Innercreativity

Creativity today asks for a new mindset, cognitive intelligence, fresh knowledge, a connected world image, global consciousness, etc.

Creativity has many forms and manifestations; it is an innate process to generate ideas. To deal with rapid change, fierce competitions, professionals must find ways to stimulate creativity, be original and be yourself; practice creativity via trying to mix varying colors or putting two totally different things together to make something new.

Creative people have the intrinsic ability to think outside the box: Creativity is often being called “out-of-the-box” thinking, connecting wider dots to come up with something fresh. At present, we can’t separate knowledge and creativity. Without interdisciplinary knowledge, there are not enough meaningful dots we could connect to spur creativity; without creativity, knowledge will simply get stale soon; synthetic knowledge does not exist in any of the individual components, but is being created through cross domain knowledge refinement and creative reasoning.

To become a creative problem solver, we must remove the “old box” shaped by conventional wisdom, expand a bigger thinking box by challenging existing thoughts, knowledge or standards, and seek additional knowledge and experience, spur fresh ideas and solve problems alternatively. From an innovation leadership perspective, it is absolutely necessary for leaders to create discomfort, get others thinking differently, challenge the “we always do things like that” mentality and explore innovative solutions that will produce great results.

Striking the right balance of solitude and connection is the key to develop creativity: Creativity flourishes in solitude, thinking deeper and showing intellectual curiosity; but participation and networking matters to make connections, share ideas and amplify creativity effects. Like many other things, finding a balance is key. Creativity is not always spontaneous; innovation shouldn’t be a random effort. Individuals need to take responsibility for what they do and what they say.

“Diversity in thought’ is the gold nugget to be found in sparking creativity. Creative people explore the new lenses to understand things with the new way to solve problems. Collective creativity is not just a mere cumulating of the creative inputs of those involved, sometimes can amplify collective potential. Highly creative people in the team or across the team brainstorm, collaborate, clarify, develop on each other's ideas, discover nuances and unexpected relationships, and so on, to continually generate fresh ideas and discover innovative solutions.

Fostering a creative environment in which people are encouraged to think creatively, take risks, experiment with new ways to do things: Innovators challenge the status quo and that is important in a healthy, innovative organization. From an innovation management perspective, look at resistance as a source of energy and where there is energy, there is still passion and potential. Organizations usually reflect the personality of their top leaders. Personalities often mean mindsets, traits, emotions, attitudes, or behavior. Innovation leaders not only need to lead the great teams for transforming novel ideas to achieve their commercial values; but more crucially, they are also able to “walk the talk,” being innovators themselves to think and do things differently.

Creativity is essential in order to propose changes, improvements, disruptions, etc. It is a unique and complex mix of vision, growth mindset, innate capabilities, finely-tuned communication skills to build a creative workforce. You can only manage what you measure. The factors that could be used to measure innovation score within a company could be human and financial capital invested, challenging activities being involved, level of autonomy, number of innovation initiatives being launched, etc.

Creativity today asks for a new mindset, cognitive intelligence, fresh knowledge, a connected world image, global consciousness, etc. Innovators develop multi-dimensional competencies to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances, formulate unconventional solutions to resolve problems smoothly.

Posted in: Creativity