Have you or your company fallen into a rut? Are the same old ideas getting a fresh coat of paint and being paraded around as new? Has your team become so data-driven they’ve forgotten that people are driven by pathos and will spend money when they feel a connection to a brand? It’s time to make creativity a priority and instill it into your team like a habit.
Habit expert and New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits James Clear says creativity is something you can and should turn into a habit. After studying habit-building, decision-making, and long-term identity shifts, Clear has created a method that pinpoints the steps necessary to make lasting change.
He applied this to his creative pursuits and ended up with millions of website visitors each month and some 450,000 subscribers to his email newsletter, not to mention his book is ranked by New York Times as #2 for Business and #5 for Advice/How-to.
Here is how you can harness the effectiveness of habits to bring creativity to you and your team.
1. Notice
Clear explains the first step to making a habitual life change is noticing the need for it. If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably noticed a lack of creativity within your company or yourself. It’s easy to fall into the humdrum of a daily office job, so take a survey of the people you work with. Is there collaboration? Is there innovation? Or is everybody punching their time cards, getting their work done with little to no questioning of the usual?
Once you’ve noticed a need for change, it’s time to share your findings with the class.
2. Want
After bringing the need for change to your team’s attention, everybody involved must want to make the change. Generally, there isn’t much push back around getting more creative, but you should be ready to explain the benefits of having a creative team within your company—it brings about new and innovative processes and ideas, it encourages collaboration and comradery, and countless other reasons.
Oftentimes, people will want to make a change, but don’t have a plan concrete enough to progress them. Clear says people confuse a lack of motivation with unclear guidance. He provides an exercise to help prevent excuses down the line. Have your team imagine they set out to be more creative and 6 months down the line they failed. Now brainstorm all the possible reasons for failure and create a plan to circumvent them.
For example, Clear wanted to write a blog post every Monday, so he imagined all the reasons he wouldn’t be able to accomplish this. Say Monday fell on a holiday and he would be traveling. Since he foresaw this dilemma, he was able to create safety nets for his goals.
It also helps to design your environment to encourage creativity. Instead of creating an office space that encourages departments to keep to themselves, take a page out of Pixar’s book and make communal areas for eating and other activities that bring people together.
When everyone has fleshed out the possible hindrances and they’re onboard, it’s time to act.
3. Do
Decide on your communal goal and do it. The hardest part is starting something new, but Clear says any new habit can be broken into a 2 minute starting point. If your new habit is to work out for 30 min every day, the act of putting your gym shoes on and getting into the car is an easy 2 minute act anyone can do.
Say your team’s goal is to have collaboration sessions once a week or have everyone take 30 minutes a day to work on something out of their wheelhouse to get the creative juices flowing. It may be hard to step away from work that has been effective to try something experimental. But if you break it down into a 2 minute habit to turn off your computer and move to a new area of the office at 4:30 every day, then the rest will follow.
4. Like
A key to creating a sustainable, long-lasting habit is to like the reward. Clear says most good habits have a very far off reward. It’s hard to remember the end reward when you’re putting in time and work and not seeing immediate success, like losing weight through eating healthy and exercise.
When your team begins their creativity habits, the payoff might not be immediate. You may not come up with an innovative idea that propels you to the top of your industry overnight, but the habits you create will pay off eventually when your team begins to see themselves as forward-thinking innovators.
Clear says the trick is to create short term rewards to make the entire process likable. This can be spotlighting someone’s creative work for the team or cash incentives for using creative time to think differently.
Small habits compile over a long period of time, so putting in the work now to make your team a creative machine will benefit your company in the long run.
