Creativity « Genesys Australia Psychometrics

Posts Tagged ‘Creativity’

How to Spot an Original Thinker

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Original thinkers who drive innovation, adaptability and problem solving are highly valuable and sought-after, so if organisations were able to identify and encourage original thinkers they would have a huge advantage in the marketplace.

Can you spot an original thinker? Dr Mark Batey of Manchester University’s Manchester Business School believes you can.

In a recently produced MBS video interview, Original Thinkers, Dr Mark Batey, a world-leading psychology of creativity researcher, outlines the four dimensions he believes make up an original thinker and that organisations can look out for to identify original thinking in their current or potential employees:

Ideas generation

Original thinkers are highly fluent, which means they produce lots of ideas. Even though sometimes their ideas might not be practical, and it might be hard for other people to see how these solutions might be used, the key is the volume of ideas they are able to produce.

As well as the number of ideas they produce, original thinkers tend to produce different or unusual ideas.

In their approach to thinking, original thinkers often like to incubate, or let their thoughts percolate for while. This period will often be followed by a “eureka” experience, what Dr. Batey calls “Illuminative Moments”.

Personality traits

Original thinkers are inclined to be very curious. They ask lots of questions, and want to know how things work the way they do, and why.

The other personality trait that stands out in original thinkers is that they are comfortable with a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Original thinkers tend not to see things in black and white, and are quite happy with contradiction, competing evidence and shades of grey.

Motivation

Original thinkers tend to be motivated intrinsically. This means that they have a strong drive that comes from within them. They will be very self-motivated.

In addition, Dr. Batey believes these people are quite competitive, and they will quite likely want to “beat” other people with their ideas. Although they may work well in a collaborative team environment and be willing to share their ideas with colleagues, they will want the team to do better than it’s competitors.

Confidence

Original thinkers tend to be very confident about their ideas. This applies to having ideas, believing in the quality of their ideas, sharing them, and being able to confidently implement them.

In September 2009, Olivier Serrat wrote in a paper for the Asian Development Bank, “Creativity plays a critical role in the innovation process, and innovation that markets value is a creator and sustainer of change. In organisations, stimulants and obstacles to creativity drive or impede enterprise.”

The ability to identify original thinkers would clearly provide huge advantages to organisations faced with the fast changing pace of a developing national and world economy.

As Mark Batey says, “It’s not just being an original thinker, it’s being an original applier as well”.

Watch Video: Original Thinkers: Dr. Mark Batey

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related Posts:

The Creativity Imperative

King of the Manning River: Creativity & Problem Solving in the Workplace

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

Tags: Creativity, decision making, engagement, leadership, organisational psychology, original thinking, positive psychology, problem solving, team work, workplace assessment
Posted in Creativity in the Workplace | No Comments »

Slam Dunk

Sunday, August 21st, 2011

In the novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany by Amercian novelist John Irving, famous for writing The World According to Garp, the central character Owen Meany spends his whole life preparing for one defining moment.

In Owen’s case, it’s achieving a perfect basketball slam-dunk in a way that no one, including the god-like Owen himself, could foresee. Owen’s slam-dunk was his pivotal and enduring achievement. It was the moment when everything he had worked for all his life came together.

I think that this slam-dunk moment must come in everyone’s career, and lately I’ve been thinking it’s come for me.

For Owen Meany, because his creator is a master of black humour, his pivotal and defining moment was his last moment. But for those of us in real life, a pivotal moment should be a beginning, not an end.

In my case, all my professional and personal areas of interest seem to have allied themselves seamlessly, in a way that makes me feel as though, like Owen, I’ve been practicing for this moment all my life. And I have.

Sportspeople know this feeling of recognition as being in the zone. Psychologists and artists know it as flow. Teachers, performers and public speakers feel it as being in unison with their audience. It’s the ordinary yet transcendent feeling of satisfaction, empathy, elation & connection we feel as part of a crowd at a football match when our team scores a goal. It’s the feeling of rightness, when everything falls into place. Slam-dunk.

