Why Creativity Is the Antidote to Scarcity Culture
Scarcity culture* is rife in changemaking.
It’s shaped in part by funding models that pit community organisations against one another, the way many nonprofits (often as a result) underpay staff**, the chronic shortfall of time, energy, and capacity that so many changemakers, across industries, feel and face.
It’s also one of the barriers to creating deep, transformative, liberatory change.
Big visions become weighted with concerns about capacity (or tip to extraction, exhaustion and burnout).
New ideas are met with rigid rejection, burdened by past experience.
Collaborations become tangled with resentment and invisible expectations.
Scarcity culture - especially when combined with urgency – results in not only burnout and conflict, but almost always diminished or unsustainable impact.
An antidote to a culture mired in scarcity or urgency however is not (only) slowing down, simplification or even a cultivating an abundance mindset.
It’s actually creativity.
Scarcity and urgency mindsets are very rigid, fixed ways of seeing the world, flatteners of possibility. The only answer they see is the status quo or past experience - work harder, follow the playbook. They tend to focus on the limitations that exist, with an (often unspoken) belief that the ends can justify the means (eg, achieving the goal is worth pushing through any personal or organisational limits - and indeed, the only way).
Speaking to mindset isn’t to isolate individuals – this is often an inherited story, shaped by a collective culture and influenced by experiences that have come before. And it’s a common mindset in organisations that have had to deal with very real restrictions and limitations. But it is, none-the-less, a way of engaging with the world that isn’t generative or conducive to the futures we desire.
To break this down, we need to bring as much creativity into our change-spaces as possible.
Creativity to generate new possibilities not just for what work you’re doing, but also how the work gets done.
This might look like:
Collaborations and partnerships that hadn’t been considered.
Merged or streamlined steps, or a change to the timeline.
New decision making processes.
The removal of bureaucratic steps.
Sharing work live or publicly before it’s finished, co-shaping direction.
Gaining buy in earlier.
The alternative is to continue acting from a place that rarely has the space, time or safety to consider the full spectrum of possibilities that exist.
Because there often are solutions to the problems we’re facing, but we can’t find them when we’re running on fear, exhaustion or ‘realism’.
If you’re wanting to cultivate creativity in your team or community, here are a few grounded ways to begin:
Refuse to Fight for Your Limitations: As Richard Bach said, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”
“Put down the fight for limitations” can be a helpful reminder at the beginnings of meetings or strategy sessions. The ‘limitation’ can be picked up later, but there’s a period of time where it’s loosened and freed.
Now, this isn’t to say that limitations are not real or shouldn’t be considered – but too often we hold tightly to what ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ possible, losing sight of all the possibilities that surround us.
So if you notice the creep in of ‘this just isn’t possible’, ‘that won’t work’ – why? What if that wasn’t true? What if there had to be a third way (even a bad one) – what would it be?Use the phrases Yes, And and What If? to help spark possibility. No ‘buts’, ‘it would be nice if…’, ‘realistically…’. This is a practice in not only creativity, but complexity and paradox.
Language shapes possibility.Brain Dumps: There’s nothing like a good, old fashioned brain dump. Very important note though: creativity hates a critic. It will run and hide if there is any judgement – that’s why “there’s no bad ideas” has to be genuine for the period of the brain dump.
Start with the worst ideas you can think of.Spend Time Outdoors: Nature is a brilliant solutionist. She is incredibly creative, and has an answer to every challenge. We evolved from nature, in nature and as nature – the more we get outside, the more we connect to the water, air, trees and elements that surround us, the more we generate our capacity to see new possibilities.
Importantly though, creativity isn’t about a ‘one off workshop’ or a one time solution.
Rather creativity in this context is a mindset shift – an ongoing practice that shifts the modus operandi from a fixed and extractive way of operating, to one in which we ask, How could we? What might happen if…? Imagine…
It’s not putting down the big ideas – it’s creating the space for us to approach them in a whole new way.
*There is a subtle difference between scarcity, which with the right conditions can be a driver of creativity and innovation, and scarcity mindset/culture - particularly artificial scarcity, generated by capitalism - which creates a pervasive sense of fear, uncertainty and despair.
**a topic for another day – but we cannot create the conditions for thriving in the world without also creating and planting the seeds of thriving in our own bodies, communities and organisations, and that includes in how people are compensated. Amahra Spence beautifully suggested in a must-read piece, the The NonProfit Industrial Complex and the Gap in Alternative Future Building, that we must be “Re-coding the language of funding so that “overhead” becomes “infrastructure”; so that back-end work is also seen as frontline work and that work is resourced with less stipulation - longer term, more flexibility, where unrestricted really means unrestricted.”
