Dispelling the myth that creative people are always generators and conceptualizers
It all goes back to the definition of creativity – we are very firm on not having any definition of creativity. If you ask fifteen different people what animal do they think best illustrates creativity, you’re going to get 15 different answers. Playing this up further, someone likes peacocks because it has got a lot of color – someone else likes raccoons because they can solve problems. There are some people that say, well, there are people who can get things done quickly. We stay away from that. What we do is we try to educate people, that the creative process is everything and if you’re not going through the creative process, people have different skills in all of them.
Some people are really creative about implementing – it’s a tough job to implement. Some people are especially creative – think about the Apollo Thirteen crew. It took incredible creativity to solve the problem of getting back to earth with a damaged spacecraft. How about people who can really find ways to elicit new problems from people by asking questions? How about people who are all over the map and looking for new problems to solve? To them the name of the game is finding problems. People have different thinking styles.
So we are very careful – we don’t distinguish between creativity and innovation – it’s a process. It’s a process that requires all four styles and we like to get people feeling good about whichever one they like best. An advertising agency one said, “It ain’t creative unless its sells.” and that’s one of the best things we’ve learned – you can have lots of ideas but that’s only part of the creative process. Another saying that we really like is, “Creativity is a implemented change.” That’s what creativity is. Unless you’ve done it, you haven’t done anything creative. The poet Keats said, “Nothing is real until it is experienced.” You can talk all you like, you can have all the ideas but it’s not real until you experience it. Like when you’re running a Simplexity session and you have people experiencing the whole process – now it’s real – now you feel it.
