What hampers my creativity?

This week we had a look at the constraints on creativity - both internal and external. This is something that I have considered before. In terms of external constraints, I have definitely felt this before in the workplace. I spent many years working as an accountant for a local government. Accounting in itself can be fairly constrained. Things have to be done in a particular way, at a particular time. Add to this the bureaucracy and risk-averse nature of government work and you get an environment which stymies all kind of creative thought!

So what about internal constraints? Well, last year, my husband and I completed the John Muir Trail - we thru-hiked a total of 265 miles in 25 days, carrying everything we needed. While we were on the trip, we talked a lot about how the challenge was not just physical, but mental too. We faced a couple of obstacles along the way. One which comes to mind is when (after a particularly windy night on the side of a mountain) the main pole of our tent completely broke. If this happened during a normal camping holiday we discussed how we might phone up the shop we purchased it from, get a new part, or even pack up and go home. None of these solutions are an option when you are in the middle of the Sierra Nevada! There was no phone service, there was no camping equipment shop, there was......noone!! We knew we needed shelter due to the changing weather so we had to actually use our brains (not youtube, advice forums, Facebook pleas) to come up with a way to create it. What we came up with was using a hiking pole at the end of each day and copious amounts of duct tape to create a shelter (see picture!). The reason this is so memorable to me is that we discussed how lazy we had become in terms of using our minds to come up with fixes and ideas - often maybe the answers are right there in our minds but it is simply easier to find it from the internet!

It was interesting to me to consider at what point this laziness set in. School? work? the invention of the smartphone? After watching this TED talk by Ken Robinson, I am starting to think it happens the moment we begin to express ourselves as children. He talked about how we are all creative as children but that we get educated out of it. Just today I had a discussion with a friend who was seriously considering taking her children out of school and educating them at home for this very reason. Concerned that the focus in the education system is too weighted upon maths, english and science, rather than creative subjects, she wanted to pull her kids away from an environment that involves continuous assessments and desk time. I think it is true that currently in the UK, we have a one-size-fits-all approach to education in a society where every child is different. By only rating the performance of children against one set of criteria, some are inevitably disadvantaged. Are we crushing the creativity of the next generation before they get the chance to be innovators?

What does everyone think?