Ep 105: The Power of Process: How Structure Actually Enhances Creativity
Breaking the Myth That Process Kills Creativity
SUMMARY
Have you ever noticed that the most brilliant creative minds aren't just wildly chaotic, but actually rely on systems and structure to produce their best work? In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, Dustin Pead shatters the myth that process kills creativity and explores how the right kind of structure can actually set your creative mind free.
The common misconception is that creativity requires complete freedom. However, as Dustin shares from his own experience designing a Good Friday service with zero parameters, too much freedom can lead to decision paralysis. When given constraints and clear parameters, he and his team created one of the most talked-about experiences for years to come.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Constraints expand creative thinking - Parameters and boundaries narrow your focus, allowing you to use 100% of your brain power on creative problem-solving rather than establishing the framework. Stanford University research shows that participants with moderate constraints produced more innovative and practical solutions than those with complete freedom.
⚡️ Structure creates ideal conditions for creative flow - The "flow state" (being in the zone) is where creatives produce their best work with effortless creativity. Having structured time, place, and rhythm creates the perfect conditions for flow by removing distractions and reducing decision fatigue.
⚡️ Systems multiply creative impact - As Scott Belsky famously said, "Creativity × Organization = Impact." Your creative potential is multiplied by organizational systems, not diminished by them. The most successful creative professionals balance innovative thinking with structured approaches to execution.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Creatives love to tell people that they don't want to be put in a box, but when the rubber really hits the road, they need the box in order to create. They need the boundaries, they need the non-negotiables because they narrow the focus for you so that you can hit your mark each and every time."
💬 "Creativity × Organization = Impact. What that means is that creative potential is multiplied by organizational systems, not diminished by them. The most successful creative professionals are ones who balance their innovative thinking with structured approaches to execution."
💬 "The goal of structure is freedom. It's freedom, it's not restriction."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Free Guide: 5 Project Management Pitfalls and How To Avoid Them
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Have ever noticed that the most brilliant creative minds aren't just wildly chaotic, but actually rely on systems and structure to produce their best work? Today we are going to shatter the myth that process kills creativity and explore how the right kind of structure can actually set your creative mind free. Let's get into it. Taking creatives from chaos to clarity.
Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, Creative Process Coach and Consultant. I'm here to help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can scale with efficiency together.
Today we're gonna talk about the power of process, how structure actually enhances creativity. But before we get into that, I wanna remind you, if you're listening on a podcast platform of any kind, I would really appreciate a five star rating or review. It helps get this content out further to those like yourself who can benefit from it. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm so glad that you're here. I'm constantly tweaking my look. So if you have any feedback about the studio here, please let me know. But this is my office and I'm super blessed and pumped to be able to work at such a cool space. So if you're seeing that, take a look around. If you have any questions about some things that are in the background, in the background, that's always changing because I change a lot. Please reach out to me and let me know. But I would appreciate like subscribe and ring the bell if you're watching on YouTube.
And if you are interested in learning more about me or what I can offer you in your creative business or your creative entrepreneurship, you can reach out to me and find me online at DustinPead.com or you can find me on social media at DustinPead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.
All right, let's get into today's episode. Several years ago when I was in ministry, if you know my story, I spent almost 20 years in full time local church ministry, specifically in the creative departments, music, communication, tech, that type of thing. Right. And I was given the opportunity to design our good Friday service, which at the time of this releasing of this episode of the podcast tomorrow is good Friday. So this is a timely illustration story for you. I had the opportunity to design our entire good Friday service from top to bottom, zero parameters. I was like, man, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. This is every creative's dream to have given a full blank canvas and say, just create your whatever you want, just create it. And we trust you, right? It's an amazing feeling as a creator. I was paralyzed almost instantly with decision fatigue. I went back and ended up asking for some guidance and parameters and it ended up being one of our most talked about experiences for years and years because the common misconception is that creativity requires complete freedom. But in that moment, what I needed were parameters. I needed to know how long the service needed to be, what the feel of the service we were going for. mean, most Good Friday services are a little bit somber. Is that what we want to do? Or do we want to celebrate the cross? how are we? What's our angle here? What are we going to do? How much singing do we want involved? How much participation do we want involved? All questions that I needed to know in order to build this amazing experience for 45 minutes on a good Friday service and got those parameters and me and the team knocked it out. And it was, ended up being, like I said, one of the most talked about experiences for years because we had some really good parameters, but we still were able to kind of run our creativity lens through it.
