Rediscovering Your Creativity | Richard Granger | TEDxRoyal Holloway
- Aisha Washington
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Creativity is often treated as an identity: some people supposedly have it, while everyone else must depend on logic, experience, or discipline. In his TEDxRoyal Holloway talk, Richard Granger challenges that divide. He presents creativity as a practical capacity that many adults have allowed to weaken—but can deliberately rebuild.
Granger develops this argument through business history, childhood imagination, curiosity, and workplace behavior. His central message is reassuring but demanding: generating original ideas does not require waiting for inspiration. It requires gathering varied experiences, questioning familiar assumptions, creating room for play, and making it safe for unfinished ideas to be heard.
Hasselblad, NASA, and the Value of Reframing
Granger begins with Hasselblad, the Swedish manufacturer known for precision mechanical cameras. When NASA needed photographic equipment capable of operating during lunar missions, it selected Hasselblad. Cameras of the period depended heavily on intricate mechanical systems, and the violent vibration of a rocket launch made reliability especially important.
Hasselblad already occupied a prestigious position in professional photography. Its equipment served demanding fields including surveying, architecture, and fashion. Its association with the Moon missions reinforced the brand’s reputation for exceptional engineering. Some of the cameras even remained on the lunar surface because astronauts had to prioritize the weight of material brought back to Earth.
Yet past distinction could not protect the company indefinitely. Roughly two decades later, competitors were introducing electronically controlled cameras that offered greater efficiency and reduced dependence on delicate mechanical parts. Hasselblad’s established strengths were becoming less decisive as the market changed around it.
According to Granger, the productive response was to reconsider the problem itself. If executives asked only how to defend a traditional camera business, their options would remain narrow. A more generative question was what opportunities might exist for a company with deep expertise in fine mechanical engineering.
That shift illustrates one of the most useful forms of creativity: reframing. Instead of rushing to solve the problem as first stated, a person or organization changes the frame and looks again. New language exposes different assets, possibilities, and routes forward.
The lesson extends well beyond photography. A team facing disruption might ask not merely how to preserve its current product, but which underlying capabilities customers still value. An individual confronting a stalled career might examine transferable strengths rather than searching only for a similar job title. Often, the first creative breakthrough is not a clever answer but a better definition of the challenge.
Creativity Is a Capacity, Not a Fixed Category
Once creativity is described as commercially and personally valuable, it can sound like another standard that many people fear they cannot meet. Granger recognizes that most adults do not readily describe themselves as highly creative. They may associate the term with artists, inventors, or unusually imaginative colleagues.
This self-classification is misleading. Although people differ in temperament and ability, the everyday skills behind creative thinking can be practiced. These include noticing unexpected connections, approaching a question from several angles, tolerating ambiguity, and resisting the first obvious conclusion.
Creativity in this sense is not the opposite of rational thought. Logic helps test whether an idea works; creativity expands the set of ideas available for testing. Organizations need both. Analysis without imagination may optimize an obsolete approach, while imagination without evaluation may produce concepts that never become useful.
Granger therefore treats creativity as relevant to careers and ordinary life, not as a specialist talent. It helps businesses adapt, but it can also help individuals handle unfamiliar constraints, repair routines that no longer work, and recognize alternatives they might otherwise overlook.
What Childhood Imagination Reveals
Children demonstrate how naturally imaginative behavior can arise. A cardboard box becomes a vehicle, a building, or an entire world. Plastic bricks can be rebuilt without concern for the “correct” final form. A simple doll can support elaborate stories that exist nowhere outside the child’s mind.
By the late teenage years or early adulthood, many people have replaced that freedom with a conviction that they are not creative. Granger points toward education as one influence in this decline. Schools often reward sensible answers, orderly methods, and logical progression. Those habits are valuable, but an excessive focus on correctness can make experimentation feel irresponsible.
Adults also learn to anticipate judgment. They become skilled at filtering out an idea before anyone else can reject it. This protects them from embarrassment, but it also removes the strange, incomplete suggestions from which better solutions sometimes emerge.
Rediscovering creativity does not mean abandoning mature judgment or behaving childishly. It means recovering selected qualities of childhood play: curiosity, flexibility, absorption, and a willingness to explore before deciding what is practical.
Curiosity Builds the Raw Material for New Ideas
Granger places curiosity at the center of creative development. Original thought rarely appears from an empty mind. It usually emerges when existing observations, experiences, and concepts are combined in a way that has not previously occurred to us.
