Creative Expression

Just as engaging in creative projects benefits individuals, practicing creativity can be beneficial to organizations. Organizations, like people, can get stuck in ineffective patterns. Deborah Obalil, Executive Director of Foundation for Art & Healing, describes this organizational challenge, “If something stays the same too long, it gets stratified in a way that is not useful, because the world is changing around us. What we thought we were doing that worked, or that we thought worked, may no longer be the best organizational practice.” This lack of flexibility can inhibit program effectiveness and organizational growth.

One way to combat this organizational torpor is by introducing creativity as an organizational value. This can be done experientially by implementing creative projects as part of organizational thinking. If your organization is in the middle of a strategic planning process, you may want to have staff and board paint, collage or write a poem about what they see as next steps. This process may yield richer results than a strictly intellectual discussion group. Ms. Obalil explains the rationale behind this approach: “Creative expression can be used as a tool to help people and organizations think differently. When you use creative exercises to think through problems in a certain way, all of a sudden you get different answers.” The results of creative exercises may transform an organizational culture by increasing creativity, flexibility and forward thinking.

Creative expression can also contribute to staff morale, a sense of job satisfaction and individual sustainability. Creative expression can be used as a tool for individual self-care and as a way to manage trauma exposure response. Many people are reinvigorated by seeing the results that creative work can have. They may have been drawn to helping professions out of a desire to connect with clients or community members in a deeper way than they are able during the normal course of their duties. When they are able to have that deeper connection using art, their sense job satisfaction increases and they are more able to manage the inevitable setbacks and disappointments of doing the work.

At its most powerful, creative expression can be a tool for individual and organizational transformation. It can help people externalize and name painful feelings and thoughts. It can enable people to connect to their inner voice and allow them to make themselves heard. It can flow through the barriers that separate our conscious from our unconscious, our public personas from our private selves. It can be a mechanism for healing and growth and community. At its more mundane, creative expression can enrich our lives in everyday ways, by brightening our mood with a glimpse of color or inspiring our imagination with a beautiful phrase or by providing a path to joy with soul-stirring music. In any and all of its incarnations, creative expression can benefit everyone who interacts with it.