Creativity vs. Insight ~ Future of CIO

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Creativity vs. Insight

11:42 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Knowledge is the power, but do not let knowledge deter your imagination, stifle your creativity or block your insight.

Creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas, it is a type of “out-of-box” thinking; insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Creativity is a result of living in your intuitive space. It is an action or a reaction to the world. Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom. Insight is not only about trying to "think outside the box," but an intuitive expression and alternative path that takes you wherever it needs to go, without boundaries, with the goal to think beyond the surface and break through conventional wisdom.

Insight takes both creativity and reasoning: There is a critical link between creativity and intuition. While imagination helps us expand our idea, knowledge helps us refine our idea of what is economically feasible. Insight takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, perception. So insight does not just fuel creativity, but also make creativity more tangible and embed creativity with other thought processes to create value and produce the new knowledge. Insight is the ability to see underneath the surface, discovering the "truth" requires some analysis to understand multiple opinions and emotions which in many cases are among differing views and distorted facts, the inner and outer self is the struggle between what we know as reality and what we feel as our connection to the wholeness. Insight is crucial to remove the unconscious bias or silo thinking, and creativity explores the new lenses to understand things with the new way to solve problems.

Creativity is about connecting the dots, and insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context: Having knowledge is a good thing, debating, sharing exploring what to do with that knowledge and connecting disparate ideas that don't seem to fit together naturally will lead to the true imagination and further spur creativity! Insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues of a situation which leads to understanding and resolution. Too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time to understand what is going on underneath. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario.

Creativity is the higher level intelligence, and insight is also at the higher level of knowledge life cycle: Creativity is a higher level of thinking because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously use different kinds of thought processes such as association, perspective shifting, opposites etc., when you are wanting to come up with a creative solution to a challenge. Insight is captured from information, and the information is based on data. Sufficient, especially interdisciplinary knowledge is fundamental to spark creativity and gain insight. Though it doesn’t always mean the more knowledge you have, the more insightful you become, or the more creative you are. The disconnect, comes when we lose our vision, the attitude, people close down conversations because their personal exploration of an issue has either been exhausted, or tic-tac-toe like, they have found no way of resolving what's before them and, therefore, believe nothing more can be done. "it can't be done," or "if it could be done, someone would have already done it"; both of these opinions could impede imagination. It is also true that if you have too much knowledge on a topic, you will be bounded by this knowledge, hampering being more imaginative about other things. Do not let knowledge deter your imagination, stifle your creativity or block your insight.

Creativity is the most wanted skill in the 21st century, and insight is the most needed vision in the Digital Era. They are both based on knowledge, but not limited by knowledge. Creativity often means you need to apply the previous knowledge to the different context, and insight means you have to digest knowledge, and not just understand it on the superficial level, to “see” things or make connections others can not. When you are on a higher plane of thinking, you are not confined by walls such as conventional wisdom, you can connect the unusual dots to spark creativity and dig through cause-effect to capture insight.