Fredrik Härén's Blog

The word “comfort” has gotten a bad rep.

As someone interested in creativity, I often meet people who say, “To be creative, you have to go out of your comfort zone.”

It’s like comfort now means “complacency, laziness, or lack of ambition.”

But the etymology of the word “comfort” is “com” (meaning “with”) and “fortis” (meaning “strong”)

So originally, “comfortable” was about strength and encouragement.

After all, when we “comfort” someone, we are trying to strengthen them.

So, in these uncertain times when many are stressed and confused, why are we telling people to go to a place outside of where they feel comfortable?

Outside of where they feel strength and encouragement?

Do not “go out of” your comfort zone.

Instead, “expand your comfort zone.”

One of the most important professional decisions I have made was when I, in 2005, decided to stop being “a Swedish speaker”, and instead chose to become “a global speaker” – which had me move to China (and then Singapore).

At that time, I did not focus on all the things that could make me uncomfortable with moving to China and starting a new career.

I focused on how it would help me grow as a speaker and as a person.

That was not me going out of my comfort zone.

That was me expanding my comfort zone.

How do you plan to expand your comfort zone to increase the space where you feel strength and encouragement?

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Picture of me in my rowing boat that I upgraded with an electric engine a few years back and which I, this week, upgraded again with a soft, comfortable pillow with a back-rest. A different way of expanding my comfort zone for my daily commute. 🙂

The post In defense of the comfort zone. (Episode 261) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Interview with Thomas Shilvock, Director of Strategic Development at Specsavers.

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Some people, sloppily, think of innovation as just “imagining the unknown”, but innovation, for companies, is the balance between three aspects:

 – The Art of the Possible – i.e. what can be created

– The Art of the Practical – i.e. what will be realistic to push through

– The Art of the Meaningful – i.e. what people actually want as well as what is in-line with your company’s mission and purpose

 Balance the Possible with the Practical and the Meaningful and you have the sweet spot of innovation – the point of convergence between imagination, practicality and meaning.

 The word for “a point of convergence” is: “focus”.

 And here is an interesting insight: Many people think of the wrong thing when they hear: “focus”!

They think that you should concentrate and pay attention to one specific point. Like to just stare at a specific place.

They think of focus as static.

But the true meaning of focus as a “point of convergence” is that this space is constantly changing.

To focus is not static. It’s dynamic.

You should focus on that one point, but the key is to be aware that that point might soon change.

Some aspects might not change, some might change slowly, while others might change quickly and to focus is to constantly pay attention to what is changing and what is not.

And to then have the ability to change your behaviour accordingly.

To innovate, a lot of people will suggest the creativity trigger “What if…?” to help imagine what is possible.

And that can work great.

But an even better creativity trigger is “How can we…?” because this focuses both on the potential of the unthought as well as the current circumstances of a company, a situation, a team or a market. And it focuses on the current team coming up with ways of changing.

It incorporates both the art of the possible (“how”), the art of the practical (“can”) and the art of the meaningful (“we”).

How are you using the focus to innovate and if you think “How can we..?” what will you create?

This text was inspired by a conversation around creativity and innovation with Thomas Shilvock , Director of Strategic Development at Specsavers, a company dedicated to developing and innovating around their purpose to “change lives through better sight and hearing.”

The post The Creativity Suite. Episode 161: Focused Innovation. ​ first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

“Inspiration has expiration.”

I was recently on a podcast and I said that sentence. (Yes, I am quoting myself)

But my point with that quote (and this post) was to send out a reminder that when inspiration fades, so too does the creative energy.

I said it as a reflection about how I, as I was writing my latest book, had noticed that texts that I wrote JUST after I had finished an interview were much better than the texts I wrote based on interviews I had done days, weeks, or even months earlier.

The texts I wrote while I was still high on inspiration from the interview had more edge, had more emotions. They were just better.

It made me make a promise to myself to never again go to sleep if I still had notes from an interview that had not yet been turned into a text.

To never let the creative inspiration from an interview expire before I have turned it into a meaningful text. To write while my mind is still in the sun, so to speak.

