We Need to Be Creative If We Want to Change the World, Part 1

Want to change the world? You’re going to have to get creative.

We will always have problems to solve. Threats to the environment. Pandemics. Inequality. We should never give up trying to bring about a better world. We also should be willing to accept the fact that we will never live in a utopia.

But if we want to work toward a more just, sustainable world, we need to bring new solutions to our problems. Sometimes we fail to approach problems creatively because we think that what worked in the past will still work, even though the world has changed. Other times we become so attached to an idea that we won’t give it up, even when that idea fails. And all too often we see the world in binaries — if the solution isn’t X, then it must be Y — lacking the imagination to try an approach that combines both X and Y or that is something utterly different from either of them.

Creative solutions can scare us. They challenge our beliefs and can be so wild that they seem unfeasible. They seem too difficult. Why not stick with what we already know? It’s easier to use the same route to get to work, to listen to familiar styles of music, to eat the foods our family ate when we were growing up, to continue to do what we’ve always done. Change, trying new things, is risky, and we tend to be risk averse.

But people who ask “What if…?” are the ones who change the world.

What Creativity Looks Like

• Horrified by slavery, William Wilberforce and others like him asked, “What if we could outlaw the British slave trade?” Around the time of his death, the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act.
• After discovering that fair-trade chocolate is not necessarily free of slave labor, Dutch journalists asked, “What if we could distribute a truly slave-free chocolate bar?” The result was the birth of Tony’s Chocolonely.
• Jeremy and Jessica Courtney asked, “What if we were willing to love others — even across enemy lines?” They founded Preemptive Love Coalition, delivering aid to people who need it, often where other organizations are unwilling to go.
• In the face of high recidivism and mortality rates for recently released prisoners, California’s Anti-Recidivism Coalition asked, “What if formerly incarcerated people helped newly released prisoners transition back into society outside prison walls?” The program is by no means a cure-all for the difficulties that newly released prisoners face, but it’s a step in the right direction.
• As India works to clean up the Ganges, someone thought to ask, “What if we got people to stop dropping chemically treated flowers into the river and to recycle them into incense sticks instead?” There are still enormous problems to solve in trying to clean the river, but if people continue to think creatively, there’s hope.
• In this podcast episode from The Forum on Workplace Inclusion, Joel Hodroff and Professor Thomas Fisher discuss the outside-the-box idea of a dual currency system, springing from questions such as “What if we stopped confusing money with wealth?” Listening to that episode was what inspired me to write this two-part series on creativity.

Creativity Won’t Fix Everything, But It Can Change the World

As you can see from the list above, some of these ideas have only made small differences so far. Others are as yet unproven. But all have changed or have the potential to change the world for the better, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in seismic shifts.

So if we want to make a difference, we need to be open to creative ideas. In part two of this series, scheduled for March 2, I’ll share ways we can grow as creative thinkers.