The Dot Connection of Creativity vs. System Thinking

 The digital ecosystem is interwoven with nonlinear interactions and interdependent relationships, spontaneously self-organizes, generates patterns, forms structures, initiates business activities, and above all, creates novelty over time.

Creativity is about connecting dots to generate novel ideas; to dig into mindset level, it’s a system thinking process. Systems Thinking is about seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, understanding patterns, focusing on the nature of relationships rather than just on separate entities. What’s the further understanding of creativity and Systems Thinking?

Systems Thinking provides the frame to inspire creativity with a focus and manage ideas out of chaos: Creativity is a sort of consciousness or desire that allows people to see how things can be both connected or disconnected to create completely new forms, systems, and ideas. Creativity is a constructive disruption. Systems Thinking provides the frame for discovering patterns, connecting the dots to develop creativity and managing ideas out of chaos.

The System, being dynamic, is always already in the flow. Systems Thinking is nothing more than a good combination of analytic and synthetic thinking. Creative people with system intelligence have strength and willpower to follow the courageous heart, see the trees without missing the forest, leverage both hard data and soft variables to dig through the root cause of problems arising, explore unusual pathways and solve them in an alternative way,

Systems Thinking stimulates creativity because it allows you to identify interconnectivity, understand the flow, and explore new possibilities: Creativity is an innate process with multidimensional thinking that generates unusual combinations of ideas or insight. Systems Thinking helps to discover the interconnectivity and interdependence of the digital ecosystem, engender new perspectives or actions as part of the process of creating a cross-disciplined understanding of the business problems and solving them creatively.

Systems Thinking is about discovering the patterns underlying the dots, keeping an open mind to explore new possibilities. By leveraging System Thinking to see the world through different lenses, you see different systems interconnected with each other, you can’t separate things properly and you can’t predict the actual effect of interactions straightforwardly. By perceiving the system holistically, perhaps you have the better opportunities to step outside of the system, explore the full cognition spectrum to gain an in-depth understanding of the connectivity of things, streamline the flow, and generate great ideas continually.

The systematic structure provides the shell within which individuals can collaborate to enforce transparency and develop creativity: A highly innovative organization is an open environment or ecosystem that creates unique insight and takes advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way. The systematic process and robust tools that allow people to communicate and collaborate across boundaries and enable any entity to generate winning concepts on a consistent basis is the prerequisite for stimulating novel ideas and sustaining advantage and growth.

There is a marvelous system of creativity at work around emerging digital technologies, but it is only a subcomponent of the global system of creativity. Further, Many companies can put in place a good systematic approach in process terms, but if the underlying culture doesn’t support risk-taking, collaboration, learning, they still cannot nurture creativity. The digital workplace with systematic structure needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization, understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore opportunities innovatively.

The digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. System thinking provides the framework for meaningful dots connections to generate novel ideas by gaining a cross-disciplined understanding of nonlinearity and building common rational ground. The digital ecosystem is interwoven with nonlinear interactions and interdependent relationships, spontaneously self-organizes, generates patterns, forms structures, initiates business activities, and above all, creates novelty over time.

Posted in: Communication,Connecting Dots,Creativity,Systems Wisdom