Episode 5: How Do You Balance Innovation and Creativity?

Show Description:

Explore the dynamic relationship between innovation and creativity in this episode, where we uncover how these concepts flourish in collaborative environments. Join our team as they discuss the balance between thinking outside the box and staying grounded, share tips for fostering creativity through passion and play, and highlight the importance of community support. Learn how vulnerability and openness can lead to breakthroughs, and discover the role of culture and rebellion in driving creative expression. Perfect for anyone looking to ignite their creative spark.

Welcome to day 5 of the creative work hour and NAPPOD promo podcast entry. And we're just using the audio, not the video. So don't worry about your hair or anything like that. I'm having a bad hair day myself, so it's just as well. Right?

I just pose a question just really as a conversation starter. Or really we can talk about anything that we like. How do you balance innovation and creativity in your work? And what role does each one play the innovation and the creativity? Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

I mean, just go pop con style. It makes me go, oh god. Another tool that I'm not gonna know how to use. But then shadows, like, had a breakthrough today with with a workflow for her podcast work. So did that feel like innovation to you, Shadows?

I don't usually see much difference between innovation and creativity. One drives the other. I'll just jump in. In the high-tech innovator space that I worked in for a number of years, when we were really innovating, 1 out of 3 ideas was supposed to come out of left field. And every once in a while, it was a direct connection.

But more importantly, it did create some creativity. And you'd want to pull on a thread, maybe not related to anything that was in play. But it was that little spark that Dumbledore would pull out of his head and drop into that little pool of water to come back to. I like it out of left field. Yep.

Oh, Greg, you're muted. I like what Shadow said innovation and creativity being, one and the same. Speaking about creativity, what tips does anyone have for sharing, for improving creativity and thinking outside the box? And, Bobby, I don't know if that plays into the left field thing. It does.

Pure creativity in my mind has no boundaries. You can't enter a creative space without thinking the pool is limited in its boundary. And that doesn't just mean on the horizontal plane. You want to open your mind up. This probably sounds like some spacey drug thing from the sixties, but you want to open your mind up because not all of our not all of our assumptions are correct.

But opening your mind up lets you dip into other people's pools and, you know, just take a moment to let anything be right and see where that might take you. And then, of course, downstream, you start beating it with a broom to narrow it down to what you wanna run with today. Tips for improving creativity can be a lot of things. Right? And I don't know if, Wailing, if you would consider what Alessandra had said to you about putting a mat, you know, when you're doing your your your practice for your tour.

You stood on a a circle or a square mat. Right? And that was kind of your space not to go outside of. That that kinda would would count. Right?

Would it? On that note, I think it's important to create space for creativity, and it could be, like, dedicating time to doing like, pursuing things that you enjoy, things that you are curious. But I think more importantly, it's about following what makes what lights you on fire, and it's something you can't you can't deny yourself. You can't cheat yourself. It's like you know if something sparks your interest, you would just go along.

So I like to think of creativity as very much like what Bobby say, there's no boundaries to it, but there's also no expectation you have to do something out of it. It's more like just indulging in the things that you enjoy in the way that maybe you have done it before or not done it before, but it's just speaking to that to that child in you to just have fun. I I like to think of it that way. Yeah. Like that.

And that can change. Right? That can change over time what you're passionate about. Passions change. Doctor Melanie, what do you have?

I think a lot of people are creative on their own and not a lot, but there are some people that are just able to do things completely on their own. And but that that is not the majority of geniuses or creative people. And so this place provides a couple different things, friends, a place to brainstorm, a safe space for dealing with some issues that might be bothering you, a place that feels a little more comfortable to deal with the bullshit so you have time to deal with the creativity. So it's a lot of I I think it serves, you know, a lot of different purposes. I mean, it's not in the narrow sense of the word creative.

I don't really think it fits. I think this you know, it's a nice it's a great name, but I think we do there's a community that then functions in some very supportive ways for each other. And out of that comes whatever each person wants. Our creative work hour is my family of choice. There you go.

