Creativity and Policymaking — Resources for today's policymakers

Authors: Laura Nelson-Hamilton, Daphnée Nostrome, Jonathan Craft

When thinking about creativity, the complex, rules based, process heavy and incremental world of policymaking may not spring to mind. Picassos, sculptures, architecture or fashion design are more likely to top the list.

To explore the theme of creativity in policymaking, we hosted a session at OCAD U’s Centre for Emerging Artists and Designers, on June 7, 2024. We welcomed a small and diverse set of policy professionals to discuss where and how they experience creativity in their work.

This post summarizes our approach and the themes and insights that arose through discussions.

Opening Provocations

To ground our discussion, Daphnée Nostrome provided opening provocations, building off her post on harnessing creative approaches to policy making.

Daphnée started by telling a story about a frustrated guy who spent hours trying to solve a tech problem before finally calling tech support. The tech comes over, fixes the issue in under a minute, then charges $1,500. Shocked, the guy complains about the high cost, and the tech explains that the quick fix comes from years of experience and practice. The story shows how creativity, like the tech's skill, is a practiced craft that lets us find the right solutions.

Daphnée also asked the participants to consider:

What is creativity?
Who gets to be creative, and at whose expense?
Who can question creativity?
What creative experiments can help us find small changes that lead to big results?

These questions opened up our thinking prior to engaging with policymaking.

Exploring Experiences with Policymaking to Understand Creativity

To move beyond hypothetical or general thoughts on creativity and policymaking, we asked participants to reflect on an experience of policymaking.

Participants filled out the following template as a way to prepare for conversation:

They shared a wide range of experiences, including those related to:

informing trade policy
prioritizing a political platform
designing a service
COVID-19 response
talent and capacity building
analyzing housing options for women leaving situations of domestic violence
securing space for artists
envisioning the future of a theater company to support its pandemic response

Many examples included some form of:

convening affected persons, stakeholders, and interest groups
establishing internal to government collaboration across teams that hold particular forms of expertise
soliciting or providing expertise

What we learned in the session is that the approaches people took, and the policy environments they worked within, were what defined creativity, in practice.

We adapted the following dialogue framework, from 10X100 and Politics for Tomorrow, to facilitate discussions:

Image description: A diamond with Presenter at the top, with 10 minutes for speaking. 2 dialogue partners in the middle, with 15 minutes for speaking, and a reflector role at the bottom, with 5 minutes for speaking. The presenter concludes the conversation by sharing back their insights, for 5 minutes.

Participants were provided the following written instructions and prompted to use the template prepared in part one of the session as the basis of their conversation:

Presenter - 10 mins: Shares about an experience with policymaking. How did it start, what were some of the main activities, where did creativity show up?

Dialogue Partners - 7 mins each: Consider what the presenter shared in relation to your experiences. What stood out to you? What’s similar to your experience? What’s different?

Reflector - 5 mins: Share themes, connection points, and areas of divergence.

Presenter - 5 mins: Summarize any insights that have arisen, what the conversation is helping them consider.

Themes and Insights

In our discussions, the following themes and insights emerged:

creativity can be a practice, a process, a set of techniques, a mindset, an input and an output
the policymaking environment may not be open to creative inputs and outputs, particularly, those related to creative forms of knowledge generation and sharing. This may result in a separation between what is deemed to be creative and what is understood as policymaking
data is often sought out by reflex, to understand a current state. That can help foster creativity, but others flagged it could also limit creativity by limiting exploration or leading to a sense of certainty over desired outcomes
future-oriented analyses can enable affected persons to articulate preferred scenarios in novel ways. However, these preferred scenarios can be challenging to map to discrete policy changes, absent a political mandate or willingness to apply policy levers to the creation of preferred futures
lived experience can help establish foundational understanding of the current state, but requires deeper connection to policy to support data interpretation and identify appropriate levers for change
early stage work was often required to understand the current state, who needs to be involved in solutioning, and build relationships that could contribute to a shared vision for change
time, resources, and alignment with funders are required to build the foundations for creativity and policymaking
creativity in policymaking requires acknowledgement of one's own bias and recognition of the power dynamics that shape who is involved in policymaking, when, and how

When Does Creativity Happen and What Prevents It?

Many participants reflected on how creativity in policymaking often started as a response to crisis. Others expressed it as a response to not knowing exactly what to do, or how to do it.

For some, creativity was a path one needed to take in tandem with traditional policy development processes and in alignment with funding requirements. Creativity could launch those engaged in policymaking in new directions, but this inevitably required reorientation and shape shifting to be accepted.

In some instances, conscious departure from a standard policy process was an objective of creativity. One participant shared the example of domestic violence reporting where creative approaches were needed to ensure that statements could be taken from survivors in ways that minimized invasive and painful experiences for them. This was echoed by others, who noted a distinction in creativity in what to do (policy objectives or problem structuring) versus the how, or implementation.

One participant raised that creativity may not always be positive. Noting that in some instances it might be used in relation to facts and framings in less helpful ways.

Participants consistently noted that creativity was relational and spatial. It was produced in spaces where people felt understood, safe, and able to express their knowledge and experiences in a manner that is consistent with who they are. It often came to life within relationships of trust. Creativity also evolved in how policymaking participants interacted with others within and around governments on policy issues.

Financial inputs, resources, authorities, and legitimacy are often gained and exercised in creative ways to allow responses to the policy challenge at hand, diversification of who is in the room or conversation, and where and how policymaking unfolded.

As one participant noted, creativity and policymaking may be about letting go of the ways, structures, assumptions, and functionality of traditional policymaking, and being drawn, instead, to the goal. Creativity in policymaking is about being responsible, working within guardrails, and behaving as stewards of the future, through deep understanding of the present.

As it turns out, there is far more creativity within policymaking than initially imagined. There is also far more to consider than we had time to cover in a 2 hour session.

If you’re interested in contributing to the conversation, reach out. If you have something top of mind, tell us:

What does creativity and policymaking mean to you?
What possibilities and limitations do you see?

Links to Facilitation Materials are here

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