The ones who see things differently…who are not fond of rules…they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. — Steve Jobs
Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been. – Alan Alda
Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge. – Leonardo da Vinci
I think it’s better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life! – Francis Ford Coppola
Meetings are all too often the burial grounds of great ideas. — Keith Reinhard, member, Advertising Hall of Fame
You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them. – Alexander Graham Bell
The most dangerous phrase in the language is, We’ve always done it this way. – Grace Hopper
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. – Albert Einstein
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. – E. O. Wilson
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway
Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!
Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.
While we are all creative in some aspect, some people are more creative than others. How do we distinguish one from the other or do we? What should we look for when searching for creative people? While reviewing several research articles on creativity, I ran across one that might shed some light on this “creative people search.”
Creativity can be defined as the capacity to come up with new ideas to serve a purpose. Think of it as intelligence having fun! As such, creativity serves a vital role in both our personal and professional lives every day.
No wonder employers want creative employees in areas where it is essential to come up with proposals for new products and services, and new ways of doing things.
The Creative Personality
Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen at BI Norwegian Business School conducted a study some years back to develop a personality profile for creative people: Which personality traits characterize creative people? The study was conducted with 481 people with different backgrounds and consisted of various groups of “creative” people.
The first group of creative people consisted of 69 artists working as actors or musicians in a well-known symphony orchestra or are members of an artist’s organization with admission requirements.
The second group consisted of 48 students of marketing.
The remaining participants in the study were managers, lecturers and students in programs that are less associated with creativity than marketing.
Seven Creativity Characteristics
In his study Martinsen identified seven paramount personality traits that characterize creative people: 1. Associative orientation: Imaginative, playful, have a wealth of ideas, ability to be committed, sliding transitions between fact and fiction. 2. Need for originality: Resists rules and conventions. Have a rebellious attitude due to a need to do things no one else does. 3. Motivation: Have a need to perform, goal-oriented, innovative attitude, stamina to tackle difficult issues. 4. Ambition: Have a need to be influential, attract attention and recognition. 5. Flexibility: Have the ability to see different aspects of issues and come up with optional solutions. 6. Low emotional stability: Have a tendency to experience negative emotions, greater fluctuations in moods and emotional state, failing self-confidence. 7. Low sociability: Have a tendency not to be very considerate, are obstinate and find faults and flaws in ideas and people.
Among the seven personality traits, associative orientation (#1) and flexibility (#5) are the factors that to the greatest extent lead to creative thinking. “Associative orientation is linked to ingenuity. Flexibility is linked to insight,” according to the professor. The other five characteristics describe emotional inclinations and motivational factors that influence creativity or spark an interest in creativity. “The seven personality traits influence creative performance through inter-action,” Martinsen points out.
Less Sociable
The study shows that the artists who participated scored much higher on associative orientation than the other participants. They have a substantial need for originality and are not particularly stable emotionally. The personality profile of the marketing students was quite similar to the artist profile and also differs from the other participants in the study. The artists in the study also scored lower values for ambition than the others and are not particularly sociable.
“An employer would be wise to conduct a position analysis to weigh the requirements for the ability to cooperate against the need for creativity,” Martinsen believes. He also emphasizes that creative people may need help to complete their projects. “Creative people are not always equally practical and performance-oriented, which is the reverse side of the “creativity medal.”
Since a good eight years have passed from when this study was done, it would be interesting to learn what differences, if any, a newer study would reveal toward creativity aspects in individuals. Given that the creative landscape itself has changed, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that the new study results would reflect that.
• Idea Tub – can be a physical place or thing and/or an electronic file. It’s a compilation of all ideas ever submitted since you started keeping track, but organized as to be readily accessible.
An elaborate Idea Tub
• Don’t let the execution bury the idea. Your message will be diluted and possibly even confusing if the creative is too cute, too complex or just plain dumb. Think napkin, not computer.
• Realize your own sense of creativity by challenging your imagination and stimulate thoughts to lead yourself to a new level of solution.
