4 Ways To Amplify Your Creativity
are over, the weather is lousy, and
we’re sober again. We made all kinds of New Year’s promises, but the big one
that will change our careers, if not our lives, is the promise to ourselves to
become more creative. In my new book, Creative Intelligence, I show that creativity is learned behavior that gets
better with training--like sports. You can make creativity routine and a
regular part of your life. That’s true for big companies as well as small
startups, corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs. Creativity is scalable.
The huge national policy storm
brewing over “dwindling innovation” and an “innovation shortfall” also gives
creativity an even greater agency. Creativity is the key to generating economic
value and getting the U.S. economy to grow fast again.
So here are four specific ways to
lead a more creative life and boost your creative capacities. Creativity is not
about blue rooms and brain waves but about social engagement and mining the
existential. Here’s what you can do.
Nearly every creative entrepreneur,
artist, musician, engineer, sports players, designer, and scientist works with
one, two, or a handful of trusted people, often in a small space. Sometimes
they work on just one project but often a series of projects over time. They
energize, complement, and spark each other and together and create something of
value that didn’t exist before. From the Rolling Stones to Thomas Edison, this
is how creativity works. This is how Apple works.
So you need to engage with creative
people. Ask yourself, among your friends and colleagues, who is the most
creative? Who brings out the most creativity in you? How does it happen?
Reflect on that. Take time to think about it. And add to your creativity circle
if you need to.
Managers need to identify and
promote the creative circles within their organizations. The pyramid is the
accepted geometric organizational structure of most businesses and
organizations. We’ve spent decades “flattening” the hierarchy of the pyramid to
boost efficiency. But to raise an organization’s creative capacity, we need to
replace pyramids with circles. Identifying, promoting, and managing those
creative circles is a key skill they should teach in B-Schools.
Successful creativity requires
scaling your new concept into an actual product. You have to pivot from
creativity to creation. To do that, you need to find the resources to transform
your concept into reality. We call them general managers, patrons of the arts,
professors, lab chiefs, sports coaches, and, these days, crowdfunders. I like
to call them “wanderers,” people (or smart crowds) experienced enough to screen
new ideas, pick those likely to succeed, and provide the resources to try them
out. People need to belong to pivot circles at work and in their regular lives
to make their creations real. What pivot circles do you belong to? Who are the
wanderers in your life? Family, friends, Kickstarter--who can identify your
best creative ideas and help scale them into reality?
Managers need to identify and
empower the wanderers inside their organizations. Who is designated to search
out the creative possibilities being offered up in your businesses? How do they
make their decisions? What resources are they providing? Who do they report to?
The Six Sigma black belt is the hero of efficiency in most corporations. To
increase creativity, a new corporate hero must be born.
Creativity is relational. Its
practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of
existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine
your knowledge. You have to know your dots.
We are used to thinking about the
dots of knowledge that come from spending 10,000 hours on practice or study.
Learned knowledge from immersion is extremely important to knowing. But look
around at the world of startups and you see that the knowledge we embody as
members of groups--demographic, cultural, national, linguistic--is often more
important than what we’ve studied and learned. Embodied knowledge, especially for
young people, can provide critical dots that we can connect to new technologies
and new situations to provide meaningful solutions to the problems in our
lives.
So take a moment to take a
creativity audit. What do you really know that might be of value? What does
your generation, your group, your family, your hobbies, your obsessions give
you that might connect to new technologies or other bits of knowledge that
might lead to something new? Ask your trusted friends to hold up a mirror to
your possible creativity.
Managers should do creativity audits
within their own organizations. What is inside that might lead to something new
and valuable. What are your generational and global assets--what do they know
that might be of value if mixed, shaken, and stirred, especially with social
media technology? The easy part is auditing the formal spaces for
innovation--labs, new product groups, R&D. Harder but possibly more
productive are the informal groups working under the radar on weekends and at
night. Or just the rare birds with unique backgrounds and knowledge, learned
and embodied. Do you know them?
Being creative means leading a
creative life. We need to reflect on what we do, with whom we engage, how we
act in order to increase our creative capacities. One easy way is to keep a
creativity journal and map our creativity. Take a few days, a week, or a month
and write down what you do, where you go, and with whom you spend your time.
Map out where and with whom you get your “best” ideas? Which coffeehouse do you
go to in order to be alone to think? Where do you get coffee to meet people?
Where do you go for inspiration and provocation? A creativity map can reveal
your process of creativity. Or it can show the banality of your life and why you
should change it.
Creativity mapping gives purpose to
people’s linkages.
Managers can do creativity maps of
their organizations, both formal and informal. Network mapping, increasingly
popular in big corporations, is a first step. Creativity mapping takes the
effort further by giving purpose to people’s linkages. Most networking is about
making mobility alliances--job-hopping to other places or promotions.
Creativity mapping is about finding people to join your circles of creativity
and pivoting. It’s about creating new economic value.
Creativity is deeply undervalued in
America today outside a tiny few university and business enclaves. Only 9% of
all public and private do any sort of innovation. Our best schools teach the
tools of efficiency and analysis. Yet we know that creativity increasingly is
the greatest value-generator. It separates those who can deal with change and
chaos and those who can’t. So we all need to build up our creative capacity.
Building these four competencies can help get you there.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671773/4-ways-to-amplify-your-creativity
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