What are you doing to make sure your creative process harnesses inspiration to its fullest?

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The post Inspiration has expiration. (Episode 260) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Interview with Alpha Bah, Country Director of the World Food Programme’s Pacific Multi-Country Office.

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Here is an interesting train of thought:

a) True creativity comes when you disconnect from your ego. So the creative process benefits if we are able to disconnect from our ego.

b) A very effective way to get rid of the ego is to develop empathy, as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others helps us gain other perspectives outside of our own world.

c) One way to develop empathy is to adopt a humanitarian mindset to your work and its purpose.

d) So instead of approaching life with just a “What’s in it for me?”, we should adopt a mindset of “What’s in it for humanity?”

By doing that, you might actually end up having better ideas – ideas that will not just benefit others, but also yourself.

This insight came through a conversation with Alpha Bah. Mr. Bah is currently the Country Director of the World Food Programme’s Pacific Multi-Country Office, based in Fiji. Originally from Sierra Leone, he has served within the UN system for over 30 years, working in different regions in the world. He has worked in North Korea, in Bangladesh, during the Rohingya refugee crisis, in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. Before moving into leadership positions, his background is in establishing robust communication quickly in areas affected by a catastrophe.

During my conversation with him, it became clear that someone like Alpha, who has been working for 30 years to help the most vulnerable on the planet, has a different approach to work.

He said: “None of the problems we’re solving are our problems, anyway, it’s humanity’s problems. But somebody has to step up and say, Hey, what can we do to make it easier for people?”

That is why the World Food Program exists.

People like Alpha have a humanitarian approach to life, and that affects how they are creative.

Here is an example: He told me how, during COVID, the World Food Programme and other humanitarian agencies had problems coming into the camps in Bangladesh where almost a million refugees were being kept during the Rohingya refugee crisis.

Due to Covid restrictions, every truck with supplies for the refugees and humanitarian workers had to be checked by the guards, but they had a manual system that made it take hours to get the trucks through. Alpha and his team approached the people who ran the camps and suggested that the World Food Program develop an electronic system with QR codes that would speed up the process. This new system drastically decreased the time it took to get their trucks and humanitarian workers in.

By focusing on the guards and their operation, the World Food Programme solved its own problem (of getting the trucks in faster so it could help more refugees.) and by doing that helped the problems of the refugees, who needed food and other supplies.

Thinking of solutions that will help the greater good and everyone is easy to say, but hard for most to do.

Sometimes a dramatic crisis can help us with that. If we are stuck in a lifeboat with limited food, most of us hope and think that we would all share the food with each other and make sure that whatever food we had would be distributed in a fair way.

But in our “normal” life, human empathy, for some reason, becomes harder.

And perhaps it has become harder and harder.

During my conversation with Alpha, we talked about how “information overload” has created a world where many people feel so overwhelmed by the access to information that they consume less complex and more easily digested content. Too much information seems to make us worse at picking what information to consume. (kind of like how a huge buffet of food can make us lose our appetite.)

And in a world with mobile phones at every tragic human event, we might also be suffering from “Empathy Overload”, which could risk us becoming less empathetic and less humane as we just feel overwhelmed.

Alpha: “I think empathy has a finite limit… as humans just to stay alive because I think it’s a coping mechanism, we tend to block out things that will destroy us.”

But in a world full of terrible suffering, we need to actively develop a more robust empathic way of thinking to make sure that the empathic action that we do take is as useful and humane as possible.

Humanitarian Creativity is this ability to distance ourselves from, well, ourselves! Or at least from our own ego.

To deliberately redefine how we approach the creative process so that the end result benefits the greater good.

We need to make sure that the very human tendency to think “What’s in it for me?” when we do something is tweaked into something more universal and more humane. Because there is, almost always, a “What’s in it for me-aspect to how we think. The “trick” is how we approach it.