Yeah. Me too. Me too. I have a few people who are also in my family who aren't on this, but, otherwise, yes. If I can add them too, yes.

I always love to ask Alessandra to talk about the origins of 24 hour, and it's Yeah. Like, one of those favorite story of mine to go back to. Yeah. Like, she you started it without knowing that it would bloom into what it is today. Had no idea.

I had no idea. It was like a case of indigestion. It was located the same place in my body. A clip, Greg. A case of indigestion.

That's how that's how it was born. But it was like a big place. Your butt. I had swallowed a balloon of of of warm bubbles. Okay?

And it's like, oh my god. What is happening? Is this alien? What is happening? This thing something is happening here.

Next thing I know, there's like a 100 or thereabouts sessions where I'm just sitting there by myself saying, dear god, please let somebody dear god, please don't let anybody come today. I hear you. That's the truth. There there's you reminded me of a different twist of if you're being creative with others, sometimes you have to be vulnerable enough to give step completely away from all your assumptions and all your boundaries and absorb and sit in theirs for a moment. Like, I like to I like to phrase what you said in my head because I got a little I got a special little crazy going on.

I was like, what if everything I know about this or think I know about this is horse hockey? Yeah. And and it's and it's the thought that by doing that, it's not a spider web that you're gonna be trapped in. And it's there's no convincing yourself that there's no threat to nest there for a moment. And then step back out.

I think that's why belonging matters so very much to experiencing creativity. I think it's evolutionary. I think that when we belong and we're gonna do creative work, there needs to be a man on that wall to watch out for us while we're doing the creative thing so we make it out of here alive. I think there is absolutely an an evolutionary component to creativity. And I think, like what Melanie was saying, that for some artists and creatives, they can just do their one man show.

They can do they can just do it. They can do it by themselves. They can do it all day, every day, them and a bottle of gin. But that's not necessarily who we are. We get our strength from feeling safe, feeling like we belong, feel like we're understood for our sensitivities, and that there's value to those things.

We don't need to pack them away. But, yeah, it is a little bit of that that like, what Wylene was doing this morning just to practice her talk in front of us. She was coming out of the tree line and into the open space. And we she practiced with each of us having a pair of tiger eyes looking at her, And that's how she's building resilience, you know, because it's not about if Wylene if she if she gets to bring home the trophy, okay, cool. We're gonna, like, you know, make some kind of stiff punch in that thing.

But if she doesn't come home with the trophy, it was never about the trophy. No. And what I said is not a requirement. You can stay nested in your own space and be just as much of a contributor to creativity. Yeah.

But you know, so there's ups and downs. This briefly, this reminds me of a study done years back of jazz musicians who could sit down having not been together, having not set a playlist, and just play beautifully for a couple of hours in front of an audience. And when they were monitored, little sensors put on their brain, whatever, what was discovered is their frontal cortex is not as defined as the average human. So, things could pass through that maybe we would have blocked. Said, oh, wait a minute.

I gotta think about that first. Like an inhibition? Yeah. Inhibition is diminished for the sake of creating the next thing. But, you know, they were all the peep jazz musicians are better at improvisation when they played together.

Mhmm. And develop that with practice. It also happens, I believe, with people who've been meditating for a long time. So I've watched all of you innovate at various times in this space. You dovetailed a little bit.

Finish saying what you're saying. What we're talking about is culture. I mean, if you're talking about anthropology, we're talking about culture. Even the people who work on their own eventually wanna show their work usually. Mhmm.

You know? And if you expression was born out of daily life, you know, like, let me make this clay pot prettier or let me express myself while I'm making this clay pot that we need for rice or water or whatever. So And there's a place about more than one human. It's about a human in culture or community or whatever. Yep.

Can I factor into that too? Sorry? Pride, being proud. Oh, certainly that Well, you can either call it pride or xenophobia. I mean, if we're going back far, even not so far.

