Uncertainty Demands Imagination

How to retrieve the creativity we were born with

According to the New York Times, the word ‘uncertainty’ cropped up in 87 percent of earnings calls this season. Executives publicly acknowledged that they don’t fully understand the present and are mystified by the future. In years gone by, this might have been seen as an unforgiveable confession of weakness. These days it is a statement of the obvious: we don’t know the future.

When, in 2017, I started to write Uncharted, more than a few of my friends and colleagues thought I was mad to pursue the argument that we can’t predict the future. Data, models, polls, the repetitive patterns of history, genetics: surely, they all argued, these are accurate predictive tools.

It’s not easy writing (or pitching) a book based on an idea that everyone around you rejects; I’m glad this wasn’t my first experience of it. When I was writing A Bigger Prize, arguing the competition does not guarantee that the best rises to the top, I frequently felt I was writing the longest suicide note in history. But I have a fierce belief that writing is about being truthful, so I persevered. Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future came out just as Covid hit; now those sceptical friends and colleagues suddenly acclaimed me a prophet. I am not. Uncertainty had merely made itself incontrovertibly, and tragically, visible.

Uncertainty, of course, didn’t go away; not in the world and nor in my head, where it sat posing more questions. Uncharted had proposed different ways to deal with uncertainty—but who, I kept wondering, is really good at that? Was there any particular group or type of person who embraced it, not paralyzed but energized by it? Who and where were the people undaunted by change, comfortable making choices without a plan or guarantees? They were artists.

I’ve spent a good part of my life working with highly creative people: poets, musicians, designers, novelists, playwrights, directors, composers. I’d long been struck by two qualities they had in common. Very frequently they started work that was undefined at the start, frequently took years, but then arrived, as if by magic, at exactly the right moment. The most memorable of these was the original BBC series House of Cards, broadcast the week that Margaret Thatcher lost the support of the Conservative Party. But the production had been initiated years earlier, when she seemed unstoppable. It was more than a coincidence—some producers seemed to do this too often for it to be chance. My historian friends told me that this is frequently the case with the arts: if looking for the earliest moment in a period of change, they said, you most likely find it in the arts. A lifelong habit of noticing fuels exquisite intuition.

The second quality artists have is nerve: the capacity to start something without knowing how it will develop or be received. I was astounded to discover novelists--Lee Child, Haruki Murakami, Olga Tokarczuk—who started complex books without knowing the plot. This was a capacity to deal creatively with ambiguity of a kind I rarely see elsewhere: just start and see what you discover.

Hence the origins of my latest book Embracing Uncertainty: How writers and musicians thrive in an unpredictable world which argues that, while we might not all be artists, there is much we can learn from them about dealing with the ambiguity, complexity and unknowability of life today.

Again, naysayers, of course. Are you seriously saying that the chaos and tumult of today can be solved by artists? Well, no, not really; I am arguing that, while not all of us should or could become artists, there is much we can learn about how they approach life. Ways of being and experiencing the world. And that the denigration, marginalization and trivialization of the arts is specifically depriving us of the mental freedom and aptitudes we most need now. In a dark time, this has turned out to be an optimistic argument: that we already have within us much of what we need to cope with the urgency of now.

© Lucy PcLauchlan, painting and Matthew Watkins, photograph.

No writer really knows what they’ve written until their work is out in the world, encountering readers. That’s when the surprises come. I had not expected so many readers to embrace the book because it spoke to their inner, often suppressed, sense of their own creativity. It gave them heart, encouraged them to believe in skills too often dismissed. I had also not anticipated that many would confess to me that they were not creative—but were eager to learn. I wonder where that perception has come from, how and why so many have been persuaded into a self-concept that diminishes them.

At the age of 5, researchers have found that virtually all children (98%) are highly creative. By the time they are 25 or older, just two percent remain that way. What happens along the way? School. Exams. Parental and societal expectations. Management.

The more KPIs, targets and goals encumber us, the narrower our focus becomes. In a desire to achieve, we become efficient, developing habits that are rigid, stifling curiosity and rejecting change. The same executives who ask me ‘how can I make my people more creative’ are, for the most part, the same people who develop and impose ways of working that renders creativity impossible, marginal, even despised.

