Do you remember the time in kindergarten where you made your first drawing? And the teacher asking you what the drawing looked like – and between the lines told you that the drawing was too funny and didn’t look like anything at all?
That’s about the time you stopped making drawings, right?
Some of us still has the ability, the talent to make great drawings, we just need the time to practice, but also a great amount of imagination. I think Imagination is about talent, while ability is about practice.
And that leave me to my question – Can Creativity be thought?
If you look at management literature there is no limits – everything can be thought, but is that the truth? I’m in doubt here – I think that creativity is a gift given to you from Mother Nature, and how companies is using those talents in group processes, strategy formulation, product- and business development that’s another issues.
Do you have any perspectives, any thoughts on the matter?
6 comments so far
I have to agree with you on this one; no one taught me to be creative, it’s just been my way of life since birth. I never got that good at drawing, but that doesn’t mean I’m not creative.
Creativity is many things; writing, music, etc. etc.
Off the record Edward de Bono’s book Six Thinking Hats is a classic, and if you haven’t read it, then you can borrow it from me 
Some are born more or less creative but everybody have a huge creative potential that can be developed – creativity can’t be “taught” but it can be developed giving the right nursing, the right support and the right environment. It’s about developing yourself, gaining confidence, daring to get ideas and to tell and show them to our surroundings. That’s the main aspect of developing creativity – the other one is that you can become more creative by using various tricks and techniques – six thinking hats being an example of this, a more well-known being brainstorming.
Creativity may be a gift from Mother Nature but it’s a gift we all get when we are born; some more than other – maybe you can’t learn to be Leonardo da Vinci but you sure as H… can become more creative.
When I bought my first de Bono book (Thinking Course) in 1984 I was making up probably one good idea per year. By 1994, after devouring all the usual creativity books - on Mind mapping, lateral thinking etc - I was up to about one good idea per month. In 2005 my main enemy is not lack of creativity but lack of time and I can make up about ten good ideas (meaning what I consider to be good ideas) per day.
Do people consider the people of the world to be more creative than they were fifty or twenty years ago? It’s an interesting topic; I’m hoping to devise a survey in the near future to find out people’s views.
I recently read Jeff Hawkin’s book - ON Intelligence - and was left with this impression of creativity:
The ability to zoom out to high-levels of abstraction, apply metaphors, link up the seemingly unrelated and zooming-in to make it relevant to the rest of us.
It’s an interesseting question - are the world more creative now than fifty/twenty years ago? Are man becoming more and more creative?
If we take a look at the world we could say - yes we are making more improvements, innovations and so on & we have a still better possibility for doing this by a general improvement in living, in education possibilities, in knowledge acces (internet?!). But are we more creative at the individual level? Or is the improvement in creativity just because we are more individuals who have the opportunity to be creative?
I’m reading a book, a classic actually on creativity - Wallas: “art of Thought” from 1926 which presented the following stages of the creative proces= preparation-incubation-illumination-verification. These stages are still at the core of creativity understanding and are still used widely in the research on creativity. So one may ask: do we know more on the phenomenon of creativity than we did 20-50 years ago?
I’ve always found the preparation-incubation-illumination-verification advice too passive and frustrating. Many times I’ve read articles/books by creative people expecting some great insights into their methods only to find advice of the ‘take a walk in the country/on the beach’ and ‘have a relaxing bath’ variety. I find I get most of my ideas when I’m grafting away with pen and paper; the Eureka! moments take care of themselves.