Tragedy of the creatives

It's been a while since I last blogged, and many things have inspired me to start blogging again. It will take a lot more effort on my part to work on my blogging articles nowadays, what with the presence of my twin bundle of joys recently, but I think in order to maintain my sanity, I should continue using this platform as an outlet for some of my professional rants.

I was honoured to be part of the group of educational skunkworks of sorts, that is looking to make some changes in the educational scene, although maybe perhaps, for a start, a rather small one. But it is a good start, and I definitely can see the potential for such a small band of outliers to work on something, that would eventually create a domino effect that would eventually effect the mainstream masses. What I really got out of the first conversations that I had was this idea and potential of creativity, and its implications on leadership. I'm not going to dwell any deeper into what transpired during the discussions, but I thought it was one of those intellectual discourses that freshens my cognitive elements, and sets me thinking, about what it is really like to be creative.

No doubt there have been numerous articles and other collaterals that talk about creativity from different perspectives, but I thought I just like to pick up on the idea of having some degree of structures in place in order to promote creativity. I know this might sound oxymoronic, but the irony of creativity is that we would have to know and understand where our boundaries are, before realising how to work within (or out of) these boundaries, in order to get or be creative.

I came across the term 'straight-jacketing' and I thought the word is perhaps an apt yet beautiful description of what would need to be done, in order to induce creativity. Isn't the existence of barriers and limitations a precursor to the development of creativity? Isn't the understanding of known boundaries, or of knowing what has been done before, a catalyst for one to be creative...and to be creating something new? I guess that's is where the term 'out of the box' come into the picture, when one is talking about creativity.