How Our Work Culture is Dying an Uncreative Death: Delights Of The Ordinary No. 13

I write you this letter at the cusp of this weekend, so you can think and read meaningful words which inspire you to undo the stretch marks and lethargy.

“what you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

the magician’s nephew by c.s. lewis

SPACE10 was formed in 2014.

The job of SPACE10 was to curiously and creatively imagine the future realities for IKEA. Not what IKEA can be in future as a business but what IKEA can be to the world in future. They “set out to create a space where people and ideas could meet and interact.”

They say, “Our working methods prioritised collaboration over competition,…always tried to approach our work in playful and experimental ways and let the power of storytelling and imagination take root in everything we did.”

SPACE10 was able to bring innovation initiatives, curiosity and creativity into the company’s work culture, not just to the fringes.

Still, a decade later (August 2023) SPACE10 pulled their shutters down.

(Why and how is another story for another day.)

………………

Nevertheless, SPACE10 showed us that we can have a creative culture to hone our work environments in all the pleasing ways. Our jobs, our business, and our lives are not solely a pursuit of fiscal growth, growth in numbers, or grades or paychecks. These are inevitably important but are never implied to be crazily spearheading our lives.

Even then, if you find your lives entangled in this humungous world’s-grinding-work-culture, I will not blame you, even if, your creative optimism has developed deep stretch marks, from the constant stretches and shrinkage.

In some way, as much as you and I are vitamin D-deprived, we are also deprived of curiosity and creativity. Because in or around the year 2020, our human world changed again! We were compelled from a workplace culture to a remote work culture (aka post-covid-era). Cloistered working in our hovels highly deficient of meaningful human connections!

Technology has held human hands, this time more tightly clasped.

And so we have developed stretch marks of lethargy. The ordinary has become more mundane and much of our creative curiosity is looking for a window.

Hence, I write you this letter at the cusp of this weekend, when you are slightly away from your laptop and the email send button, and you may read some uplifting words to gradually undo the stretch marks and lethargy.Subscribe

How are we even Curious?

According to a study published in Harvard Business Review, there are five types (dimensions) of curiosity –

• Joyous exploration,
• Deprivation sensitivity,
• Social curiosity,
• Stress tolerance, and
• Thrill-seeking.

They all equally involve a specific level of uncertainty, yet generate different types of experience. Joyous exploration is tied with intense positive emotions while social curiosity is connected with being kind and generous.

What does it take to be a Curious Creative?

The trick is that there’s always something significant, poignant, or poetic everywhere you look,… just looking at what’s there, without reflexively evaluating or explaining the scene.

– David Cain, How to Get the Magic Back

Another trick is by simply reducing the pressure of scrutinising and not trying hard to get it – none of us gets it about life, anyway. Instead, we are “supposed to look at it and notice the feeling it gives you. That’s it.”

Finally, we apply these ideas in our actual world. There’s always something that propels with some form of heavenly significance, even if it’s a simple every morning sunlight patch, a forsaken shopping list of papers, or a super ordinary dinner menu.

You, tell your adult-heavy rational mind to quieten, so you permit these silly ordinary things to let you feel what they are meant to. We are not created to figure out things all the time.

Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?”

―C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Wherever you and I are placed we are obligated to keep innovating and not to discard the tireless curiosity. We don’t have to live like world visionaries. Yet, we can undoubtedly envision what we can be in the world which is tied up in this futile hamster-wheel-running pad.

What SPACE10 did to a large company we can do the same in our small lives – become curious and creative, make it our living culture.

We may be able to impact the work culture too.

To End:

Excerpt from the Poem "Monday," by Alex Dimitrov

Doesn’t it bother you sometimes 

what living is, what the day has turned into? So many screens and meetings 

and things to be late for. 

Everyone truly deserves 

a flute of champagne 

for having made it this far! 

Though it’s such a disaster 

to drink on a Monday. 

To imagine who you would be 

if you hadn’t crossed the street 

or married, if you hadn’t 

agreed to the job or the money 

or how time just keeps going— 

whoever agreed to that 

has clearly not seen 

the beginning of summer 

or been to a party 

or let themselves float 

in the middle of a book 

where for however briefly 

it’s possible to stay longer than 

you should. Unfortunately 

for me and you, we have 

the rest of it to get to. 

We must pretend 

there’s a blue painting 

at the end of this poem. 

And every time we look at it 

we forget about ourselves. 

And every time it looks at us 

it forgives us for pain. 

Poet Rumi wrote: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Stay curious and creative and try not to get it all the time.