (those who came up with the concept and tale) and with the director and support teams that bring it all to life.

I recently went to watch the latest Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning movie and came out of the theater wondering just how they filmed so many of the spectacular action sequences. The set-ups and risks are unrealistic and crazy but somehow it all seems so real.

Even filmmakers whose work I don’t always enjoy, like Guillermo del Toro and Quentin Tarantino, I admire because I don’t know how they come up with certain ideas and dialogue and characters. Some of the scenes in their movies are just brilliant and understandably become part of pop culture.

But beyond entertainment—which I love—how useful is such creativity?

Turns out that the world around us, and in particular our work-worlds, would be unrecognizable without it. This type of practical work-day creativity may get overlooked and unfortunately taken for granted, but it has a big impact on our lives.

Advertising guru Bernice Fitz-Gibbon points out that “creativeness often consists of turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?”

As the old proverb says, necessity is the mother of invention. And while you may laugh at a clever scene in a movie, it won’t improve your life like a proper-fitting pair of shoes can.

Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi wrote that “creativity is to see what everyone else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.”

When I’ve been on construction sites, I’ve marvelled at some of the tools and machines that have such specific and useful purposes. The people that use those tools are skilled, but whoever first came up with them changed how they and others would work in the future.

My uncle, also named André van Heerden, has done a lot of research and work on how to be an effective leader. He argues that “to be a leader demands creativity. Fortunately, we are all equipped to be creative.

“The human intellect is a problem-solving phenomenon, constantly evaluating the way it finds the world and pondering how it might change things for the better. It is a creative power in search of challenges. Directed by hubris, it is dangerous; guided by love, it is the hope of humanity.”

If you were asked what invention has saved the most lives in history, what would you answer? Electricity? Vaccines? Pasteurization? Those have all saved millions of lives, but the biggest life-saver is also the least glamourous: wastewater systems.

So, while creative filmmakers and authors may get a lot of the glory, it’s important for us to not overlook the more practical and useful creativity that’s all around us. It may make you a better leader, it may make your job easier, or it may just inspire you to create something that helps those around you.

Practical Creativity

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