Thoughts on Creativity

What are your personal experiences with individual creativity? Have you had times when you felt especially creative, or even, especially uncreative?

Over the years, I feel that creativity has come to me in waves. The more I exercise my creative senses, the more easily I find myself capable of being creative. For instance, when I was in middle school, I spent a lot of time writing stories, drawing, experimenting with new art materials, and listening to music. During that time period I remember myself as a very imaginative and artistic person. In high school I lost the time to work on writing and art, and I found it much more difficult to do creative tasks when they came upon me. But I realize now that creativity does not just exist in the form of the arts, but it also exists in problem solving, inventions, and critical thinking. Despite that I have recognized this, I am still better at being creative when it revolves around art, since I think of art as being abstract and having no right or wrong answer. When it comes to problem solving and critical thinking I find it much more difficult to be innovative since there seem to be wrong answers and I have been trained to think within certain limits to answer problems. It may help me to start thinking of problem solving more abstractly. I also believe that I am more creative when I am doing something on my own free will rather than when someone is asking me to be creative. Lastly, I also find myself more capable of being creative when I search for inspiration. Some may think this would make any of my ideas unoriginal, but many times I come up with my own work by looking at other examples and making my own mix of them.

What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity? Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative, or even, especially uncreative?

I have two different examples of places I worked where creativity was very different. When I worked at a doctor’s office, problem solving was approached in a manner that didn’t produce creativity. For example, most decisions were automatically deferred to the upper management or the doctors, without much brainstorming involved, which limited the range of options that the organization believed it had available to them. The other example comes from when I worked for a mobile app company. This organization held a meeting first thing each morning during which they discussed any current issues, made announcements and did a lot of discussion. People were always contributing new ideas. The atmosphere at this company was very different though. The owners and managers of the company sat in the same room as the interns. The small company had an “open door” in that anybody could overhear all conversations and you could talk to anyone about any issue. This company also encouraged you to be wrong as a way to learn. This acceptance of wrong answers and making mistakes made employees much less reluctant to provide their own ideas and insights. Sometimes this got a little chaotic, and sometimes there were even heated debates about ideas, but I think all of this contributed to make the organization more original in its problem solving and brainstorming strategies.

Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself? And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?

I do believe that there are certain people who are extremely creative all by themselves. They can come up with really inventive ideas without any help from other people. But I, myself am not one of them (yet). Even if a person is already pretty innovative in their thinking, I think we can all increase creativity by working in teams. Since we all come from diverse experiences, we can all bring different knowledge and perspectives to the table. And when someone has an idea that they believe is great, it can be helpful when someone else instantly realizes why it won’t work based on their own experiences. By working in groups, organizations can save time and money and enable more meaningful creativity.

What do you think about the idea of different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes? Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

I believe there are many different creative processes or strategies one can use to ideate. You can brainstorm, journey map, think, do, or even look for inspiration. Each of us probably has our own method we tend to rely on. If we are searching for the most creative answer, then it would make sense to continue to ideate even after a satisfactory idea is reached, in case a better idea can be formulated. So in this case, I would say we should not trust ourselves to use one creative process to brainstorm, but rather it would be helpful to try several different strategies so that many different ideas can be created. On the other hand, we shouldn’t try a creative process if we know if doesn’t make sense to apply it (i.e. don’t journey map if there is no story to be told). Unfortunately, I think when most of us come with an idea that sparks our interest, we run with it, rather than searching for even better options. For those of us who don’t consider ourselves particularly creative problem solvers, trusting ourselves to use one type of approach will not allow us to open our horizons and think outside of the box.