Creativity

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

I would say that most of the time I used to think in myself as uncreative person and straight forward thinker. My engineering background had a big influence on me to adopt a more systematic thinking when solving a problem, trying to find the right (and only one) answer as in any math or physics problem. But this was not always the case, some other times I felt very creative and motivated to find different approaches to solve problems or inspired.

During a recent training on self-awareness I assisted, the trainer explained an interesting theory about behavior that I found very useful to explain my creativity process. Here some of what explained:

He explained the Behavior we have is in function of two factors, Personality and Environment. The former is considered a constant in the equation, which means that we hold the same personality during all the time and it is not very likely to change during our life (but can be affected by extreme experiences); the latter is a variable in the equation since we are exposed to different environments where we have different roles: school (student), house (son, daughter, father, mother, husband, wife), work (employee, boss), and so on.

Behavior = F(Personality x Environment)

That means that our behavior is dictated by our environment. Now, as the articles suggests, the creativity is also related to the environment as well. Relaxed settings were found the best places to inspire creativity. So we could use the same function for behavior to explain creativity.

Creativity = F(Personality x Environment).

In this case, personality can represent genetics, interests and skills. I just read an article where it is mentioned that according to some studies of identical twins separated at birth indicate that our ability to think creatively comes one third from genetics; but two-thirds of the innovation skill set comes though learning. (Dyer, 2009)

Based on this I could explain that I am creativity in specific environments where I have more freedom and not much pressure on me. On the other hand, I have experienced that when I feel pressured to make something creative it does not work and most of the time nothing comes up.

 

2.      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?

When it comes to professional life I have experienced both sides of the coin in the same company. Working for a German automotive company in the manufacturing engineering department I used to have a lot of freedom when designing tooling for new projects introduction or to solve every day problems, the main restriction was to keep everything into the budget. The fact of being reporting to a local management made easier to have freedom in decisions.

But switching job to the Product Engineering department things were a different. By looking at the title you can imagine that being designing products would require higher creativity. However in many big organizations like this, the product is sometimes untouchable; there are many specifications and standards that constrain any change on the design. In this kind of environment the creativity is not as much required as one may believe. Main changes on standard and product design are responsibility of a specific group (R&D in Germany or US) where they were the responsible for all the creativity and analysis. In order to request or make a change the process is long and complicated.

In general, depending on the strategic crafted by the organization they can define which areas or departments need to be empowered to be creative in order to reach its objectives.  

3.      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?

Yes, I considered myself as capable of being creative but it depends on the situation. I would not say I can be creative all the time and for everything. My creativity flows easier when I have something that I find interesting and challenging to solve and when I can have more freedom to think and operate.

The groups within organizations can be creative; it is just matter of finding the right people and creating the atmosphere to inspire creativity. However I don’t think there is only one formula for all the companies to have creative teams; teams should be customized according to the necessities and culture of the company.

4.      What do you think about this article and the way this author describes 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 found this article very interesting and I totally agree that creativity is part a skill that anyone can learn and practice to improve it. This theory aligns to others articles I have read about this same topic. I really think that people can improve their creativity when they have a real interest to work on it.

The creativity types and processes make a lot of sense to me; different kinds of problems require different approaches and I like the ones that are proposed in the article. The two creative types that are proposed make a lot of sense with one phrase I just read in one article “Innovation is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration”.

On the other I do not truly agree that we can trust on ourselves to decide the approach we need in all the problems. Sometimes is useful to have a guide or standardized process to use the right process on a given situation, especially when working in solving problems as a team.

Having different people working in a problem at the same time need to have a structured process that helps to bring the experiences from each one; it may be possible that part of the team thinks that one approach works better that the other and the other way around based on their knowledge and background. If they don’t have a clear process it could lead to a team paralysis where not outcome can be reach.