Throughout the years I have treated my life and my career as though it was a painting. Two generations of “creatives” before me taught me to lay down strong foundations, to build up layers, to balance the composition and colour, to have a careful observant eye and to go with the medium not against it. When you make any creative piece (whether it’s a painting or a life) you have to trust that your knowledge and technique will lead to a successful outcome.

So I’ve spent decades trusting that, just like in a painting, a successful outcome would be built from accumulating knowledge, steadfastly laying down foundations, exploring widely and observing closely. In painting, there’s a defining moment when everything suddenly comes together and you know it’s a finished piece. And at that point, instantly, the painting becomes greater than the sum of its parts and has an independent existence that you’ve created.

It’s the slam-dunk moment. The moment of revelation: the moment when action achieves a guaranteed outcome. That’s why slam-dunk has come to mean a sure thing. It’s the moment I hope everyone has in their career and life.

Lynette Jensen

Please click on the heading above to leave a comment or to share.

* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

Work Life Balance (And How to Preserve Olives)

Staying Afloat: Boats & Analogies

A Room with a View

Tags: achieving outcomes, careers, Creativity, decision making, engagement, HR Consulting, leadership, organisational psychology, problem solving
Posted in Career Achievement | No Comments »

Genesis Means Create: The Creativity & Innovation Imperative

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

The word “genesis” means create or come into being. Creating things is what human beings can’t help but do. We are driven to it.

Creativity is at the heart of what it means to be human. Creativity informs everything we do and as a species it’s our overwhelming imperative. We invent, produce, have ideas and think of solutions. And never stop.

Everything we do is based on our essential creativity and nothing would happen if we had no creativity.

In the modern world of business and organizations, innovation and adaptability are both highly praised and greatly desired. Especially in uncertain economic and fast changing times, the need for innovation and adaptability is becoming one of our highest priorities, because if we have access to and control of these then we can adapt quickly, stay afloat or ahead of the game and be ready for all challenges.

Creativity is the raw material of innovation. Innovation is simply creativity put into action. Creativity is necessary not only for innovation but also for critical thinking, problem solving, leadership, teamwork and almost every area of life we most highly value.

In business and the workplace, creativity is the most powerful tool an individual or organization can have and across the world there is a growing recognition that we must muster our individual and collective creativity and learn to innovate or perish. An IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs cited in the Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis in July 2010, identified creativity as the number 1 “leadership compentency” of the future.

If we want to be lean and mean, if we want to continue to find successful and elegant solutions, if we want to continue and increase technological development, if we want to make good decisions and think clearly and well, if we want to re-define and re-invent the way we use natural resources, if we want to feed the world’s expanding population, then we need to recognise and apply our creativity as expediently, intentionally and intelligently as we can.

There is no more time to play silly games with our creativity: no more time to pretend that it only belongs in the arts, that it is not rational or scientific, that it’s what other people have and not us. Creativity has to be recognized, embraced and applied universally and well.

The organisations and individuals who have recognized this are already ahead of the game. There is nothing tricky or mysterious about creativity. It’s what’s inside us all.

We can all generate more good ideas and good decisions that invent the future.

Lynette Jensen

Please click on the heading above to leave a comment or to share.

Tags: challenges, communications, Creativity, creativity & innovation, decision making, leadership, organisational psychology, problem solving, psychology, team work, workplace assessment
Posted in Creativity & innovation | 1 Comment »

Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates LinkedIn: Online Citizenship

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Most of us in business or other organisations belong to LinkedIn, and many of us participate in discussion groups related to our fields and areas of specialisation and interest. Furthermore, marketing and promotions professionals these days tell us that it is extremely important to have an online presence and profile, and though there are other alternatives like Brazen Careerist, LinkedIn is the professional social networking standard.

