Creativity: The Extra Ingredient

Creativity has been allied to ..

• Madness• Mystery• Muses• Magic

A Proposition

• Creativity provides the extra ingredient permitting enhanced performance by individuals, teams, organizations, and cultures

Definitions

• Discovery processes leading to new and unexpectedly valuable ideas

• ‘Looking where all have looked, and seeing what no one has seen’

Creativity Components

Person Process

Place(or ‘Press’)

Product

Many and VariedTheories

• Insight theories • Self-actualization • Transcendence • Cognitive reframing• Darwinism• Information processing• Problem-solving• Experiential learning

Insight Theories: Scientific Discoveries

• Preparation (Knowledge, experience)• Incubation (‘Gestation’) • Insight (large or small)• Validation (Design and testing actions)

Intal and Dr RogerAltunyian

Foresight Theories

• Insight• Cognitive reframing• Intuition• Serendipity

Creativity: The Big Questions

• How can I become more creative?• How can my team become more creative?• How can my organization become more creative?• How can my society or culture become more creative?

The Creative Individual

• The Elitist view: Special and gifted people are born creative (The gifted and talented school)

• The Developmental view: Everyone has the potential to fulfil their creative abilities (Carl Rogers)

The Creative Individual

• Developing Intuitive Skills through Lateral Thinking methodology involves deliberate confronting the unlikely and the impossible

The Creative Team

• Teamwork is increasingly seen as the organizational structure for focusing and targeting collective creativity

Enhancing Participation and Team Creativity

• Researchers at MBS have studied a modification to Tuckman’s stage model

• It proposes two barriers to creativity which teams must overcome

• Only a minority of teams do so

The Two-barrier model of team development (MBS)

Form

Storm

Unexpectedly good (creative) performance

Performance barrier

Behavioral barrier

Norm and Perform

Distributed Leadership

• Recently the idea of distributed leadership suggests that a team may collectively act as a ‘superleader’ (Manz & Sims)

The Creative Organization

• Creative industries, and their organizations have increased in importance

• They are fast-growing economically• They include architecture; arts & antiques: Design,

Performing Arts, Electronic games and media

The creative organization: Toyota

The Creative Organization: Haier

The Creative Organization: WordPress

• WordPress is a good example of an entrepreneurial and creative organization …supplying an easy-to-use service for bloggers

• Its growth supports ‘infection’ theories of creativity

The Creative Organization: Ideo

• IDEO created Apple's first mouse; Microsoft's second mouse, and the Palm V PDA. Other major clients include Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, and Eli Lilly

The Creative Culture

• Culture has always developed around creative hotspots of artistic and scientific discovery

• Athens, London, Cambridge(s), Silicon Valley, ‘Madchester’ ..

The Creative Climate and Intrinsic Motivation

• Teresa Amabile proposed a theory of intrinsic motivation.

• A creative climate allows intrinsic motivation to flourish. • ‘The play’s the thing’ (contrary to economic theories).

The Creative Culture

• ‘A key driving factor in the divergence or flow of human capital is … the openness of a given location. The more open a place is, the more it will be able to capture the talents of its own people and to attract those from elsewhere.’ (Richard Florida)

Creative Clusters*

*Source: Richard Florida

Creative Clusters

And Finally…

• When all else fails remember...

• there must be other ways…

• there might be better ways

To go more deeply• Journals• Creativity Research Journal• http://www.questia.com/library/jp-creativity-research-• Creativity and Innovation Management

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0963-1690&site=1

• Journal of Creative Behavior http://www.creativeeducationfoundation.org/jcb.shtml

• On Line reference sources http://leaderswedeserve.wordpress.com/ explores creativity and creative leadership

• http://www.buffalostate.edu/creativity/pucciogj.xml?username=pucciogj (‘The international center for studies in creativity’)