Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Ingenuity

Ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in the original and creative way.

Generally speaking, creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas; ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in the original and creative way. It is the qualification to be creative, insightful and inventive. Some say ingenuity is the distant cousin of creativity, ingenuity often demands creativity as a mixed ingredient for puzzle-solving or invention. Ingenuity is increasingly important because the business world becomes overly complex and hyper-connected, so which questions to ask for assessing a person’s ingenuity?

Are you an original thinker?  Originality is valuable as authenticity. It is not easy to recognize "original thinker," and it becomes more difficult as most of the modern people are too busy to even think and observe. Original thinking is a tough job and recognizes original thinking is equally tough if not less. The points like character, motivation, personality, and confidence can be the indicator of original thinking. It can be done if someone remains conscious, alert and has the inclination to search excellence.Those come up with conclusions and solutions for problems with their own unique brain processes. Nearly all thoughts, come from some sort of internal or external stimulus. Thus, the seeds of original thinking may come from the unoriginal input, but it’s such a dot-connecting capability to synthesize the unoriginal input into unique output, which makes one an original thinker. To be original, you need to be true to one's own personality, spirit, or character. Consider authenticity to be a positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation rather than a negative outcome of the rejection of the expectations of others.

Are you an insightful observer? Ingenuity is often connotated with insight or perception. Insight is the vision through ‘mind's eyes,’ the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively in Greek called noesis. When you learn to create inner space of clarity, calmness in the storming mind of thoughts emotions, sensations, dreams and imagination, insights can be perceived. Being ingenious needs more understanding, not less. Insight takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, perception called intellection or noesis. The insight of situation requires in-depth understanding. It’s about the understanding of possibilities, adversaries, environments effects. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for understanding.

How creative are you? Creativity is one of the most important ingredients in ingenuity. True creativity has an inner origin. It keeps surfacing from within and keeps expressing. It means that creativity needs a problem to solve, and a creative mind needs a purpose. And creativity is part of ingenuity. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, and manifold knowledge. The point is not to be unduly constrained in your thinking, but at the same time not to lose sight of the objective of thinking. Start with "what if . . ., " and see where it takes you for the ingenious thinking. Only then do you have enough to start weeding out the bizarre and tweaking sound ideas into reality, either for invention or problem-solving.

If creativity is more artistic and aesthetic, it is a result of living in your intuitive space. It is an action or a reaction to the world, from that place, it has no fear or traditions. And then ingenuity is more purposeful and functional, it’s not for its own sake, but a combining thought process and ability to achieve certain values either for benefiting the businesses or our society.

Posted in: Innovation,Talent Master