In Alpha’s words: “There’s nothing as self-fulfilling than giving somebody something who cannot give you anything back and telling you thanks, and put a smile on that person’s face and feel good. You feel good yourself the entire day. So, in a way, that’s your “what’s in it for me. There’s still a “what’s in it for me?” Because at the end of the day, if your objective is to put a smile on the face of a vulnerable child in a rural village, that’s what gives you satisfaction.”

In short:  Humanitarian Creativity is about helping others. And doing so helps us reduce our egos. And doing that helps us be more creative.

What problem are you working on right now? How can you elevate the solution you are developing into a solution that is helping the greater good?

Stay in that mindset as long as you can, and chances are your creativity will flourish when your ego is pushed aside.

The post The Creativity Suite. Episode 160: Humanitarian Creativity first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

I recently had the privilege of speaking on the topic of creativity to a group of Ukrainian engineering students and faculty at the National University (Kyiv Aviation Institute).

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Using creativity for survival is an extreme use of creativity, and one we all hope to never experience. This war is just so sad on so many levels.

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Ukraine has a smaller economy, resources, population, and army than Russia, and yet they are fighting back. Talk about punching above their weight.

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Their creativity, for sure, is one of the weapons they use to be able to do that.

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What crisis, big or small, are you using to trigger your creativity or to push you to do things differently?

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ps: I had asked for their questions in advance and built my speech based on their questions to be sure to customize it to their needs as much as possible.

The post Creativity for survival. (Episode 259) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Hunger is a signal to tell you to eat. 

Feeling thirsty is a signal to you to drink.

And to feel bored is a signal to you to grow.

Companies often measure engagement and happiness at work to make sure people are enjoying what they do.

However, being bored at work is not necessarily a bad thing – it could also be a great signal indicating that someone is truly ready to learn something new and grow.

If you are hungry and you do not get food, then that is bad. 

And it is the same with boredom: if someone is bored at work, and doesn’t get the chance to grow or learn, it is bad.

But picking up on when someone is bored and giving them new and challenging work will be just as rewarding as giving a hungry person food.

So, create a system to detect and cure boredom, and you will catch people ready to grow and get them off on a journey of self-development.

And the next time you are bored, ask yourself: How do I need to grow?

This text was inspired by a conversation with Oshana Dias, Chief People Officer at Fortude – a curious HR leader. In our conversation, she stressed the importance of making sure that people have a safe environment where they feel that they can share when they are bored at work, so that the company can pick it up and create new challenges for people to grow.

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The post Pay attention to boredom. (Episode 258) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Interview with Caroline Norbury, the Chief Executive of Creative UK.

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Sometimes we need a new word to be able to see something more clearly. Like how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized the concept of “flow” which made millions of people more aware of this “mental state in which you experience a deep sense of immersion in what you’re doing.”

For the reason of better understanding a seldom talked about – but very important – role, I would like to introduce you to the concept of “Creativitor”.

A creativitor is someone who enables creativity in others.

I learned about this concept from Caroline Norbury, who is the Chief Executive of Creative UK, the independent network for the UK’s creative industries. With over 30 years of experience across community arts, film, television production, and policy advocacy, Caroline has been a leading voice championing the value of creativity to the economy and society.

 In short: Caroline is a creativitor.

 If creativitor were a word in a dictionary, it would be described as follows:

Creativitor (noun) /kriˈeɪvɪtɔr/

Etymology: From “creativity” + suffix “-or” (one who)

Definition: A person who empowers, enables, or facilitates others to express themselves creatively; one who creates conditions for others to explore their creative potential rather than creating directly themselves. A creativitor serves as a catalyst, shepherd, or nurturer of others’ creative expression, often providing permission, resources, and supportive frameworks that unlock creativity in individuals or communities.

In his famous TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson tells the story of how Gillian Lynne’s mother took her daughter to a specialist because she thought Gillian had a learning disability.

The doctor turned on the radio and when the child started to move, the doctor turned to Gillian’s mother and said: “You know Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick – she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

That doctor was a creativitor.

And Gillian Lynne, of course, became a dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre-television director and an instrumental person behind two of the longest-running shows on Broadway: Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

But without that doctor being the one who set Gillian free to create, none of that would have happened.