Accordingly, like most people I know, I belong to many LinkedIn groups, which in my case cover areas like organisational psychology, psychometrics, creativity, arts, advertising and HR. Like most people, I subscribe to a few good professional blogs, and through these come upon many links to other blogs and articles. It’s an expanding world, and I’m both personally and professionally grateful to be exposed daily to so much information and food for thought.

I have always been interested in many different areas, and so my professional interests and reading reflect this. Lately, because I’ve started to notice some patterns in myself and others, I’ve begun to realise that my online life is very similar to my real life.

Online, the contacts I collect seem to be like my friends and associates in real life: they are interesting, varied, creative, mostly outspoken, confident, leaders and thought influencers, and from many walks of life and professional areas. The things they say to me are starting to be like things people in real life say to me.

More importantly though, I’ve started to realise that the virtual, online professional world needs to maintain standards and etiquette, just like in the real world. Just as I do in real life, I seem to spend a lot of my time being on guard for and smoothing over potential conflicts. The online world of professional social net-working is a place where all cultures come together and connect instantly, where the nuance of the written word is often difficult to understand and subtleties are sometimes misunderstood, and the different time zones across the world make the time of day an ingredient in the way we communicate and what we say.

Online, even in the professional sphere of LinkedIn (as opposed to Facebook for instance) there are bullies, cranks, show-offs, posers, extraverts, introverts, casual people, funny people, serious people, formal people and many, many others. Just like real life. In real life though, you can look someone in the eye and hear the tone in their voice and judge their body language.

So I’m beginning to think that we need to proactively think of ourselves as online citizens, with responsibilities to be civil and not too dominating in discussions but to have something to say and keep discussions going, aware and empathetic of differences like race and culture, and to be particularly careful to try to pick up verbal nuance and humour, and not to over-react to apparent slights but to publicly object to online dominance, bullying or impoliteness.

A year or so ago my sons made a short film called Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates Facebook for Kino, Sydney. It should come as no surprise to me to find that the same principle applies to LinkedIn.

Lynette Jensen

Please click on the heading above to leave a comment or to share. More posts below.

Tags: business etiquette, communications, Creativity, leadership, manners, organisational psychology, problem solving, social networking, team work
Posted in Online Citizenship | 3 Comments »

Creativity: The Essence of Being Australian

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

Creativity is at the core of all human endeavour. It’s what makes us keep searching for new ideas and innovations, and is what got us standing up and leaving our cave dwelling existence in the first place.

Creativity in the workplace is essential. At a macro level creativity drives innovation, and it’s innovation that drives expansion and development of industry and economy. At a micro level, every individual in the workplace can be more productive, happy and effective if they apply creativity to problem solving, team dynamics and management, and their general work and work/life balance.

There has been a tendency in Australia to marginalise the word “creativity”. As a society, we have been guilty, I think, of using it almost as a pejorative term, and to see it as something outside the mainstream. We have tended to think of it as being associated only with the arts, or with advertising, or with people who wear “funny clothes” and are generally not quite “like us”. But this is to trivialise creativity, and not understand what it really is, and to miss the point as a growing and dynamic society, to our detriment.

Australians are probably known for loving sport and straight-talking, and for being suspicious of the more “airy fairy” which we’ve historically associated with a perceived pretention in arts, culture and intellectualism. We pride ourselves on a straightforward and egalitarian approach. And we are proud we’ll “have a go” with a minimum of fuss (No worries, Mate!).

“Having a go” is at the heart of what creativity is. Creativity allows you to make something from nothing, to look at something in a different way, to make the most of limited resources, to try something new and to solve problems. I would have thought that Australians, with our “No worries, Mate” attitude, unconsciously apply creativity very well, and fundamentally.

Surely it was this attitude, and it’s underlying basis in creativity, that recently got us through the Global Financial Crisis so well, that allowed us to stage such an inspiring, beautiful and deeply touching Sydney Olympic Games, that underlies our worship and reverence of the physical poetry of Don Bradman’s game, and that’s enabled us to have created (against all odds!) a dynamic, culturally diverse and sophisticated society from a convict settlement in just over 200 years.

