Managing a Strong Creative Team

The key to managing a strong creative team involves hiring the right people for the culture of your business and empowering them. Empowering your staff creates ownership and shows them that you respect them. It produces work that reflects the level of commitment your staff has to the business.

When you create a nurturing environment that respects good work and sees bad work as learning opportunities, it helps build a culture of innovation that is inclusive and inspiring. It's important that your people feel (and know) that you have their backs.

Understanding that the ultimate goal is to create an efficient and profitable workplace, protect your staff from things that waste everyone's time or create unnecessary situations. Doing this shows your employees the quality of their work environment is a priority to you.

Be aware that you are being observed. The vastness of a leader's responsibility can sometimes cause him/her to lose touch with the emotional sensitivity of employees. Realize your performance is always being judged.

And lastly, remember that everything you do affects everyone on your team. Your bad day can ruin their good day. Your goofy dance can break them out of a creative slump. We're all human, we're all friends. Remember that and you'll always have success.

The Wicked Tusk of the Narwhal

“You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing to you how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.”
 – Pablo Neruda from the poem the Enigmas

In the poem Neruda speaks of the narwhal, that is an odd looking whale with a tusk that protrudes from its mouth. An animal feared and once thought to be a monster. The creature is used to illustrate how we make snap judgment. The answer is relative to the asker. People live within their own values and morals. We are all slaves to our own experiences. A person who lives a peaceful life is affected by cruelty differently than a person who had never known a life without cruelty. It’s natural to see how difficult it is making judgments on choices or what is right and wrong when the fact that all of us are so tightly wound in our experiences and fears that it makes highly improbable that any of us will ever see things the same. Understanding people instead of vilifying them for believing differently is instrumental in the evolution of humanity and the key to the development of our own understanding of our creative capacity.

Left Brain vs Right Brain

The "Right Brain" Creative side feeds content to the "Left Brain" the analytical side so that it can be executed properly. Successful implementation of an idea inspires more ideas and the circle continues. It's not so important that you are either right brain or left brain. What is important is the understanding that one needs the other to innovate and succeed. 

Creative Courage Workshop at American Institute of Architects Las Vegas Chapter Design Conferance.

These are photos of a workshop I did on Friday September 20,2013. I had 3 hours so I was able to include a creative exercise. I gave 6 different groups 6 different props and had them come up with Names, What they do, and had them write a commercial spot for them. The result was very fun. You can see the video of one of them here:



A little taste of my workshop. Audience participation.

The Courage of Knowing by Alex Raffi

The wind pressed on a smile

We gather our intentions and wait

Our ticking life tips us off to the waiting calm of our discoveries. 

Simmering

It's the noticing that escapes us

The silent scream of invention in our ear.

We are surrounded by it in its silken blackness.

Slightly waving in the breeze.

Light peeks between the drapes. 

Now... Now... Now...

A soft slow flash of knowing.

There and gone again. 

But always there, waiting.

We stretch and reach for it from our seats.

We fail and learn and live with the courage of knowing

And that is enough, for now.

Nuance

Nuance surprises us. We often don’t seek it out. It just sneaks up on us. It is the unexpected insertion of life into the adequate expression of a thing. We don’t consciously miss it, but definitely know when it happens.

You see this very clearly in music. An amateur cellist for example can take a sheet of music and play every note perfectly. Not one error. Not one missed beat. Yet the same sheet of music in the hands of a seasoned cellist result in something very different. The same notes are also played in the same order and tempo yet there is a life within the melody you don’t get from the amateur. There is fullness to the execution that only comes from complete faith in intuition and skill. This is also true in our creativity. The creative process is a skill to be mastered. We begin to focus less on the acquisition of ideas and innovations and begin to act instinctively and trust our judgment. Trust it so deeply in fact that we are able to just live in the process. In the same way be become familiar with a musical instrument.  Our understanding and implementation of it at its fullest capacity becomes a common practice. We then begin to act instinctively and become less focused on our technique and more focused on the experience of expression. We live it rather than execute it. It becomes equivalent to our expression rather than what we do to express ourselves. It is the moment when you become creatively free.

The Rain