Innovation

Are you old enough to remember going to open registration in the gym during freshman year of college? Waiting in line for a whole day and trying to avoid any unnaturally early 8 AM classes. Such a waste of time had a silver lining as it gave me a chance to make some new friends in the queue. If we look hard enough, bottlenecks can provide some creative opportunities.

Unless you’re trying to apply for a patent, build a monopoly, or hold off an army – for most of us, bottlenecks are an annoying loss of efficiency and delay to our gratification as we slowly drip the ketchup onto our golden french fries. Fortunately, the internet has reduced bottlenecks by granting us simultaneous access for making transactions. And unless you happen upon an ancient bureaucracy or a grocery checkout during a blizzard warning, long lines have become a relic of the past. Until now.

I’m not alone in noticing that this week, this___ has to happen before that____. I’m waiting for an appointment with the only local welder to patch my sinking boat. He can’t work because the scheduling office is closed for Covid. My plumber is back from his home country but too booked up to fix my running toilet. The sales women is working from home and can’t place my order for 20 more copies of Creative You until she is back in the office. My painter is waiting for his power-washer guy to become available before he can make any repairs. I tried to order pimento leaves for my smoker but my source in Jamaica is out of stock… of leaves?

This is not just my problem. The just-in-time supply chain has been reported as habitually tardy. While the little league needs an umpire to play baseball, our automotive manufactures can build cars but have a macro-shortage of microchips to control the surround sound system and automatic headrests. Butcher shops can’t “meet” demand (apologies), and according to Reuters, we are a country out of zippers and “Shortages of metals, plastics, wood and even liquor bottles are now the norm.”

Sometimes bottlenecks aren’t even at the bottlenecks. Have you noticed the people at Lea & Perrins made the pin hole in their Worcestershire sauce spout a lot larger?
Find a bottleneck and break the glass with a creative solution to bring back the flow.

Open Ski and Open Flower

We’re all dealing with the threats of Covid-19 in our own ways.
Along with the great harm and suffering, our public health crisis has left few bright spots but inadvertently in a backhanded way granted a small wish.

As we must take care in what we wish for, some of us have been dreaming for some time alone. As we spread out to prevent the spread of an unseen enemy, many of us are home during daylight hours to garden, with some time for reading, creating, learning an instrument or another language. We’re shuttered with our books, art supplies, and that old dusty guitar. While some of us have been overachieving In these initial stages of Corona style home arrest, I’ve been surprised to have done close to nothing on my wish list as all my stuff is obeying state orders and refusing to be touched. These few paragraphs are all I’ve written. If all we needed was time, are we really all creative now?

With our isolation, we are not alone as we are all together now facing a major shift in the ways we live. Up to now, many of us have succeeded in our lives by being specialists. Our uniqueness and particularly our skills have been our strengths as we relied on others for their strengths. Social distancing is dragging our wagons all the way back to the frontier where survival is again supported by our rugged individualism. Do-it yourself in your own six foot radius or do without – we are all generalists now.

While stretching and finding new ways – our time and energy is consumed in broadening our wings. Now we are all chefs, computer troubleshooter, teachers, and mask makers – we are learning to read graphs and look at growth rates like epidemiologists… or as day traders, learning to communicate remotely, while scrubbing the floor, cleaning dishes and doing an extraordinary amount of laundry, learning diplomacy as our family hovers. Some people are adventurously making their own coffee at home while others are experimenting with cutting their own dogs hair – perhaps without a license.

It’s like moving to a new place, and figuring out how to do the basics, except, now like some earth-wide beach house change-over day – everyone is changing at the same time and many of us are spending time in our own homes for the first time. We can try to replicate our old ways or we can reinvent better ways to work, function, and live our lives. We are all creative now.

So, if you’re using your clothing iron to steam sanitize your groceries, while watching three news channels at once on mute during a conference calling with your camera turned off, you are doing something different and being creative.
From 6 feet away, we’re reaching out to help others, offering a cup of sugar to our neighbors, making available our own expertise and resources to our communities and reaching out to those who are most isolated. As many of our cultural institutions are closed, our communities remain open. – Let’s use our creativity to make our communities stronger. Distant but still social.

We are all adapting, and we can now all believe in our creativity – we are all creative now. When we reopen, we will have new skills, we will have proved our resourcefulness, we will be more confident with our creativity. We are all creative now.