So what I want to talk about today is this misconception that processes and systems hinder creativity. Let me first start with how constraints can expand creative thinking. Constraints, which it sounds like a negative word, but they're just parameters to work within. They're non-negotiables. They're boundaries. I often say that creatives love to tell people that they don't want to be put in a box, but when the rubber really hits the road, they need the box in order to create. They need the boundaries, they need the non-negotiables because they narrow the focus for you so that you can hit your mark each and every time, right? If you were to just walk out and fire an arrow, they would go, oh, you missed. Well, I wasn't really aiming at anything, right? It's the whole Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You're not aiming at the thing, right? So some examples of constraints commonly are headlines and these things are going to sound just before I get into the list. These things are going to sound ridiculous. They're going to sound like I hate these things. Why would I invite these things into the process? Just stick with me here for a little while. But productive constraints, they can be deadlines. Nope, they can be the B word budgets, right? The money for it. Or they can be technical limitations like us and my early church days. We had zero budget.
So we had tons of technical limitations that we had to overcome. But listen, limitations and these constraints, they force us to think differently and find innovative solutions. There's a study that Stanford University did a few years ago on creativity and constraints. what they found was that introducing specific limitations actually enhanced creative problem solving compared to wide open parameters. Researchers observed that participants who were given a moderate amount of constraints, they produced more innovative and more practical solutions than those with complete freedom. And this is, they said that this was likely because of the constraints provided helpful starting points and narrowed overwhelming possibilities. I'm going to say that again. It narrowed overwhelming possibilities. If you're feeling overwhelmed today, and the possibilities of your creativity, it's probably because you don't have any boundaries on it. You don't have any helpful, useful, productive constraints. They went on to talk about how this phenomenon is sometimes called the paradox of choice, which is a fancy way of saying there's too many decisions, decision fatigue, too many options, right? And so what they did is they demonstrated that removing the paralysis of too many options, it allowed the participants to focus their creative energy more effectively. Do you see what I'm saying here? So they're not having to spin their brain power coming up with the parameters and then filling the parameters. They were already given the parameters. They can use a hundred percent of their brain power towards the creative problem solving.
The study concluded that the sweet spot for creativity involves providing enough structure to guide thinking without being so restrictive that it stifles imagination. That's not what we're trying to do. A prime example of this is Twitter or X or whatever it's called these days. Twitter, when it was first introduced and I'm pretty sure still now I haven't really used Twitter all that much. But Twitter had a character limit. And a character limit on Twitter blew up because people were like, oh, this makes me get more concise and creative with my communication. Do you see how parameters and some productive constraints can heighten your creativity?
All right, let's talk a little bit about this science, this brain science, neuroscience behind creative flow. You'll also you'll often hear creatives and athletes alike, people that are highly skilled professionals in their field. Writers will talk about this a lot. They talk about a phrase called the flow state. Right. And the first time I heard this, I thought it was just some mystic mumbo jumbo. And it can easily get there for sure. But flow state is actually a psychological condition where a person becomes fully immersed in an activity like imagine your kids when they're watching TV, they are fully immersed in that flow state. Although I would argue that maybe it's not the most creative activity to just sit around and watch TV, but you understand what I'm saying. They have a fully immersed in that activity. They're experiencing deep focus. They're obviously enjoying themselves and they have a complete distorted sense of time. It's, it's often described as being in the zone, right?
I know when I was writing my book last year, the very first day that I sat down and started writing, remember specifically I was sitting in my local coffee shop, I started writing and I just lost myself on all track of time, right? Because I found myself in this creative flow. I looked up and a few hours had went by and I didn't really understand where I was or how I got there because I was so immersed in the story. I was so in the zone, right?
So for creatives, this flow state, it matters tremendously because that's where you produce your best work with what seems like effortless creativity. And it bypasses all the self-criticism and accessing of deeper levels of innovative thinking. During this flow, creative professionals experience a heightened pattern recognition and make intuitive connections that might otherwise be missed during normal consciousness, right? So this structure around their time, this is the time, this is the place, this is the rhythm we're gonna talk about in a minute. This structure, it creates conditions, right? It's like, hey, there's hurricane conditions or there's storm conditions, because everything has kind of been set up and working in the right atmosphere, right? your right environment for that storm to happen. And we're trying to create creative storms every single day, right? We're even trying to create, wait for it, brainstorms. Okay. That's just a dad joke. We can get on past that for a second, but the structure creates the conditions that are needed for flow to occur by removing distractions, right? It's, it's a, it's a, it's a routine. It's a habit. It's a rhythm that reduces decision fatigue, Steve jobs and his outfits is a prime example of this. said that he wore the same thing, the same outfit, not the same exact clothes, but he wore the same outfit every day because it was one less thing he had to make a decision about. And so it freed up some mental bandwidth. so processes and systems, don't hinder creativity. No, no, no, no. They free up the mental bandwidth for actual creative thinking and when we work in systems and predictable workflows into our creative rhythms, they can actually reduce anxiety because we don't have to make all the decisions. We can just show up, understand our parameters and start creating immediately with 100% of our brain power. It reduces anxiety and it reduces creative blocks.
All right. If you're still not on board yet, let me give you just a couple of quick case studies of highly creative companies or people with some strong processes, right? If you've ever read the story of Pixar, you understand that they have a development process and brain trust meetings and they have their own process and they have these brain trust organized meetings where people can review the work that is constantly becoming out and everybody can collaborate and give feedback. But no one would ever look at Pixar and say they're not creative at all. Like Pixar has broken the mold on creativity time and time again in their industry. Apple, when they were under the designer Johnny Ive, he had this 10-3-1 model where he would say, we're going to have 10 ideas and then we're gonna narrow it down to the best three, and then we're gonna narrow it down to the best one. That little thing right there of saying this is how we're gonna do it, no one would look at Apple in that heyday and say, this is not a creative company. People longed to work for and buy Apple products because it made them feel more creative. Scott Belsky, who's with 99U and B. Hansen, all these companies over the years, incredible, incredible creative professional. One of his like all time bestselling books making ideas happen Please go buy that book. It's it's incredible. But in that he talks about how creativity is a quote. He says creativity times organization equals impact Let that sit in for a second creativity. We all have it Times not just plus but it multiplies with organization equals impact. And that's what we're all out here trying to do. We're all creating our art in order to make a difference, in order to make an impact, whether it's a financial difference or it's an artistic difference or a social impact difference. We all want that difference. And so the way to get it is creativity times organization. That's what equals the impact. And what he meant was that there's creative potential is multiplied by organizational systems, not diminished by them. At the most successful creative professionals are ones who balance their innovative thinking with structured approaches to execution.
All right, so hopefully by now you're convinced that processes and systems don't hinder creativity. And if you're a person that has little to no processes or systems, or you're still trying to figure out which ones you need, let's talk for a second about identifying which processes you need to implement first. And we're going to talk about First, first thing you need to do before you kind of go down either one of these paths, because we're going to talk about it for solo creators, and we're also going to talk about it for creative teams. But before we dive into either one of those, you need to be really honest. And sometimes this involves bringing outside help in someone like myself who can sit down and together, we're going to identify your biggest creative bottlenecks, your biggest creative bottlenecks. Is it internal communication? Is it communication with your client? Is it a repeatable processes and over and over? Is it that no one can find any documents or files that they need anywhere? Whatever it is, you're going to first identify your biggest creative bottleneck. And once you have that, now we're going to talk about the three most important processes for solo creators. OK, so you have your bottleneck in mind. Think about this. Number one, you need to have a consistent Idea capture system again. This is for solo creators, right? And yes, these things are important for creative teams as well But I'm talking just to the solo creator right now You need to have a consistent idea capture system that allows you to document inspiration Whenever it strikes I think about Jerry Seinfeld and always carrying around his legal pads with them all the time his legal pads have been noted at nauseam about how he would use those or wake up in the middle of the night and scribble stuff down the next day, he'd have to wake up and be like, what is this that I wrote? But he had a system. So when an inspiration was striking, he had a place to go. So it doesn't matter if it's a digital tool like our phones, or it could be a remarkable tablet, or it could be, I know, I anything else around here in front of me right now. It could be your computer, it could be Post-it notes, could be field notes. I used to love carrying around field notes. I need to get back into that. But having one place, not multiple places where it's scattered all over, because that creates chaos and we're trying to go from chaos to clarity, right? But having one place, whether digital or physical, that ensures that great ideas aren't lost. So you need to have an idea capture system.
The second thing a solo creator needs is structured time blocking rhythm that separates the idea time from the execution time from the administrative work time. You need to have three buckets as a solo creative. You need to have idea time should be blocked out on your calendar every day, every week, however often you need to do it, right? Execution time should be blocked off on your calendar every day, every week, however often you need to execute the ideas. And then there's the unfortunate administrative work. If you're solo, you also have to do the administrative work. So you have those three buckets for three distinct periods. And the reason you do that is it prevents the context switching, right? You don't have to switch your mind, go, okay, well now I'm in idea mode and now I'm immediately in execute that idea mode. And okay, now I've got to take a break for a second and do some admin stuff. Do you see the chaos that that begins to cause? It does not maximize creative flow. And that's what we're after.
The third thing for creative solo, for solo creators is a clear project completion framework that's going to be defined by milestones along the way so that you know you're tracking towards the right end goal and some finishing criteria, right? You, how do we know we're done? How do we know when we've won? Because the, the, the tendency here creative, if I can just speak candidly with you for a second, you know, the tendency is for you to fight against perfectionism and you'll keep editing and keep editing and keep editing and keep editing. And you've edited that thing to death. And it was at one point early on in those edits, like probably version three, four or five, somewhere in there. It was really, really great. But you kept editing it and editing it to death. And now you're left with nothing because you constantly are combating that perfectionism. So having a framework of your project completion is super important to know when you've done. What's the criteria for knowing that we're done? Is it a certain amount of edits? Is there a certain satisfaction rate amongst the team? Whatever it is, you gotta have that to ensure your creative work actually launches rather than remaining perpetually and that we're almost done. This is almost done. This is almost done. Almost done is like the worst phrase for creative production because almost done is never done. You know what mean? So those are the three things for solo creators, idea capture, time blocking, and project completion. You got to know when it's done. All now let's talk about the three most important processes for creative teams, okay?
For teams, yes, those things are important before, but teams are gonna, the dynamics a little bit different. So for teams, you need to have a standardized feedback protocol. And what this does is it establishes when and how their critiques happen. It specifies what constructive feedback looks like. And it ensures that the creative work improves without demoralizing the team, right? You don't wanna do that. You wanna be able to say, hey, look, I know this can be better. So how can we make it better together? So a standard feedback protocol, whatever it looks like, this is it. Everybody knows it. Everybody uses it. This is how we provide feedback like brain trust meetings at Pixar.
