I had one stack of rhyme notebooks and two problems: I couldn’t figure out where to share them, and I was afraid of what would happen if I did.
A dingy closet-sized bedroom in Wicker Park served as my first humble abode in Chicago, circa 2013. Mattress on the ground, oddly painted blood-red walls (just happened to have the paint, so I went for it), a clothes hanger drilled to one wall, and an 8ft x 4ft white board covering the entirety of the other wall.
This depiction is only relevant for telling you what, for an extended period of time, the white board contained: names.
Before I even knew where to share those notebooks, I had filled a wall-sized white board with names of people that I feared may be offended, surprised, or detrimentally affected in some way if I did. My mind ran the gamut: What if my intention on this piece is misinterpreted? What about the profane word rhymed in that piece? What if I appear less-than-solely obsessed with building Packback?
That last one was the most troubling. We were early into an angel round of financing. Core to the narrative on Packback was grit & die-hard hustle from the founders. Would an admission of time invested elsewhere betray that?
My professional fear and the creative itch grew in unison. Within that conflict I found a paradox: the arena takes your absolute hustle + focus, and yet it calls for creative fuel. Creative range isn’t just OK, it’s necessary. In obsessing over two seemingly conflicted one-way streets, I was missing the crossroads right in front of me.
Fast forward to 2016 and a rickety platform started forming at those crossroads. We call it Makespace.
What is Makespace?
That’s just a little color on my story. Ask the other folks who built up Makespace over the years and they’ll share their own angle too. As it turns out, the creative crossroads between the “professional” & art community is host to plenty of quiet residents. We simply handed them a microphone.
So what is Makespace? It’s an intimate gathering for creative display. Think “showcase” as opposed to the typical bar-scene “show”. Attentive, detail-oriented audience, in an intimate welcoming setting. Each event hosts three “featured artists” (music, poetry, comedy, prose, etc.), complemented with a few open “spotlight” slots, and capped off with a visual artist of the evening displaying their work on the surrounding walls.
The event gathers a hodgepodge of attendees from the tech, art, and student communities surrounding the Chicago loop area. On any given Makespace evening, a tech CEO is sitting by an art student somewhere in the audience. Oftentimes, they’re watching a business person share her art.
Of course, we’re not the only ones talking about creativity. Harvard Business Review is packed with expert takes on the subject. In reference to the “global creativity gap”, HBR’s Rebecca Shambaugh notes:
The fact is that while research shows that 80% of people see unlocking creative potential as key to economic growth, only 25% feel that they are living up to their own creative potential.
Nobody would dare say “I don’t want my team to be creative”. However, as I scroll through the business literature, most of what I find is contained to experts opining about unlocking creatively with a specific aim. “How to”s on getting your team to be creative aboutsolving your specific business problem. Thinking outside the box is preached up and down State Street.
One problem I observe, is that as soon as we add the “about”, the box is already drawn. It’s kind of like trying to say, “Here’s 7 ways to get a painter to paint a masterpiece that has these particular themes, colors, and specs”.
While directional parameters have eventual utility & necessity, I find that before you can aim creativity, you have to let it breath freely. Creativity, like curiosity, thrives in the wicked realm of mystery. It doesn’t really like for you to determine it’s endgame.
Creativity for creativity’s sake holds immense value in and of itself. And as it turns out, there happen to be positive side effects that also benefit the company endgame.
When the muscle is exercised routinely & freely, you’re better able to tap into it for the professional task at hand. This is an important distinction to be made: the difference between creativity aimed at a function, and a function aimed at creativity.
Makespace is a function aimed at creativity.
What started as a dinky open mic at the office, has survived & evolved over four years into a safe haven for creativity to breathe in & around Packback.
I’ve been witness to amazing things that have occurred even just within our own Packback participants:
- I’ve seen several displays of paintings, photography and even computer-generated art. All of which opened a window into the artist’s — and our teammate’s — unique perspective.
- I watched a new teammate captivate a packed audience with a live comedy bit in their first week. Immediate ice breaker with each of their teammates!
- I’ve seen tears in the crowd after a teammate shared a poem expressing the impact that a recent national event had made on her. Others shared the same sentiment.
- I heard a teammate open up about a recent hardship, expressed via written prose journal reading. Again, adding an incredible degree of perspective and empathy to their teammate relationships.
