Purpose: The key to unlocking creativity

Mark Twain said that two of the most important days of our lives are the day we are born, and the day we find our ‘why’.

Since the inception of our Joe Public brand, I have struggled with a deep inner sense that most creative people within our advertising industry still struggle with: not being good enough.

At times, this sense of ‘not being good enough’ can be a magnificent driver for creative success. But in a quest to disprove this inner narrative through the sheer power of my will, it ultimately found a ceiling. A ceiling that I would smash shortly after experiencing a personal breakdown in 2006.

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Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung stated that every psychic advancement of the human arises from the suffering of the soul.

Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing supported this view, asserting that psychological breakdowns are, in reality, breakthroughs to greater enlightenment.

Another seemingly unrelated but highly relevant example of this mode of thinking, the Activity Theory, highlights ‘contradictory’ and ‘problematic’ moments in computer gaming as key sources of greater learning. This insight into gaming suggests that a ‘breakdown’ occurs when the general flow of gaming activity is interrupted by the player making a mistake and then achieving a ‘breakthrough’ in their level of play due to that mistake. ‘Systemic breakdowns’ are critical in the player’s evolution to achieve the next level of difficulty within the game. This is also an apt metaphor for the game called life.

My own spectacular breakdown came compliments of our business losing half its revenue overnight. This coincided with a breakdown in my closest personal relationship and my health. It was a culmination of events that caused a psychological turning point in my life, resulting in a spiritual breakthrough at the onset of 2007 and the discovery of my personal purpose.

Often, the worst thing that can happen is the best thing that can happen.

Within two years, my creative output as an individual would fundamentally shift based on a very simple idea: that I am much more than a mere human. More than just my body and my brain, only capable of performing the finite functions that create my life. It’s the idea that, at the centre of my human body, lies a greater being, an unconscious driving force that I was not even aware of. Hence the term’ human being’.

Now, consider that I was only given a human name at the onset of my life’s journey. But what if I could define the name of my being? How would that affect all my doing?

Mark Twain said that two of the most important days of our lives are the day we are born, and the day we find our ‘why’. In January 2007, through discovering my ‘why’– the one word that names my being – I moved from one city to an entirely new city: from ‘Scarcity’ to ‘Generocity’. I moved from doing – to have what I want to be happy – to just being the authentic me, allowing everything I do to flow from my being. And for the first time, I experienced an abundance of everything I ever wanted.

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Over this transformative period in my life, I would develop the firm belief that the general approach to life and business is unsustainable and, quite frankly, wrong. Without even being aware of it, most of us have been conditioned to follow the business model prescribed by Milton Friedman 50 years ago: Businesses exist to make money.

But what if a business is more than merely a business? What if a business is a Business Being?

Journey of discovery

Armed with this insight, we went on a journey of discovery in 2009 with the intention of finding the one word that defines the being of our business, Joe Public. By unearthing the one word at the heart of our business and defining it with absolute clarity, we would take our business from the doors of bankruptcy to being the strapping 26-year-old market leader it is today.

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Prior to the event, the unconscious driver of our business was simple: ‘To make money through creativity’. Post-event, Joe Public’s intention profoundly shifted to ‘To serve the growth of our people, clients, and country through the power of creativity’.

However, as much as the past 17 years of purpose-led creativity have been the most creative of my entire life, it has come with one significant stumbling block: the ongoing challenge of deeply embedding our purpose into the culture of our growing concern.

In my academic journey over the last six years, I’ve uncovered, through my doctoral thesis on organisational purpose, that only two in every 100 companies that talk ‘purpose’ truly walk their talk. ‘

Through trying to solve for this ‘lack of implementation’ challenge, I’ve discovered that an organisation can only ever be as conscious as its leadership.

This means that for an organisation to successfully implement its purpose within its culture, the leadership and all the people within the organisation must first become aware of their own personal purposes. It’s only through understanding their own individual purposes and implementing their core reasons for being into their own lives that people can begin to understand the purpose of their organisation at a cellular level and, in doing so, turn purpose into creative action.

To this end, we created a bespoke Conscious Leadership Journey for our business, with the key objective of unlocking individual growth through the power of creativity – not just at a conscious level, but more so at a deeper unconscious and spiritual level. Throughout our leadership journey, we are creating the fertile soil for vulnerability and authenticity through a safe environment, within which we can assist our people to uncover their own inner talent to bring to our organisation.

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In the end, it is all about individual uniqueness, and a deep belief that diversity is the cornerstone of creativity. And the knowledge that we can only unlock the true creativity of our business, when we unlock the inner creativity of our people, through purpose.

Dr Pepe Marais is co-founder and group chief creative officer of Joe Public United.

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