Second thing for creative teams is you need to have a transparent emphasis on transparent needs to be open so people can see it. Project management system. If you're like me, I use Asana, it doesn't matter. You can use Monday, you can use Trello. If you have to, just don't use Basecamp. But Post-it notes, it doesn't matter, whatever you use, as long as it's transparent and out there in the open for the entire team to see so that they can see their part in it. And they don't want to be the kind of the stick and the spokes that clogs up the process, right? So you want to be able to see that. But in that process, in that project management system, you need to clearly identify who owns what project task, whatever you need to establish clear deadlines and you need to make sure that the dependencies are visible so that the handoffs can happen smoothly. Right. So, hey, we can't edit the thing until we can't edit the video until the video is shot and they go, well, great. We can't shoot the video until we have a place to shoot it. Logistics. Well, we can't really think about the logistics until we know the story. Right. And so you understand those dependencies and how they all fit together.
So standardized feedback, transparent project management system. The third thing that creative teams need the most is a defined decision making framework. This is similar to our third point for solo creators, but a decision making framework that that will clarify who has the final approval, who's the head of this project and what is the criteria that's going to be used for making creative decisions? How are we going to resolve creative differences without constant revisions or a whole, let's design by committee. That's not what we're trying to do here. We still value independent creative work, but together, how are we going to make this decision? Decisions need to be made the same way over and over again. I actually just finished this great little book. you know the Do book series, just beautifully designed books, but this one right here is Les McCown. not, I'm sure I'm butchering his last name. He's wrote many leadership books, but this was do scale roadmap to remark to growing a remarkable company. And in this, talks a lot about making sure that you have a clear, clearly defined decision making framework. Again, what that's going to do is going to clarify who has final authority, what criteria is going to be used for making the decisions and how to resolve the differences when they come about.
So I've used the word framework a lot so far in this and I get it, it's an overused term. Essentially all it means is that you have a template and I use Asana, my project management system. I store all my templates in there so that when I have to use that template for something, it's a simple copy and paste it into the project that it needs to be in. And then from there, I'm just going to add the who's doing it and when they're doing it, right? It's D-O, it's not D-U-E, remember that. So wherever you want to put it, just use the one spot for these frameworks or these templates, however you want to talk about it, whatever word you want to use for it. But I use Asana. You can take these things to say, this is how we're going to do these things. You can kind of build that process out, build that template, that framework out in Asana or your project management system. Just don't just don't assign it to anybody or put any due dates on it. And then you can just copy and paste it. And then you add assignments and due dates to it. And boom, there you go. You're consistently using the same thing every single time.
In summary, structure enhances creativity. Structure enhances creativity. So I want to encourage you to just start with one process improvement. I've mentioned a lot in here today. But if you could just start with one process improvement, how you can implement it, how you can take the idea, write it down, capture it, put it in a template and do the same thing over and over again, that's what's gonna allow your creativity to thrive because you're using less and less of your brain energy trying to think about how something needs to get done rather than actually getting it done. So let's not, let's not be overly, let's not overwhelm ourselves with the how let's set ourselves up for success. The goal of structure is freedom. It's freedom. It's not restriction. Okay.
All right. So if anything that I talked to you about today has struck a nerve, this is what I do for a living. This is my business. This is Dustin Pead.com. This is chief creative consultants, LLC. This is what I'm spending my days doing now and I would love to help you with it. if you are anything that I said in today's episode kind of struck a nerve with you go to Dustin pead.com and hop on my calendar and let's chat about how I can help you go from chaos to clarity in your processes and systems.
Next week we're to talk about profitable business owners. We love that word profitable. Project planning. We're going to talk about how to set timelines that can respect your margins. And so a little bit more of what we today was kind of a lot of the why it's important. Next week, we're going to really start to get into it. Profitable project planning. I don't know how I came up with that one, right? Setting timelines that respect your margins. So feel free to mention me or the handle of the podcast at Dustin Pead. You can download any of my free tools at dustinpead.com. actually have a tool on there. If you go to dustinpead.com slash pitfalls, it's a guide to eliminating project pitfalls. Totally free. Just grab it, house around your team, nonchalantly slip it on your boss's desk and say, is how we're going to avoid this project pitfall again. But go to dustinpead.com slash pitfalls to grab your copy. Next week, the profitable project planning, setting timelines that respect your margins. Y'all have a fantastic Easter weekend. I'll talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy.