States) respondents believing creativity is taken for granted. What does this have to do with Nashville?
Bridging the Workplace Creativity Gap by Thor Urness
employers want workers with high levels of what David Kelley calls, in his recent book of the same title, “Creative Confidence.” Kelley, the head of Stanford’s d.school and founder of design firm IDEO, defines creative confidence as “the natural human ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them.” The 2012 “State of Create” study by software maker Adobe identified a workplace creativity gap, where 75 percent of respondents said they are under growing pressure to be productive rather than creative, despite the fact that they are increasingly expected to think creatively at work. The study showed that eight in ten people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth, yet only one in four respondents believe they are living up to their own creative potential, with respondents across all five of the countries surveyed saying they spend only 25 percent of their time at work creating. More than half surveyed felt that creativity is being stifled
by their education systems, which promote uniformity and standardization. The analysis published with the study noted the existence of a myth of creativity, which is that very few people are really creative. Yet the truth is that everyone has capacity for creativity, but not everyone develops it. Few schools and employers do much to encourage creativity, as the study also noted, with many (70 percent of United
Progressive companies recognize their employees have untapped creative energy that can be leveraged into opportunities for growth. But their toolkits for harnessing this energy may be underde veloped. This is where the Nashville Arts & Business Council’s WorkCREATIVE projects
Examples of WorkCREATIVE programs are a local bank’s collaborative project that yielded employee-made art for its downtown lobby, a joint project by three companies to paint a mobile bicycle rental facility, printmaking and improvisation sessions at a law firm, and a poetry workshop for a hospital company’s management team. People are naturally creative. The best companies and cities harness the creative impulse. Nashville and its businesses are doing this, including through WorkCREATIVE. To learn more about WorkCREATIVE, the ABC, and its other programs, visit www.abcnashville.org. Thor Urness is a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings and Chairman of the Board for the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville. www.abcnashville.org
PHOTOGRAPH BY TODD STRINGER
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mployers want workers with a high degree of what psychologists call self-efficacy, a strong belief in their ability to complete tasks and attain goals. Progressive
Studies on the “creative class” by Richard Florida of the University of Toronto show that where musicians and artists gravitate, technology businesses and other start-up and entrepreneurial activities also gravitate, all of which contributes to economic growth. Nashville has outperformed most of its peer cities due to its strong creative class, as Florida discussed at his Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce presentation last September, in which he attributed Nashville’s economic overachievement to a healthy blend of “talent, technology, and tolerance.”
can help. WorkCREATIVE brings artists into businesses and integrates their employees in hands-on creativity to stimulate communication, build teamwork, and spark innovation to drive business growth.
A team from Bradley Arant Boult Cummings painting a community mural with artist Andee Rudloff
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