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Tip 43 – Boosting Creativity
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As well as being a core competency for leaders and managers, everyone needs creativity to address challenges and solve problems. It is known that organisations led by creative leaders have a higher success rate in innovation, employee engagement, change and renewal.
But what are the skills that are essential for the creative processes?
In an interview reported in the Harvard Business Press Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University, gave us the answer from his 6 year study surveying 3,000 creative executives.
He found that there are 5 main ‘discovery skills’:
- The first skill is associating. It's a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas.
- The second skill is questioning. An ability to ask "what if", "why", and "why not" questions challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture.
- The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people's behaviour.
- Another skill is the ability to experiment. The people studied are always trying out new experiences and exploring new worlds.
- And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.
Professor Dyer discovered that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting and networking, but questioning on its own doesn't have a direct effect without the others. He found that overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren't created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven't been connected before. The other behaviours are inputs that trigger associating - so they are a means of getting to creativity.
All these skills can be summarised by one word "inquisitiveness"; the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children. One of the challenges associated with this is that even the most creative people are often careful about asking questions for fear of looking stupid, or because they know the organisation won't value it. This often comes from early schooling: if you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 7 they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
As Jean Piaget said “If you would be more creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterises children before they are deformed by adult society”. Additionally, as Katherine Hepburn put it “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun!”
A coach can help you develop your creativity skills and in many other ways.