You know, there's the the human mind has that limbic thing of, oh, this is foreign. You know, if you hear someone with a different accent, you pay more attention. You don't do that that stuff that that they always show you so beautifully happens with unconscious bias where you only pay attention to this much of everything that's going by. You hear a different accent and you go, what? So it's for me, that you know, some of that some of the pride is based on being different from, and that if you're gonna go anthropologically into the brain is sort of, you know, the limbic mind and xenophobia, which is a survival mechanism.

And sometimes it's about simple rebellion. Like, the first stories that Shadow's ever told me about herself was she's like, yeah. Because I asked her. I'm like, are you a musician? Did you ever play an instrument or sing or whatever?

And she was like, I took yeah. So, Shoutos, tell that little story about the piano and your mother and the outcome of that. Oh, yeah. Well, I had 10 years of piano training. We're all conservatory.

There was 2 things. 1 was my mother decided that she probably knew better than my piano teacher. So I'd come home to practice, and she'd make me do it one way. And then I'd go back to take my lesson, and my teacher would be like, this wasn't what we got you. She finally caught on that it was mother's influence.

And the minute she addressed it with my mother, my mother suddenly changed piano teachers. So eventually I ended up doing the Great Four Conservatory exam, which I passed rather well. And then the theory started, and I went, fuck this. I'm not doing this. I didn't want it in the 1st place, and I quit.

By then, I was a teenager. Yeah. And so there's something really powerful about that. Like, we were all brought up that quitting is, like, less than ideal, but sometimes quitting is the rebellion, and that rebellion is housing the energy of creativity. Yes.

She wasn't happy. She tried to guilt me about all the money she spent. That was like, I didn't ask you to. And I think that's just that and that's that's just part of of who we are as a as a group of people is we all have a story, like, where somebody was like, this is what you're gonna do because you're good at it and because I paid for it. And there's something in you that goes, you can't make me do it how you want, or I won't do the damn thing at all.

And that is just powerful energy full of creativity. Yeah. And we were also talking about this the other day, how Andy model such a good example of being willing to pivot when you are called to do something. Right? So that's the thing.

I think it's very that people would frown upon if, let's say, someone has been in a doing something for a long time and then they try something new, but I think it's more important to just keep changing whatever that calls you and not feel guilty about it. Well, it's not like that stuff goes away. Mhmm. Yeah. When I switched from art to to pre med, they're like, wow.

He wasted all that time. And I was a med student, and I'm in the OR, and someone is lining up uterine fibroids on a tray. Like, it was really amazing. There are, like, 16 of them in small and small. They said, you you have a photo degree, don't you?

Would you take the pictures of this? And and languages, which initially in one hospital I worked in, I was the only person who spoke Spanish. You know? So all this shit, you know, divided it up. Yeah.

Right. Divided it up, but it's not like 10 years of piano playing didn't affect your brain and how you think and what, you know, how you see things and everything. We won't be controlled or or like what Daffy Duck says. Nobody's gonna tell this little black duck what to do. We're at the bottom of the hour, so this is probably where we tie it up.

So we still have room to work, be creative, or go off and do what you need to do. Greg, thank you again for this. We will be seeing a treat of what Greg has been working on for the last couple of weeks coming out soon. And how would we describe that to them? How would we describe that?

Well It'll be a NAPOD promo entry. The creative work hour podcast prototype. Yeah. I like it. I like it.

So we're getting there. We're getting music picked. Yeah. So stay tuned because there'll be some questions coming to you so that instead of our booking an interview with you, we'll be able to do it asynchronously because Greg will have the questions for you to choose from recorded. And you get to go, I'll answer that one and that one.

You get to cherry pick which ones you wanna answer, and then you get to record it on your own, and he puts it all together. So, like, it's easy on the schedule because we're already running a 100 events a month. Right? So this was his brain, baby, and I think it is fantastic. Yay.

Okay. I'm gonna turn the recording off.