Take a shower and get creative

“I will now take you on an imaginative journey. Think about your inner totem animal.”

These weren’t exactly the words Lene Tanggaard expected to hear from her lecturer as she sat in the lecture hall as a new student at the Department of Psychology in Risskov. But they were the words that went on to characterise her experience of studying psychology.

“I remember my studies as experimental. We had a close relationship with our lecturers – not only on an emotional level, but they also gave a lot of themselves, and they took us seriously. They saw us as members of an academic community, and they spent a lot of time answering our questions, after lectures for example. It was a completely new world that opened up, and I felt seen,” says Lene Tanggaard.

Today, when she walks around Design School Kolding, where she is rector, she recognises something of the same.

“The students don’t really care what the rector thinks. But the lecturers! It almost moves me to see how much the lecturers mean to the students, and I recognise this a lot from my own student days.”

Too much energy
Lene Tanggaard makes coffee and opens some Belgian chocolates in her yellow detached home overlooking the frozen Brabrand Lake. A pair of jolly Christmas elves watch her from the bookshelf as she eagerly gesticulates and recalls her student days at Aarhus University. Back in the 1990s, psychology students were based on Asylvej in Risskov, and the barrack-like buildings, which sometimes let in the rain, were characterised by temporariness – but also closeness and intimacy.

During her studies, she had to learn to practise psychotherapy, so she and three fellow students advertised for clients with “a few problems” in the weekly newspaper Aarhus Onsdag. They found a supervisor and offered voluntary therapy in a rented room on Store Torv for a year. Lene Tanggaard was interested in the educational aspects of therapy, but she began to realise that it wasn’t what she wanted to do after she graduated.

“I am a very action-orientated person, and sometimes I caught myself thinking: ‘Then go and do something about it’ – haha! I have a bit too much energy to be a therapist. I have a huge respect for clinical psychology and the craft. But I started to become more interested in psychology outside the clinic. How to prevent people getting into difficulty. How to create environments that don’t make people ill,” says Lene Tanggaard.

Playing around and research
At some point during her Bachelor’s degree, Lene Tanggaard received an unexpected comment from her then professor Steinar Kvale:

“He said: You write like a professor, and you shouldn’t yet. You need to learn the craft and the methods, and I’m happy to help you.” And so it was that Steinar Kvale became Lene Tanggaard’s supervisor – and sowed the idea of her becoming a researcher.

Lene Tanggaard’s PhD thesis focused on apprenticeships on vocational education and training programmes, where she followed a group of electronics technicians. This is where she was introduced to what would eventually become the recurring theme in her research: creativity. The young men were surprisingly creative – especially in the evenings and during breaks, when they would go out to their cars, get some old computer screens and mobile phones, take everything apart and then put it back together in new ways.

“I asked them what they were doing and they said: We’re playing around! I also asked the teachers, and they were convinced that it was in these moments that the apprentices learned the most. It’s in the in-between moments that creativity emerges. I recognise this from my own experience. Humans are creative beings. We make things up. We can’t help it. I am interested in how we can create environments in which human beings can develop and experiment,” says Lene Tanggaard.

How to become more creative
Research shows that we often get good ideas when we let go of work for a while. When we go for a walk or a run. Take a break. Or take a shower, where Picasso was known to get some of his most groundbreaking ideas.

Lene Tanggaard tries to create these in-between moments for herself – and for her staff.

“Promoting creativity as a manager is, among other things, about creating spaces in the workplace so that not everything is about operations. As a manager, the danger is that you sit in meetings all day, and this kills creativity. The key to creativity is daring to take risks. Diversity isn’t just about gender and skin colour – it’s also about the ideas we dismiss because we don’t think they’ll fit in. But perhaps some of these ideas deserve to be taken further,” says Lene Tanggaard, who continues:

“We should never say: Now it’s time to be creative. As a manger, there’s a constant pressure to stand up and say a lot. But, in reality, we should probably say less – and do less. We’re always dashing about. We need to slow down and make room for what is important,” she says.

She found her totem animal
Lene Tanggaard’s career straddles the line between creativity-promoting breaks and extreme productivity. It’s fair to say that this hard-working rector is still brimming with ideas. But she’s also starting to entertain the notion of looking back. 

“It’s often at this time of year, around Christmas, that we take stock at the Design School. And perhaps I’m also at a point in my own life where I’m beginning to reflect a little. I haven’t always been good at this, because I’ve always had so much going on. And I am still busy – I have more books in the pipeline. But I have realised that it’s enjoyable to stop and think about what I’ve actually achieved,” she says.

It’s not easy for Lene Tanggaard to stop and reflect. Just as it wasn’t easy for her to suspend her well-developed critical sense and go in search of her totem animal all those years ago in the psychology lecture hall. In the end, it was a cat. Sometimes you’ve just got to go where the journey takes you.