To be creative, ideas must be new and useful. However, new ideas are often not very useful, and useful ideas are often not very new.
Coming up with a creative idea is only the first step to success. You have to refine, evaluate and present the idea to others.
Why is creativity important?
Most innovation starts with a creative idea in people’s minds. To have a successful product or service, you need creative ideas. Creating an idea is the beginning of a long and difficult process, because ideas are often risky, uncertain, difficult to understand, and few people can imagine their practical value and utility. In addition, companies tend to favour the status quo. A big challenge is the art of convincing people to make a creative idea come true.
Creativity is the engine of innovation.
Who can predict the success of a new idea? The creator or the manager?
Neither, according to available research. The best are those who spend time together generating their own ideas from the very beginning, to its advocacy, to the practical implementation of the idea. Creators usually tend to think about their work and are therefore poor prognosticators of their own ideas. However, they are better judges of other creators’ ideas. Creators are better at recognizing the value and novelty of an idea than managers. This is because they focus on creating ideas, while managers focus on evaluating them.
Creators first engage divergent thinking, looking for new connections and combinations, before engaging convergent thinking and evaluating ideas based on prior knowledge and experience. Managers evaluate ideas the moment creators present them, skipping divergent thinking and going straight to convergent thinking. Convergent thinking itself is dangerous because you rely on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble whatever has succeeded before. Since creators working in teams are better at predicting the success of new ideas than managers, companies should rethink the roles of creators and managers. Give creators the opportunity to vote on the ideas of their colleagues, and involve managers in the entire creative process, preferably from the very beginning.
Divergent thinking helps people be more open to new ideas.
A new idea or a useful idea?
There is an ancient theory of painting that mentions the so-called first mark, or brush stroke on the canvas. The first mark is important. Something appears on the canvas that enables but simultaneously delimits how the stroke would continue. The first brush stroke determines the rest of the entire painting. It is a paradox, because the first mark is completely invisible on the canvas, but it is actually essential. The first mark is the trajectory of further thoughts. The question is whether it is better to start with a new idea and try to make it useful, or to start with a useful idea and try to make it more novel.
Start with a new idea that you can make useful in an easier way. When we start with something we are already familiar with, we get its usefulness anchored firmly and find it harder to come up with something that makes the idea novel. We end up with a useful but unoriginal idea. The lesson is therefore to focus on novelty early in the creative process and worry about utility later.
At the beginning of the creative process, when ideas are very rough and incomplete, it is difficult to know which ideas have the biggest potential. The best ideas take time to show their worth. If possible, it is good practice to develop at least two ideas, because then it will be easier to make a conscious choice for the first and second ideas. A simple idea that comes to us fully formed, specific and feasible, is usually not the best way to go. However, if we invest time and development in a more difficult idea, which is more abstract and we do not know how to formulate it clearly, after some time it will surely overtake the idea that we originally thought as simple.
Passing on a creative idea?
Films are more creative when the director also becomes the screenwriter. Otherwise, there is a process called late handover, where people are asked to implement ideas that were created by someone else. Late handover is bad for creativity because the handover recipient does not have a chance to develop a sense of ownership and a clear vision of the idea. If you need to pass on ideas, pass them on as early as possible in the creative process, when the ideas are still rough and incomplete.
Interesting books not only about creativity…
HEGARTY on Creativity: THERE ARE NO RULES, Slovart
ART THINKING, Amy Whitaker, Knihy OMEGA
ORIGINALS, Adam Grant, NOXI
How about your CREATIVITY…?