Human beings being creative is one of the most beautiful things in the known universe, for so many reasons. But without people helping people see their creative potential, encouraging them to pursue their creative dreams and making them trust in their creative potential, a lot of people would never become creatives.

Without creativitors, we would have way fewer creators.

Caroline told me: “Imagine if we were able to unlock the creative power in more people. If we could get more people to feel seen, heard and encouraged to express themselves. Imagine children growing up that way, imagine a society with structures and systems built around that.”

 I agree with Caroline: Imagine that.

 Imagine a world with more creativitors.

Who are your creativitors? Who are the people who made you the creative person you are today?

And who could you be a creativitor for?

The post The Creativity Suite. Episode 159: Creativitor first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

“Why are we (as humans) not better at picking up ideas and best practices from around the world?”

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That was one of the questions I got yesterday as I was a guest on two podcasts.

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My answer: “I think this is a bug in the human system!”
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It breaks my spirit that after more than 30 years of Internet connectivity and after building such a globally connected world, we are still so bad at learning from each other.

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(Not that the world has not learnt at all – we have – but the speed of picking up good ideas from other places could – and should – have been so much faster.)
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A few weeks ago, I was in Bhutan and learnt about how they look at creativity there from people like Dorji Dhradhul, a former minister and author. The trip broadened my understanding of creativity a lot.

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Today Dorji shared with me a speech he delivered where he was inspired by some of my ideas.
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​Watch it here.
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Learning from other people around the world might just be the easiest way to improve our lives.

In the process, it makes us more human.

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Getting more people curious about the world was one of the main reasons for me writing my next book (The World of Creativity) that will come out just before Christmas.
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The inspirational lesson I gained from learning from Dorji in Bhutan is in the book. You can now pre-order your copy at your local Amazon or other bookstores.
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Who are you going to learn from today?

The post Who are you going to learn from today? (Episode 257) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

“Creative people are unconventional”, said the podcast host who interviewed me recently. 

I told her I disagreed.

Creativity is not about being unconventional.

Creativity is about doing what is authentically you – and since you are unique, that might come across as (!) unconventional.

But we should not aim for being unconventional or different.

We should aim to be authentically and uniquely ourselves.

(Picture from my geometric dome office on my island, which might be an unconventional office, but that is not why I built it; I built it because it is authentically and uniquely, 100% me.)

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The post Creativity is not about being unconventional. (Episode 256) first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.

Interview with Danny Donkers, Country Lead – Greece and Cyprus at Amgen.

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In a “normal” world, it makes sense to make worst-case scenarios, best-case scenarios, and base scenarios, and to go with the base scenario.

However, in an environment that is constantly changing unexpectedly and where planning seems (and often is) impossible, it can actually make the most sense to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

Because in a chaotic world, people might be disheartened and lose confidence when nothing goes as planned and things always change.

By planning for the worst case scenario your people will then get positively surprised and energized when that bad scenario doesn’t always happen. Let’s call that “worst-case-strategy”.

It is similar to how a football team meeting a much better team might plan a very defensive strategy, but will be ready to counterattack if the opportunity presents itself. 

Having a worst-case strategy is not about being “defensive” or “negative” – it’s about using the positive energy that comes when people who have been living in a chaotic world where you seem to not be able to trust anyone or anything suddenly feel that they get a “win”.

Worst-case strategy is not about having a “the glass is empty” mindset. It’s a “the glass will probably be empty, but if it is not, I will be ready to drink it-mindset.”

It’s a strategy to stay sane in a crazy world and to have enough creative juice left when, suddenly and unexpectedly, an opportunity actually reveals itself.

This text was inspired by a conversation with Danny Donkers, Country Lead – Greece and Cyprus at Amgen. Danny has managed business in situations and markets where Worst-case-strategy helped him navigate the business landscape successfully. 

The post The Creativity Suite. Episode 158: The Case for Worst-Case Strategy. first appeared on The Creativity Explorer.