In the increasingly uncertain and fast-paced environment of today’s workplace, the ability to think outside of the box is more valuable than ever before. The unprecedented challenges posed by Covid-19 in the past few years, and the rapid response time required to address them, have revealed to many teams they are better at innovative problem-solving than they once thought. But when there isn’t a fire to put out, how do people keep creative solutions flowing?
Wyatt Closs - Senior Vice President of Creative and Cultural Strategies at communications firm ... [+]
Step one to thinking outside the box is accepting there aren’t as many boxes as you think. That’s according to Wyatt Closs, Senior Vice President of Creative and Cultural Strategies at communications firm Spitfire Strategies.
“The world is not as compartmentalized as it was when I was twenty-three,” Closs reminds. “It’s not so strange to think about combining art with politics and advocacy and culture.”
Closs has followed advocacy and the arts throughout his career, serving as a creative voice for message-minded political organizations and a strategic voice for artists. Closs realized there was great potential for the arts to bolster his advocacy work earlier in his career at the Service Employees International Union.
“Why I have a foot in both advocacy and art is they're both about reaching people,” Closs says. “They're both about affecting how people think and feel and move about in the world.”
At Spitfire, Closs sees his work having meaningful, long-term impact.
“Spitfire is a woman-owned public interest communications firm,” Closs explains. “It’s a really smart group of people who are also very passionate about progressive values.”
Even before his days organizing pop-up art shows to benefit nonprofits or empowering YouTube creators to make content about social change, Closs saw the potential of utilizing the arts to achieve larger goals. In other words, thinking beyond the traditional political spectrum to get better results.
“Even when I was in junior high school and ran for student council, the real reason I ran was because I knew the president got to plan the dances. They got to decide who spoke at assemblies, who was in the talent show,” Closs explains. “Both politics and art are ways to reach people in a way you wouldn’t otherwise.”
These are two ways Closs advises others to cultivate innovative solutions in their work.
1. Meet people where they’re at
The most seemingly insurmountable problems are usually the ones that have resisted past solutions. Despite best efforts, the same issues pop up again and again. For real change to happen, according to Closs, it’s necessary to work with what you have rather than force the ideal.
“Culture is first and foremost about meeting people where they are at,” he says. “I was in North Carolina talking about tackling food deserts. Art and painting and things like that came up, but it was more about NASCAR. North Carolina barbeque, the State Fair, and how those things are useful as ways of talking about the need to create a different food system.”
If a persistent problem seems impossible to change, step away from the ideal solution for a moment and take stock of the resources you currently have.
2. Question biases, focus on solutions
Sometimes the best ideas come to us when we get out of our own way. Our assumptions or biases can hinder our ability to see the potential value of different ways of thinking.
“We did a large-scale pop-up art show performance and education space focused on mutual aid and economic justice for communities of color. Thousands and thousands of people came over ten days,” Closs says. “It was really the solution for a nonprofit that wanted a new way, a speedier way, a grander way to do some of the organizing work they would typically do knocking on doors and handing out flyers. It was culture and art as an organizing magnet.”
In Closs’s case, the goal was to gather as many people as possible in order to spread political messaging, but the means was to throw a hugely successful art show. By questioning assumptions about which tactics had worked in the past or been attempted by similar organizations, and instead remaining focused on the goal of organizing a large amount of people, Closs and his team were able to find a solution that surpassed previous efforts.
