The greatest challenge to deliberate creativity is supporting the efforts of teams diverse in knowledge, goals, thinking styles, paradigms, and cultures.
Unfortunately, some of the most important problems yet to be solved require a breadth of understanding that is not available in any individual.
Assembling the individuals who have various subsets of the required information often requires a diversity of perspective and habits that make interaction and synergy almost impossible,
Fortunately, members of teams and other interactions can come to understand, accept, and even value differences in other team members. As this understanding develops in parallel with the natural building of group cohesion, teams become more and more capable of integrating their knowledge and creativity into co-creative ideas which would never have been available to an individual working alone, unless they possessed all that knowledge and perspective.
Many well known tools of deliberate creativity combined with the available knowledge of human differences in thinking, communicating, and culture can be provided to teams to build their ability to be co-creative as teams.
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Beyond Natural Creativity to Deliberate
The world's literature is full of tales of creative people making great contributions. There is a great deal of research trying to discover the sources of this "natural" creative ability, with little success. The relative scarcity of this "natural" ability makes the stories interesting, but leaves the world limited in its speed of improvement.
Fortunately, often as a result of the various research attempts, the world has developed an array of tools and methods to achieve "deliberate" creativity. From research attempting to define creative ability as flexibility and fluency of ideas, the tool of "brainstorming" emerged, a social event encouraging individuals to maximize their flexibility and fluency of thinking, regardless of their natural tendencies. Despite a variety of attempts to discredit the tool, by people who did not understand how to do it, the process done correctly consistently extracts creative ideas and builds a community receptive to considering new possibilities.
Learning to understand the various tools and apply them to specific situations helps individuals, teams, and organizations use their knowledge and other resources to more rapidly discover opportunities for improvement.
Fortunately, often as a result of the various research attempts, the world has developed an array of tools and methods to achieve "deliberate" creativity. From research attempting to define creative ability as flexibility and fluency of ideas, the tool of "brainstorming" emerged, a social event encouraging individuals to maximize their flexibility and fluency of thinking, regardless of their natural tendencies. Despite a variety of attempts to discredit the tool, by people who did not understand how to do it, the process done correctly consistently extracts creative ideas and builds a community receptive to considering new possibilities.
Learning to understand the various tools and apply them to specific situations helps individuals, teams, and organizations use their knowledge and other resources to more rapidly discover opportunities for improvement.
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