Surely, creativity is at the heart of what it means to be Australian? To be prepared to “have a go” is to be creative.

In Australia, visitors tell us this all the time. While they expect the geographical, physical beauty of Australia, they don’t expect our joy, our sophisticated society, our straight-forwardness, and they are surprised that we’ve made something so complex yet unpretentious from very little and in such a short time. Isn’t this why Oprah Winfrey was so shocked and so over-come recently by the surprise and wonder of Australia? And isn’t this why we can say, “We created this – we made it with our own hands and our own thoughts”?

So if Australians, and the Australian culture generally, harness the essence of creativity without even knowing it, how much more could be achieved, individually and as a society, if we started to recognise it properly, and to apply it intentionally?

What a society we could be, and what an economy we could create!

Lynette Jensen

Please click on the heading above to leave a comment or to share. More posts below.

Tags: Creativity, innovation, organisational psychology, positive psychology, psychology of creativity, workplace creativity
Posted in Creativity in the Workplace | 8 Comments »

A Room with a View (Creativity in the Workplace)

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

I’m writing this from our new Adelaide rooms, which have a beautiful view across East Terrace to Rymill Park. People are strolling through the park, families are picnicking, workers are industriously getting things ready for the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and despite the heat of an Adelaide summer, the grass is lush and the trees are waving gently in the breeze. A few months ago, I was inspired to begin this blog while looking out over Blackwattle Bay from our Sydney rooms.

A beautiful view makes you want to sit and stare and contemplate, and this leads to a state which psychologists call flow. Flow is when you are fully immersed in, and engaged with, what you are doing, and have no concern at all for time. In fact, time seems to cease to exist. You feel energised and alert. It’s this state of being that psychologists like Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and Martin Seligman believe is happiness. It’s also the state that is the most conducive to creativity, which brings me back to my view of the park.

To be at your most creative, you need to be in a state to think freely. A beautiful view helps you achieve this, as can listening to music, walking or jogging, the sound and/or sight of water, being in a forest, being together with a group of people, and many other situations that can trigger free thought. It’s a question of what works for you, and most people know what works best for them.

So why is creativity important in the workplace, and do we really want people staring out of windows thinking all day?

I believe that creativity is fundamental to the workplace. Firstly, because I think human beings are primarily creative (and if we weren’t we’d never have stood up, learnt to cook food or developed culture and industry), and secondly and fundamentally, because creativity allows you to make something from nothing.

All physical and intellectual achievement comes down to making something from nothing. In other words, having an idea and making it real. In general life, and particularly in the workplace, this translates into innovation, problem solving, and making more of the resources at hand.

Every organisation can benefit, I believe, from harnessing and fully employing creativity. Whether it’s to learn to make a company leaner and smarter, to stream-line systems and procedures, to learn to employ people who fit into the organisation and work in teams well, or to invent new products, creativity is at the heart of all successful operation and achievement.

Creativity doesn’t only take one person like me staring out a window though. In an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2008 about his highly innovative film production company, Pixar, Ed Catmull said of the creative process at Pixar, “…creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems”. It doesn’t take much to see that this process could be effectively generalised to every organisation, large and small alike.

Creativity is one of the most fundamental things about being human. Since the beginning of our species, creativity is what got us here. Creativity makes us visualise what we can become, individually and collectively. The greatest organisations, and the greatest endeavours and achievements require the greatest creativity.

In the end, all achievement in the workplace, and in life, comes down to two essential things: effective problem solving, and making something from nothing.

Lynette Jensen

Please click on the heading to leave a comment

* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

Tags: Creativity, decision making, organisational psychology, problem solving, stream-lining solutions
Posted in Creativity in the Workplace | 2 Comments »