To a shocking extent, the self-help industry models itself on business management: championing KPIs, targets and incentives as fiercely as any HR department, intent on measurement of steps, sleep, heart rate, as though our bodies were just so many factories mass-producing lives to be measured, managed and sold in accordance with fixed standards and parameters. It’s a frightening thought that, both at work and in our free time, we succumb to ways of thinking that reduce our freedom and leave us feeling so very uncreative. It’s no wonder so many of us end up feeling like Flat Stanley: two-dimensional, stuck in a repetitive, efficient rut.

It is even more alarming now, when the uncertainty that surrounds us demands more creative thinking than ever. As old theories, frameworks, assumptions and habits prove inadequate to our predicament, we need different ways to think and to be. New ideas. Completely new mindsets that won’t come from recycling the principles and assumptions that got us into our current mess. To find or craft something new requires renewal in ourselves.

So I’m frequently asked—by managers and employees, educators, CEOs and politicians—what they can do to retrieve the creativity they were born with. That they sense trace elements in themselves is a crucial first step. They would like a road map, of course: one that takes them from today’s chaos to tomorrow’s wonderland. I don’t have one. I don’t think anyone does. But that doesn’t mean our only options are paralysis or surrender. (In fact, I’m suspicious of any choice framed as a simple binary.)

What I do believe is that what we once had we can retrieve, as long as we take it seriously. Joyfully too, of course. But we need to stop looking at creativity as though it were, in the words of jazz musician Soweto Kinch “like dessert, nice but probably bad for you.” Neither trivial nor marginal, resurrecting and sustaining human imagination is a job for us all.

How to begin? I’ve always been averse to the tips’n’tricks of management manuals that sell certainty. But here are suggestions, small steps that don’t demand willpower or measurement but only curiosity: what else would I feel or see or sense if I tried one?

· If you travel to work by train or bus, spend the first 15 minutes of your ride just staring out of the window. Let your mind wander. It will. Repeat on your way home.

· On waking, stay in bed for 15 minutes just thinking about what you want to day to be. What matters most today?

· Make the first task of your day to be writing at least 3 pages, in longhand, about anything. This advice comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and I’ve seen this one exercise change mindsets.

· Go for a walk with no destination. Give yourself permission to wander. I do this on my bike and frequently get lost but can always find my way home.

· Read fiction. Anything you enjoy.

· Be where you are: take the headphones out and look. Look carefully, taking no photographs, and try to remember what you see.

· Go to a museum. Don’t stay more than half an hour. Leave hungry. Repeat.

· Used to play a musical instrument? Return to it. You don’t have to be great, just enjoy it. There won’t be a test.

· Connect with an old friend.

· Go to a concert by a musician you’re unfamiliar with.

· Change a habit. This can be very hard but spectacularly enlightening.

· Go somewhere for the weekend with no plans except how to get there and where you stay. Wander without Google maps. Just look. Explore. Notice.

These are all tiny first steps. They lead to the next ones. Each is about retrieving the experience of intrinsic motivation: doing something for the sheer pleasure it sparks. Energy that is sustainable, in the best sense of the word.

I’ll be writing more on this topic in the next month, looking at how organizations are starting to derive from the arts and artists’ ways of thinking and being which can loosen, broaden, refresh our imagination and our capacity to think freely. Not one of these is a blueprint for overnight success; any artist will tell you there is no such thing. Snake oil salesman may peddle instant transformation but the real thing is as complex, rich and subtle as you are.

To Go Deeper

Murakami’s book on writing Novelist as a Vocation is a treat. He wrote his first book in Japanese but found it boring. So then he wrote it again, this time in English. It was better. On translating it back into Japanese, he found his style. If you ever thought creativity was easy, this will change your mind. That it is difficult is what makes it so rewarding.

For the Love of It

The picture in this post, of the wall artist Lucy McLauchlan, never ceases to amaze me. Lucy’s work is a spectacular combination of a well stocked mind (images, techniques acquired over years) and in-the-moment improvisation. Wall art (which used to be called grafitti) is a wonderful paradox: making in the moment a work that depends on years of noticing and it changes through time.