The six pillars of creativity

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You’re more creative than you think.

That’s one of Saku Mantere’s main lessons from his new undergraduate course, where he challenges students to express themselves through creative work.

Mantere is a professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Desautels Faculty of Management and an expert on creativity. He’s also a jazz musician, a creative writer, and a student of all things artistic. Through his personal curiosity and years of research, he identified six ways to understand creativity, which inform how he teaches it to his students.

“An amount of creativity, arguably, is essential for any type of work,” said Mantere on the McGill Delve podcast.

Whether you’re an engineer or a graphic designer, understanding creativity can help you bring more of it into your life and work. And as a manager, it can also help you structure your environment to support creative work in your organization.

Six ways to understand creativity

Creativity is inherent to every person but it can take many forms, explained Mantere. Especially at work. Contextual factors like corporate culture, boss-employee hierarchies, workload, and countless other variables can influence a person’s ability to be creative in the workplace. And different people might require different conditions to properly flourish.

The variability inherent to creative work can make it difficult to understand and cultivate. But Mantere boils it down to six core pillars.

1. Play

Creativity is something that comes out of play, explained Mantere. When our bellies are full, we have a roof over our heads, and we feel physically and emotionally safe, our impulse is often to start messing around. And through play, we can cultivate a fundamental part of creativity: fun!

Allowing time for play can lead to some great innovations. Google, for example, is famous for their “20 per cent rule,” where workers can spend 20 per cent of their time working on a side project they’re passionate about. The practice allowed for the creation of a now nearly-ubiquitous product: Gmail.

2. Meaning and identity

On another level, creativity is a way to express ourselves and validate our unique existence, said Mantere. It’s a way to stand up against the finite nature of life. Through self-expression and creativity, we can emphatically say, “I was here.”

At work, this could involve creating spaces for employees to express their ideas and contribute meaningfully to projects.

3. Competition

Another way creativity can manifest itself is through competition. Opposing forces can incentivize each other to innovate and find new solutions to problems. This is most evident in market capitalism, where companies must constantly invent and re-imagine if they want to keep an edge over their competitors, explained Mantere.

4. Design

Have limited resources? Find a cheaper way to manufacture your product. Short on time? Improve your processes so you can accomplish your task more quickly. Every problem is a puzzle, and designing a solution involves being creative. This is also the philosophy behind design thinking – a popular business practice centred on problem-solving.

5. Craft

Jazz musicians learn the rules of music so they can break them on the fly. As masters of their craft, they are free to play with its conventions and break expectations, said Mantere.

You can do the same in other kinds of work. This could involve creating a product no one has seen before, designing a supply chain that’s more sustainable than anyone else, or rethinking how your company interacts with (or creates) new markets.

6. Collectivity

Impressionism, rock and roll, and even the smartphone – these are movements that emerged around a particular aesthetic or design. When Apple revealed the iPhone, the rest of the industry iterated on this design to remain competitive.

Collectivity can also refer to collaboration, where multiple peoples’ experiences, values, and worldviews combine to create something new. Bringing diverse people together can help drive innovation in a workplace.

A little bit of everything

It’s important to remember that these six pillars of creativity aren’t completely distinct from each other. They can combine in different ways depending on who you are, where you work, and who you’re working with. Some organizations might place a bigger emphasis on play while others let competition drive them.

Different leadership styles can also influence how creativity manifests in an organization. To learn more, listen to Professor Mantere’s full interview on the McGill Delve podcast. Listen here or search “McGill Delve” in your favourite podcast player.