Coming from a background that includes creative consultancy, I came into my first academic post with a solid sense of how a recession can delimit creative experimentation and innovation.
I started freelancing in 2010, still very much in the aftermath of the housing market crash, so I had to learn fast how to be market-led and solve problems in a seriously lean environment. This is tough if you’ve spent the last several years developing a sense of your mission and vision as a creative--and it has nothing obviously to do with the boring problems that need solving by the average client or business.
The blank page and the blue sky were always virtual.
It’s also tough because the first couple of years in the working world involve learning how important context is: local and national politics, news headlines, even the personal and professional contexts of your employer or client will rapidly influence what people want to buy.
At university, almost every student-led idea emerges in a beautifully blue sky. We might interrogate it by bringing relevant contexts into the mix, but in the (virtual) classroom we allow things be born on a blank page. Not so much once you get beyond it, where the page is never remotely blank.
The creative impulse is generally to want to build a world from scratch, which requires that clear space, but in reality that never existed to begin with: too many constraints, realities, conditions to consider, things that change, factors that appear or disappear, people who don’t show up, funding that doesn’t come through, micromanagers, pandemics. The blank page and the blue sky were always virtual.
In reality you have to get permission to do the things you want to do, usually by proving these things are worth doing in the world as it exists. And that permission can be a huge ask, particularly when budget holders are operating in a moment of seemingly unprecedented risk in some cases.
Displace ego with purpose.
That’s why it’s crucial to start with the problem the user has—in the mode of Design Thinking—not the talent or passion you have, nor the great idea you want to get going. Start with their needs, not your excitement. There will be time for that.
That is, once you’ve spent some graft addressing the stated need, whatever that may be, then engage your creative skill to orchestrate in some innovation on the side—quietly, where the risk is low.
This means partly displacing ego with purpose. A lot of beauty and critical thinking and innovation can be smuggled into a risk-averse industrial setting this way.
Because organisations are in a catch-22 at moments like this; nobody thinks they can afford to take a risk, but we badly need new thinking and solutions that can only be generated by introducing a degree of risk. Lacking a more perfect solution, what I’m advocating here is ninja innovation—covert, skilled, invisible as necessary—the innovation nobody asked for but everybody needs.
The most consistently employable will be whose who can quietly smuggle in elegant solutions in low-risk ways, quietly and fairly evaluate their effectiveness, and then demonstrate the value: the proof is in the pudding.