Learning to teach creativity

Three hundred years ago at Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines Inc., I was faced with a problem of creativity. How do you teach it to people? I was director of Corporate Communications and we had to teach plant staff to think better creatively so they could come out with better-planned newsletters. The problem then and now was nobody knew how to teach creativity.

We decided first to look outside. We hired a training expert. She tried hard and we cooperated hard but in the end it wasn’t enough. It showed people how to trust more but creativity, I now realize, is not based on how you feel about other people. It is based on how much, how deeply and profoundly, you trust yourself.

Our second effort was slightly more successful. Pempe Vitalis, one of the photographers we used to hire, and I decided to conduct the seminar. He would teach photography and I would teach writing. We even had a motto: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a thousand words must describe at least one picture. Now I know how silly that was but it made people laugh. Pempe, a dear friend, has passed away since. I remember a stormy night in Calamba when I was told he had died and I was too far away to say good-bye. I still grieve.

But anyway, Pempe knew how to teach photography. I did not know how to teach writing. I had improved the writing style of some of my immediate people by sitting with them through the editing process but that was teaching them how to edit. I needed to teach people how to write.

I remember standing in front of all my books from the Writers Book of the Month Club I had joined in the USA wondering if there was anything that could be of some assistance to me. Suddenly a title caught my eye. I took the book down. It showed a technique. I tried it out. It worked. My writing became more creative, deeper, better.

I decide to use that technique to teach the people, most of whom have retired now, to write better.

Now as I look back I know I did not teach it well. Then I taught it in two days. Now I know you cannot teach people to do anything more creatively in two days. First you must awaken their right brains. Then the creativity naturally flows and improves over time. There must be gaps to allow the newly-acquired knowledge to settle in. There must be time to learn to trust yourself more.

I moved to an ad agency short on creativity then. Since I was the president, I decided to offer classes open to anyone. It was fairly successful. Eventually I decided to launch it as my main source of income after I left that agency. It has been maybe about two years since I have been teaching this. Here is the most important thing: I have learned so much.

The first thing I learned is that when you awaken the right brain, you touch the emotions in ways you cannot explain. At a class reunion one of my students said, "Let me tell you how your classes worked on me. After graduation I decided make friends with my mother-in-law. We are now the best of friends and that makes me very happy. I thank your class for that gift."

I looked at her puzzled. I had no recollection of ever teaching her to make friends with anyone. "I know," she said, "it’s strange. But it was your class that made me see it and made me do it. It’s terrific."

"That’s wonderful," I said. "Thank you for sharing your experience with me. But you should write more because as I remember, you wrote well."

"Maybe one day," she said, in a tone that told me it would not be one of her obsessions, "but your class did its job for me."

When you awaken the right brain, you change people profoundly. Yes, they write better too. The most important skill you give them is the gift of insight. It is insight that leads to creativity. I had a classmate who would throw all sorts of "creative" ideas at me, like "I was at the mall yesterday and I saw all those white walls. I thought what if I turned them into ad space?" A terrific idea, I said, but do you own the mall? Creativity also needs to make sense. It needs to think out of the box but still it needs to make sense. That’s why insight is so necessary.

Maybe if I organized myself enough, I could become a creative consultant. After all, I started working on it three hundred years ago at Coke.

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