Three “G” Factors in Innovators

Part of creating an innovative workplace involves paying attention to employee wellbeing and building innovativeness as a collective mentality.

Creativity is an innate ability to create naval ideas. Creativity is, by nature, unique to each person. Being innovative is a state of mind. There is no template which you can apply and suddenly have a creative workforce. It must be done slowly, experimentally, patiently, and individually. Either for individuals or businesses, creativity is a long-term endeavor. It must be cultivated. The best way to foster creativity is to help people communicate in a way that instills confidence, not fear; rejuvenate passion, not routine; inspire thinking differently, not “command and control.” Here are three “G” factors in innovators.

Guts Feeling: Intuition is often called gut-feeling; because it seems to have got to do something with the gut. In many of the ancient cultures,, there is such concept of the fourth brain. It says that the brain not only sits in the head, but there is one part at the solar plexus. That's where intuitions come. There is interconnectivity between intuition and creativity. Many think that creativity or “thinking-out-of-the-box” is about being creative with gut-feeling. Intuition or being intuitive is when you have a gut feeling about something. It is when there isn’t an exact answer to the puzzle because you don’t have all the pieces. But the creatives know how to put things together and magically solve them either consciously or subconsciously. The conscious ego is just a small part of the human psyche, most of the psyche consists of the collective unconsciousness and it is from which that creativity stems. In many circumstances, being creative means to getting out of the normal consciousness and see that the “other way.” This is often the role of the unconscious, the compensation for the prevailing conscious attitude.

Gap-minding: Creative people think differently to mind cognitive gap. The varying research shows that the heterogeneous team with the cognitive difference is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting. Creative people are both problem finders and problem solvers. It is also important to apply the creativity in a recursive way to the creative process for both problem identification and problem-solving. Gap minding is important to stimulate creativity, as good ideas are multidimensional, they often take root in unsuspected placed, and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. Being is the state of flow is what creative people would like to achieve because it is a seamless, effortless, and fluid state to be productive, imaginable, and fulfilling. Being curious to ask thought-provoking questions stimulates creativity and minds the gap as well, always challenge your own thinking by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first. Being innovative is to discover alternative solutions, study the choices and select the best possible implementable way for solving either old or emergent business problems.

Gratefulness: Innovation has the full emotional cycle behind it. Be dissatisfied with the status quo, but be grateful for great ideas shared or precious feedback offered. Creativity is a lonely trip and innovation is a thorny journey, with many bumps and curves, pitfalls and roadblocks on the way. Thus, be grateful for those who can truly understand you, empower yourself with the ability to deliver constructive feedback. Creatives often have open mind and heart, be grateful for divergent thoughts, and focus on what’s been told contextually and objectively. Be grateful for the abundance of thoughts, in order to encourage collective creativity because the team needs to go divergent to explore the space and spur fresh ideas. Even be grateful with some framework or rules which are not for suppressing creativity, but to help stay focused, and create value through it. Be grateful for knowledge sharing and insight uncovering, or anything happens that can deepen your understanding of the issues, accumulate interdisciplinary knowledge or connect wider dots.

Part of creating an innovative workplace involves paying attention to employee wellbeing and building innovativeness as a collective mentality, to generate positive emotions and reduce unnecessary organizational pressures. Either you are an idea person or an innovation implementation person, an innovation translator or a conductor, strengthen your creative strength, and unlock the collective creativity via working together synergistically to achieve a shared vision.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation