We celebrate people and society that achieve creative progress, but to think creatively, we must think outside of the realm in which we bind our mind with societal constructs. This often is not popular; to be creative, we must break the boundaries, even if it’s not considered the “norm.”
Very little has shaped the human experience as intensely and widely as creativity. Creativity has been the driving force for progress in all man kinds ventures, from arts to science, business, and technology. Creativity has been the subconscious force that fed the binary process of trial and error to survive, experience and persevere. Even asleep, the mentality is awake; creativity runs away with our thoughts and paints an abstract experience while we sleep.
For hundreds of years, the concept of creativity has sparked philosophical conversations and debates about the origins and the process of creativity. Today science is uncovering some of these processes while sleeping through PET scans, fMRI, and high-density EEGs.
Like much of our world, we have come to grasp what is believed to be the conventional process of creativity. Graham Wallas of the London School of Economics wrote the Art of Thought. In it, Wallas defined the four stages of the creative process. Preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification are symbiotically intertwined in the conscious and unconscious daily experience of the mind.
Preparation is the first stage where one takes a creative interest and begins to gather and process information — then followed by the incubation stage where ideas have been had and are on a static thought setting into the mind. The third is the illumination stage, the awaking of the incubation stage, and the discovery of the idea. And lastly, the verification stage is where the idea is applied as possibly successful. Today, this is followed by critical thinking and reasoning, information literacy, collaboration, self-direction, and invention. Which can all be traced back to Wallas foundational four-step process that he outlined.
These processes are applied in all facets of life, but in business, creativity is analyzed closely because creativity leads to innovation, and innovation typically leads to financial gain. Creativity is studied in business because it is what is thoughts to keep organizations going.
A couple of approaches to creativity are outlined by Chris Bilton and Stephen Cummins in A Framework For Creative Management And Managing Creativity. The other by the same Chris Bilton and Leary Ruth in What Managers Do For Creativity.
In a Framework For Creative Management, they state that in many organizations, creativity is often seen as safeguarded by a small number of people with “artistic personalities” but that in their experience, all sorts of people have creative abilities which can be used to the benefit of a creative organization. The ability to bring about creativity in an organization is thought to be of management. It’s thought that management must find a way to exploit creativity.
In What Managers Do For Creativity, Bilton tends to tackle the term creativity and its popular use in the contemporary managerial lexicon. He argues that managers use creativity to indicate an organization’s capacity for innovation and flexibility in business. And that creativity has become the currency of today’s knowledge economy. In both of the articles, a few examples from previous years were given. Such as the P-creativity and the H-creativity, the P is the ordinary everyday variety that allows us to solve our own daily problems, and H is the what’s behind great artistic and scientific discoveries. H being what is socially higher and acceptable. It also goes on to tackle the concept of genius and creativity. Creativity is person-centered, not process-oriented; innovation is privileged to overvalue and intuition inspiration over rational decision making.
Creativity in a workplace is thought to come best from a diverse environment, people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences. In the concluding findings from the Framework article, the key to effective creative management is to tolerate and even promote a different perspective or processes.
I agree that creativity is best expressed and brought together through multiple people in the workplace. The busy world in which we live has also overstimulated our ability to think independently and has put a burden on our prefrontal cortex of the brain. And studies have shown that 25 minutes out in nature help readjust this overstimulation- hence we see the move by city officials to create green space.
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