The Creativity Crisis and What You Can Do About It
Creativity is the ability to come up with new and appropriate solutions. The success of organizations and teams depends heavily on generating and implementing creative ideas. However, in a creative crisis often find it difficult to find creative solutions. In addition, brainstorming group sessions are characterized by many difficulties in practice, which lead to our blocking each other in creative group work.
Unsurprisingly, helping your employees with their creativity has become almost the norm, not only for large systems like Google and Facebook but also for small businesses. In fact, more advanced business owners encourage their employees to devote a certain amount of their Even if you think that creativity is not important in the area in which you work, in fact, it is critical.
Creativity is not only about coming up with new products. It's about thinking about your workflow, improving time management on your team, solving problems from a new perspective. This is not the kind of guy who just sits at his desk every day and doesn't think twice about what he is doing. It is you if you allow yourself to be creative and are not afraid to share your ideas.
It's the same with those of you who are your own business owners. But I believe that those of you who already know that creativity is a necessity will agree with me that it is primarily what led you to start your own business. And this is what will help you achieve even greater success. Many leaders seek to leverage innovative ideas in their businesses but fail to do so successfully because of several common mistakes.
The Four Creative Building Blocks
The American scientist Mel Rhodes is one of the most important creativity researchers. As early as the 1960s, he was concerned with the factors that significantly influence our creativity. In doing so, he found four basic elements that make up creativity and which are still valid today:
The creative person: The person encompasses the broad field of personal requirements and character traits. These include personality, intellect, temperament, habits, and behaviors, the components of which either promote or inhibit creativity.
The creative process: The process includes the aspects of motivation, learning and thinking skills, perception, and the way of communication.
The creative product: The product is also the idea at the same time - an intellectual, immaterial, or visible one - and arises in a creative process. The product is a tangible idea and therefore an invention.
The creative environment: The creative environment includes all environmental factors that influence creativity. The relationship between the person and their environment plays an important role.
The four elements of creativity show, on the one hand, that the creative spirit is already anchored in us as potential, i.e. is inscribed in our personality. On the other hand, there are many components and possibilities through which we can train and learn creativity as competence and skill.
Lack of Fresh Eyes
Critique past decisions and bring in outsiders (those unfamiliar with the project ex. your customers), for a wider breadth of feedback.
Spontaneity and Flexibility
In any case, spontaneity is a partial competence of creativity. Anyone who sticks to familiar order patterns and clings to regularities and plans inhibits their creativity. If new paths and possibilities arise during the creative process, then take these as an opportunity. The art of improvising can help you come up with an innovative new idea faster than you thought.
Selective Interpretation
Selective perception is the process by which individuals perceive what they want to hear in a message while ignoring opposing viewpoints. It is a broad term to identify the behavior all people exhibit as we all tend to "see things" based on our personal frame of reference. Using selective perception people tend to overlook or forget information that contradicts their beliefs or expectations. It is one of the biggest hurdles between the path of creativity. If groupthink is formed in a company, it is difficult to get rid of it. The only thing that can be done is to publicly encourage people to bring the so-called "bad news".
For example, if someone tells you that your company's new product has a major flaw, it will postpone the launch, but others will thank you for this clarification before the product goes to customers. In this way, you signal to everyone on the team that you will not kill the messenger who brought the bad news, but encourage people to be honest about important issues, even if they threaten the group consensus.
Groupthink
A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. Most researchers study the consciousness, methods, and motivation of an individual creative person. This orientation, on the one hand, reflects the interest of psychologists in the nature of creativity, and on the other hand, a romantic view of the creative personality.
The creativity of two or three people, as well as large groups, is perceived as something unusual or simply as the sum of the potentials of all members of the group. Today it is already obvious that it is not enough to consider creativity as the result of the efforts of an individual person. In the natural sciences — physics or genetics — most of the most important work is done by large teams. Often several hundred people.
When a team operates in groupthink mode, there is no room for discussion or alternative points of view. There will be anchorage to a particular point of view, and warning signs or conflicting data will be discarded. Groupthink can get high marks for team spirit and group affiliation, which are usually positives, but there will be no room for healthy decision-making.
Failing to Recognize or Encourage Creativity
Many organizations say that they want creativity. However, people often reject or fail to recognize creative ideas even when creativity is their stated goal. When people were concerned with uncertainty, they had a negative implicit reaction to the creative words and preferred the practicality words. Moreover, in the study, the researchers primed participants to have either a "high" or "low" tolerance for uncertainty. By having participants write an essay supporting either the idea that "For every problem, there is more than one correct solution" or "For every problem, there is only one correct solution."
Participants were then asked to rate a creative idea. Participants who were primed with a low tolerance for uncertainty failed to recognize the running shoe enhanced with nontechnology as a highly creative idea even though that idea was highly useful as well. This effect held even when the researchers accounted for how open-minded people are. Even if someone is open-minded, if they are concerned with uncertainty, they may miss the great creative idea, and, consequently, the great opportunity that the creative idea provides.
Lack of Ownership
Each project or solution should be supported by a small, agile team with clear responsibilities. If the roles are blurry, teams will lose precious time worrying about stakeholder updates, process and timeline changes, and review meetings. This is absolutely not to say that you shouldn't involve key stakeholders, but rather that you must have the common sense only to involve them when they're needed.
Conclusion
Creativity into a business would be easy, every business would be a creative powerhouse. Adding creativity to your business may not currently be a standard operating procedure. So in fact, whichever career you choose, creativity is a skill that you must master. Or you will be out of date. Changes in the business environment and in the world, in general, are happening so quickly that you have to find a way to keep up with them. And being creative is your only chance at that. But with a little knowledge around common pitfalls and how to conquer them, you can put your business on a fast track to creative success. We've identified, and a few tips and tricks you can use to avoid them.