A broader store of knowledge therefore creates more material for possible connections. Granger recommends reading beyond one’s professional specialty—not only books, but also articles and magazines covering unfamiliar subjects. Travel can serve a similar purpose by exposing a person to different architecture, customs, work practices, and assumptions about how life should be organized.
The point is not to accumulate facts for display. It is to develop a richer internal library that can be consulted when a problem demands an unusual association. A design challenge might be illuminated by something learned about biology. A management problem might look different after observing how another culture structures collaboration. An idea from history could reveal that an apparently permanent convention is merely one inherited choice.
Stepping beyond a familiar field also weakens expert tunnel vision. Deep knowledge enables precision, but it can make prevailing methods seem inevitable. Encounters with other disciplines remind us that the same need may be addressed through radically different systems.
Better Questions Make the Familiar Strange Again
Curiosity becomes actionable through questions. Granger emphasizes simple prompts such as “how,” “why,” and “who.” These words interrupt passive acceptance and invite investigation.
Taking apart a mechanism to understand how it functions is one expression of this habit. So is wondering why the sky appears blue, why red and green became signals for stopping and proceeding, or why a standard measurement has such an oddly specific value.
Granger uses the distance between railway tracks—four feet, eight and a half inches—as an example. Whether examining infrastructure, tools, or social conventions, the creative value lies in refusing to treat an established standard as self-explanatory. Every convention has a history. Some constraints remain essential; others continue only because no one has recently challenged them.
A practical questioning sequence might include:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Which constraints are real, and which have merely been inherited?
Who benefits from the present arrangement?
How would another profession approach this situation?
Why do we assume the current method must continue?
Seeking answers matters as much as posing questions. Research, observation, conversation, and experimentation turn vague curiosity into usable understanding. Over time, this process enlarges the knowledge base from which creative connections can be made.
Playful Spaces Can Support Serious Thinking
Mental performance is affected by physical conditions. Granger describes the Creative Thinking Room at Royal Holloway, which uses bright colors, comfortable furniture, and beanbags to create a relaxed setting.
Such design choices are not meant to trivialize the work. They signal that participants may temporarily loosen formal behavior, explore unconventional possibilities, and speak before every thought has been polished. Relaxation can reduce the self-monitoring that prevents tentative ideas from surfacing.
There is no universal formula for a creative room. Beanbags alone will not rescue a fearful or rigid culture. The larger principle is to match the environment to the kind of thinking required. If a meeting asks people to imagine alternatives, arranging it exactly like a performance review may send the wrong message.
Teams can introduce play without redesigning an office. They might use objects, sketches, analogies, role changes, or deliberately exaggerated scenarios. The purpose is to interrupt habitual patterns long enough for participants to see the problem differently.
Psychological Safety Keeps Ideas Alive
The social environment is even more important than the furniture. People will not offer unconventional suggestions if they expect immediate criticism, ridicule, or rejection. Creative work depends on a temporary space in which ideas can remain incomplete.
Granger warns managers about reflexively responding with “but.” Even when the objection is reasonable, an immediate contradiction can close the conversation and discourage further contributions. In brainstorming, replacing “but” with “and” can change the direction of the exchange. Instead of ending an idea, colleagues add to it, modify it, or use it as a bridge toward another possibility.
This does not mean every proposal must eventually be accepted. Evaluation remains necessary. The key is to separate generation from judgment. During the exploratory phase, the group aims for range, connection, and surprise. Later, it can examine feasibility, cost, risk, and strategic fit.
Leaders shape this climate through repeated small responses. If they invite ideas but routinely punish unsuccessful experiments, employees will trust the consequences rather than the invitation. If they acknowledge contributions, ask genuine questions, and treat early concepts as material to develop, people become more willing to take intellectual risks.
Rebuilding Creativity Through Daily Practice
Granger’s message is ultimately optimistic: creativity can be nurtured after it has faded. The process does not depend on a dramatic personal transformation. It grows through recurring habits—reading outside familiar territory, noticing how systems work, asking why conventions exist, challenging assumptions, and allowing play into serious problem-solving.
For organizations, the Hasselblad story provides a durable warning. Strong capabilities can become limiting identities when industries change. Creative adaptation begins by distinguishing what a company makes today from what it knows how to do exceptionally well.
For individuals, the same distinction can be liberating. A person is more than a current role, routine, or established way of solving problems. Curiosity expands the available ingredients; reframing changes the question; supportive dialogue allows emerging ideas to survive. Together, these practices make creativity less mysterious—and much more usable.