• The idea, for best results, should be media and discipline neutral. Otherwise, you limit yourself.
• Focus on how you’re going to make the idea work and be relevant. But, never fall in love with it.
• Don’t ever underestimate the power of the mind or your imagination. Don’t ever be afraid to ask, “Why, Why not or What if . . .?”.
• Ye Olde Creativity Survival Kit — Any sort of container in which you place whatever makes you FEEL creative and THINK creatively. In this industry, silly is sometimes serious business.
• Thinking at Warp Speed – Generating ideas at breakneck speed is a great way to capture ideas on Post-it Notes (one per note) in answering a specific question to solve a problem. Remember Giant Post-its for your “idea wall” which can foster brainstorming and open-door policy idea addition.
• Drill Down Technique – Discovering THE idea. In this unusual method choose your five best ideas and ELIMINATE THEM, choose five more and ELIMINATE THEM. The last idea Post-it may or may not be the best, but it’s one to which you normally would not have paid much attention. Go play.
• As ideas are developed, make sure their essence is refined. Make sure your ideas are clear and you can explain their basic value in about 20 seconds. If you can’t explain it to an 8-year old so they’ll understand it, you need to refine your idea more.
• Don’t manage creativity; manage for creativity. Provide an environment that is open and receptive to new ideas, and that builds failure into the process. Acknowledge error or failure in a constructive and supportive way.
Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!
Be sure to check out my other blog,Joe’s Journey,for personal insights on life and its detours.
At one time or another, we’ve all been on a creative hot streak even if we didn’t realize it. The words flowed freely, the design snapped into place magically making for very impactful creative. But how did that happen? How does one get on a “hot steak” of creativity? A new study from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University may have a road map.
The secret involves experimenting with a wide range of subjects, styles, and techniques before perfecting a specific area of one’s craft—what the authors describe as a mix of exploration and exploitation.
“Although exploration is considered a risk because it might not lead anywhere, it increases the likelihood of stumbling upon a great idea,” the study’s lead author, Dashun Wang, said in a statement. “By contrast, exploitation is typically viewed as a conservative strategy. If you exploit the same type of work over and over for a long period of time, it might stifle creativity. But, interestingly, exploration followed by exploitation appears to show consistent associations with the onset of hot streaks.”
Wang’s findings, published in the journal Nature, sought to identify periods of intense creativity in the work of visual artists, as well as film directors and scientists. The team used image recognition algorithms to analyze data from 800,000 artworks from 2,128 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo, and Vincent van Gogh. The rest of the study was based on Internet Movie Database (IMDb) data sets for 4,337 directors, and publications and citations on the Web of Science and Google Scholar for 20,040 scientists.
Creative trajectories and hot-streak dynamics: three exemplary careers. Data analyzing the work of Jackson Pollock, Peter Jackson, and John Fenn.
Pollock, who achieved widespread popular and critical success with his groundbreaking drip paintings from 1946 to 1950, is one of three creators singled out as examples in the paper.
Director Peter Jackson, who famously made the “The Lord of the Rings” epic fantasy trilogy after experimenting in genres such as horror-comedy and biography is another.
John Fenn, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with electrospray ionization, having previously studied numerous other topics is another.
The paper identified patterns in the creators’ work over time—changes in brushstrokes, plot points or casting decisions, or research topics. It noted the diversity both in the period leading up to a hot streak, which typically lasts about five years, and at other times in the subject’s career. Five years?!
I found this to be surprising in that most hot streaks I’ve personally encountered have been anywhere from a few hours to several months. I’ve never thought of them in terms of years. Anywhoo . . .
In all three fields, the trend tended toward a more diverse body of work in the period before a hot streak than at other points in time. Then, during the hot streak, the creators tended to continue to work in the same vein, suggesting “that individuals become substantially more focused on what they work on, reflecting an exploitation strategy during hot streak.”
So when is your next hot streak coming up and will you know it when it hits you?
This post is based upon the article by Sarah Cascone of Art Net News.
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