- I watched a Packback engineer wow the audience with a surprise piano mashup performance. Nobody knew he was a classically trained master of this additional craft. I later on watched the conversations among teammates that the performance sparked.
- I’ve even listened to two separate teammates preview their upcoming musical album release!
Each one of those moments boasts a variety of healthy elements that are beneficial to a team culture, and otherwise impossible to artificially manufacture. Compiled over time, those moments contribute to weaving the thread of teammate empathy & relationship building.
As for engaging with & welcoming our surrounding Chicago community, Makespace also helps us provide a window into Packback’s character. Demonstrating character and culture is a challenge that any company faces when uber-talented folks are considering joining their team. Makespace is by no means an all-in-one solution for this, but it’s certainly a contributing element of our ability to demonstrate our company’s heart to the folks interested in getting to know us.
Just ask Packback’s VP Engineering, former astrophysicist Dr. Craig Booth. Keep in mind, Craig’s professional curriculum vitae has much more to do with world-class computational research than art class. And yet, a couple of years back when he was still considering Packback and getting acquainted with our culture, Craig attended a Makespace event and left thinking to himself, “these are my people”.
Half a year or so later, Craig partook as the featured visual artist at Makespace.
Evolving the blueprint for a successful company
Shaped in part by my observation of Makespace, I now hold onto a simple personal belief: the world could be better if a marginally higher % of people advanced their creative range and lived consistently in creative health.
On a quick Google search exploring whether my gut has research-validity, I found this excerpt in a Psychology Today article about prison art therapy programs:
“One study revealed the act of art making can decrease the number of disciplinary reports written on inmates who participated in an arts program. … Recent empirical studies have supported that art therapy is indeed effective in increasing mood, locus of control, socialization, and problem solving. Most of these advantages focused on the art making process, considering the completed product as ancillary.”
The value is in the process, not the product. Generating art — in any form — has this sort of digestive ability for processing turmoil experienced both internal and external.
When I think about the world being slightly better if we could increase the % of people living in creative health, it’s as simple as considering: if more would-be painters painted today, would they be more patient on the subway train? More likely to hold the door open for the next person? Based on personal experience, I think so.
If you agree, then let’s explore the question of wherein lies the leverage to tip the scale towards creative health?
One of the factors I’m enthralled by in the process of building a company is the potential to adjust the blueprint. As soon as one company refreshes the success blueprint, the next thousand companies seek to emulate its playbook. That impacts the next million people’s lives given the role that companies play in our societal flywheel. Here’s what I mean:
To at least some degree, there exists a causal dynamic wherein K12 education strives to meet the demands of higher-education, higher-education strives to meet the demands of companies, and companies, in the ever-intense battle for talent, strive to meet the demands of the talent they recruit.
If a few companies can successfully redefine the success blueprint with a priority placed on creative health, then perhaps that could spark a ripple impact across the flywheel.
Maybe it’ll be deemed not so advantageous to cost-cut on that K12 arts program after all. And maybe as a result, we’d see a small % more of those would-be painters paint. Our collective “creative health” metric ticks incrementally upwards.
And when the next kid moves into my little Wicker Park apartment and puts their whiteboard on the wall, perhaps we’ll have changed the nature of the names she considers. Or better yet, flipped the onus of the question. Rather than the 23-year-old asking ‘Who might my creative range offend?”, companies can be the ones asking, “How do we best fuel our employee base’s full creative range”?
Beer kegs and hoodies are surface level culture factors. Let’s go deeper. Let’s get those piano chops to be understood as a valued data point on the resume, and challenge the next wave of companies to develop their own unique strategies for enabling creativity to breathe freely. That’s a workplace & societal direction that gets me excited. But it won’t happen organically. The bandwidth for it won’t just appear. You have to Makespace.
Originally posted here on Medium Feb 12, 2020·9 min read
**A special shout out to Jess Gervais, who took the helm of the Makespace project and brought it to a whole new level these past two years! Additional shout outs to Anh, Kaitlyn, Amanda, Willem Hurricane Simmens, Beats, Alex, Grace, Ishani, Alessandra, Jake, Jessica, Kasey, and everyone who has contributed a hand to making Makespace happen over the past four years!
