Friendship Sparks Creativity

When I first looked at the title of William Deresiewicz lecture “Solitude and leadership” I was not very motivated to read any further. I am external processor, happiest when I am engaged in a stimulating conversation.

Sitting with only my thoughts for company, whilst looking at an empty computer screen, is a nightmare for me. My mind seems to start blank and then drift into a cocktail of unimportant things. I often find myself gravitating to the local coffee house where at least the buzz of other people’s conversation can occasionally stimulate me into some sort of creativity.

You can imagine how happy I was when Deresiewicz mentioned that he was going to include Friendship as a form of solitude. He goes on to say that talking with friends will seem counterintuitive, as friendship is the opposite of solitude. In the context of his overall thesis that leaders need to think, he was highlighting one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation.

“This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense.” I am someone who thrives on the cut and thrust of debate and I am able to adjust my thinking as the conversation progresses. I realize that I need both environments to make creative decisions. I need to be able to write down my thoughts and work them as well as taking time to be stimulated by animated conversation and debate.

Road test your ideas

"Even decisions that have been allocated a lot of time and work often need to be given a road test"

Going round a subject numerous times can be a failure of indecisive leadership - leading to frustration and inaction. But it can also be the result of careful leadership - looking at all the angles and potential consequences. I have been in both places - and depending on how bored or stimulated I am with the discussion, I can describe it differently.

Even decisions that have been allocated a lot of time and work often need to be given a road test. Last September we started a second meeting we called The Chapel in a vodka bar. The desire to promote The Chapel with a great fanfare was massively diluted due to a severe lack of funds. The resulting low-key launch has given us the opportunity to experiment, road test and evaluate our strategy.

This has meant that we have developed a much more coherent plan as it became apparent that we were trying to achieve too many concepts that at times conflicted with each other. We discovered that people viewed “The Chapel” as a cool meeting in a vodka bar. However, not many people saw it as a place that could or would commit to and identify as their local church.

The outcome of this low-key road test is an exciting and more coherent strategy. Ten minutes walk away from the vodka bar we have hired Luther King House where we are going to launch a new 6pm Sunday evening meeting – CCM:City. This gives us the opportunity of carrying on using the vodka bar later on the Sunday the evening, developing The Chapel into a creative community. Another beneficial consequence of looking at all the angles and taking adequate time to road test is the rebranding of our morning meeting to CCM: East

The Art of Concentration

Having written about the four challenges that hinder creative thinking, I want to move on to look at some things that will help us to think creatively.

The first is concentration - the ability to focus and give attention to the big idea. Deresiewicz writes “It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.”

He goes on to say, “It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of your mind come into play, that you arrive at an original idea. By giving your brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, then a new idea can take you by surprise.”

For myself, I know that the early part of the day is when I function at my best in terms of concentration. This means that my schedule must reflect this, especially when I am looking at important issues. I find the challenge is not the isolated occasion but to consistently and regularly put quality thinking time in my diary. 

The challenge of using someone else’s strategy

I am too much of an activist to enjoy attending many conferences. My preference is to learn in the cut and thrust of debate. Especially if I have had the opportunity of giving the subject some previous thought. If I rightly understand one of Paul’s teaching styles, recorded in Acts 18:4 where “..he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks”, as a more interactive way of learning. I would have loved to be in that environment.

Those conferences I do attend I find myself wanting to listen to people who have achieved something. I especially enjoy listening to those people that have some interesting and stimulating insight on a given subject. The challenge we face when listening to great achievers is that they tend to talk about a model that they have developed that has worked for them. A one-way flow of information can motivate us to implement a “Ready made idea” without thoroughly thinking it through and asking the right questions.

Deresiewiez writes - “I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom”. It is so important that we take any idea and really understand how it relates in the context the speaker comes from, and the context that you are planning to implement it in.

To be continued

Think Slow and Change Quick

"The real need to make changes, often with limited time availability, can put pressure on us to cut corners"

I always want things done yesterday. Implementing change, and the thrill of achieving new things, energies me. Opening my mouth too quickly and then later engaging my brain is something that occasionally gets me into trouble. Sometimes in a lively discussion, as I am talking, I have the frustrating ability to change my mind and finish a sentence holding a different opinion. This can apparently be very confusing for those engaged in the debate.

Again I am challenged with a Deresiewiez comment - “I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating”

As I write this blog I realize that I live in the world of fast communication. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, text, and 24hour news encourage us to make comment first and think second. The real need to make changes, often with limited time availability, can put pressure on us to cut corners. This limits our creativity and ultimately the diligent implementation of those ideas.