How an individual, team or organization combines these different preferences of gaining and using knowledge determines their creative process profile. When you understand these differences, you can shift your own orientation in order to complement the creative process preferences of others. Equally important, you can take various approaches to working with people. You can decide on the optimum strategy for helping someone else to learn something. And you can decide whom to turn to for help in ideation or evaluation. Understanding these differences also helps you interact with other people to make best use of the complete four-stage creative process. The profile provides a common problem solving language. For example, you can help strong optimizers discover new problems and facts, or present new problems and facts to them. You can help strong implementers better define challenges, or present well-defined challenges to them. You can help strong generators evaluate and select from among solutions and make plans, or present to them evaluated solutions and ready-made plans. You can help strong conceptualizers to convince others of the value of their ideas and push them to act on them, or push their ideas through to acceptance and implementation for them.

If you understand your customer's' creative process profile, you can partner up and help that customer move through the creative process. You can also shift your orientation to help the customer through the creative process.

Maintaining this healthy balance is most important on the organization's interfunctional teams. While there are exceptions, people who work in similar occupations or departments usually gravitate toward one dominant quadrant. Because their secondary quadrants differ, their individual profiles may differ. But they have more in common with each other than with people in other occupations or departments who rely on different ways of absorbing and using knowledge.

For example, people in research and development departments, and training or organizational development departments, often favor different stages of the creative process than do people in accounting, engineering or production. No matter which process style an individual prefers, however, an interfunctional team's members have to learn to use their differences to advantage. When you are assembling a team, especially one involved in continuous improvement and innovation, you must put together people who enjoy working in each of the different stages of the creative process: finding new problems and opportunities; refining those opportunities and creating ideas; developing practical solutions and plans; and making the new solutions work.

There are many reasons why meetings and teamwork are often uncreative and frustrating. One of the biggest reasons is that people are unaware that individuals have different styles of approaching problems, and that these differences can be - must be - synchronized. Group members fail to understand each other and don't know how to synchronize these differences. For example, groups jump into "solving the problem" without first considering what the real problem is, then flounder. The Basadur Profile helps groups overcome these problems by providing a common problem solving process and language.

A creative team requires strengths in flowing through all four stages of the creative process together. Team members can learn to use their differing styles in complementary ways. Our research (Basadur, Head 2001) shows that heterogeneous mixtures of the four styles outperform more homogeneous teams.

Whether you are working in teams or not, helping individuals learn to shift among orientations also ensures that the entire organization has a complete blend of process styles. In fact, your dominant orientation is less important than your ability to shift among the orientations. Your preferences for certain quadrants of the complete creative process are not static "traits", but rather dynamic "states". You can - must - learn to work in any of the four quadrants in order to complement others in any given situation.

An organization's unique blend of styles may change over time or from one situation to another. With the rapid changes in markets and technologies that we have witnessed recently, some corporations have had to balance their traditional emphasis on optimizing and implementing with more generating and conceptualizing.

A creative organization requires a healthy balance of members whose orientations complement one another. This balance gives the organization a continuous supply of new problems, new ideas, new processes, new products and services.