World Creativity and Innovation Week, April 15 – 21 is a dedicated time worldwide to inspire new action, create novel ideas, make new decisions; solve problems in new ways, do something new, support new thinking, partner with new people, hold new conversations, use a new pair of eyes. It’s is a global launch pad for new ideas, new decisions and new actions. www.wciw.org
What is Innovation?
Management expert Peter Drucker calls innovation, “change that creates a new dimension of performance” (Hesselbein, et al 2002).
Innovation could not exist without creativity. To create new dimensions of performance, we need new ideas and new criteria. And we need to be personally involved, working from our restlessness with integrity.
Why Is Creativity Important in Innovation?
Creativity is the foundation of innovation-it’s the source and expression of new ideas and new solutions. We create when we feel a restlessness to improve or change the status quo-meaningfully, responsibly, wisely, and with impact. Innovation, on the other hand, is the successful implementation of a new idea with agreement from others. Demands for innovation are increasing in each industry sector and area of personal concern. You, your colleagues, and your children will be challenged to revise your decision-making criteria to fit the future you want given the resources at hand-and to have faith and confidence in your ability to meet new challenges and recognize new opportunities.
What Does Creativity Involve?
Creativity involves transformation-a thorough or dramatic change in form, structure, process, appearance, or character-of a person, a process, a product, or an environment. In other words, when creativity is involved, movement away from a less desirable present toward a more fulfilling and engaging future occurs. Creativity is a condition of our species; it is natural. From creativity, new life begins. In business, you express your creativity by imagining, wondering, planning, reasoning, and communicating new ideas and solutions. You discuss, analyze, structure, and prove why these new ideas will work to yield greater returns.
Why Do You Create?
Restlessness prompts you to create-to contribute to making the world and your place in it more purposeful, beautiful, efficient, sustainable, and comfortable. Sometimes you create to experiment with new ideas because your perceptions have shifted to embrace new viewpoints and learning. Sometimes your create because external environmental conditions have changed. In essence, you create when you decide to or are moved to look for and invent new pathways and new solutions.
Do We All Create the Same Way?
How one person identifies creativity may not match how another does. We all experience restlessness as a source of creativity. What each of us is restless about and how we go about dealing with that restlessness is personal and patterned according to our temperament pattern. How each of the four temperament patterns approach creativity is highlighted in this book.
How Does It Feel to Create?
How you feel about yourself, risk taking, and your influence on the environment impacts how you create. When you engage in a creative act, you enter uncharted territory. You may feel intrigued, confident, engaged, curious, and eager to explore while others may simultaneously fear abandonment, loss of security or social status, and being overwhelmed with more work. How you feel about proceeding and your attitude toward success impacts your actions. Emotions are part of the system of creating. Positive emotions support new actions more than negative ones.
You can promote positive creative experiences. Choose to make a difference. Rather than focus on what you feel you lack, appreciate your desire to move forward. Replace skepticism toward risking with a curiosity to learn from successes and failures. Generate enthusiasm for the good you might find. Promote your sense of self worth by devising a new dimension of performance for yourself, your team, and your company.
The Bottom Line
Creativity is personal and results from a restlessness to improve current or future conditions. Innovation is societal. It results from applying creativity to meet the established criteria for success. For success in innovation, others’ needs and values must be met.
Creativity results from restlessness. Innovation results from creativity.
How Temperament/Personality Dimensions® Influences Creativity
You have the capacity to more fully express your true nature when your temperament pattern’s core needs and values are being met. When they are not met, you will do what you can to balance your energy to create equilibrium.
Becoming aware of your temperament pattern/Personality Dimensions® and those of the people around you gives you freedom to choose, act, and generate and consider ideas from many different viewpoints. It’s a gift to the creativity equation-four sources of knowledge, four sources of imagination, and four sources of evaluation from which to choose to invent and implement surprisingly relevant and new solutions.
The Four Temperament Motivations for Using Creative Thinking
Championing a cause, encouraging others, unifying diverse factions, improving relationships among people, inspiring others, revitalizing morale, interpreting trends from a human dimension, empathizing with others, developing human potential, seeking common ground, mediating disputes.
Authentic Blues want to make a difference in meaningful ways. They synthesize and harmonize the human spirit to maximize group synergy and output.
Assessing situations for safety and security, sequencing processes, getting the right amount to the right people and not the wrong amount to the wrong people, enforcing procedures, stabilizing chaos, specifying resources, protecting group accord and progress, organizing people and things, making plans more efficient.
Organized Golds effectively structure and standardize to maximize group cohesion minimize chaos in the human experience.
Analyzing systems, building prototypes, defining challenges, searching for systemic inefficiencies, designing models, conceptualizing potentials, classifying competencies, questioning ideas, forecasting, exploring probabilities, envisioning futures, hypothesizing, deducing rudiments of global truths, inventing strategies.
Inquiring Greens understand the human experience from a conceptual base. They identify the variables, systems, and ideas used to model theories for consideration.
Adapting to the needs of a situation, performing with skill and panache, negotiating agreements, entertaining others through speech and action, making things happen, responding to the needs of the moment, improvising and troubleshooting, varying applications.
Resourceful Oranges manipulate opportunities in the immediate environment to produce impactful and simple solutions. They cater to the sensual experience of the human spirit.
Adapted from Marci Segal, Quick Guide to the Four Temperaments and Creativity: A Psychological Understanding of Creativity. Used with permission. Available at www.clsr.ca.
Marci Segal, MS, founder of World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15-21 frees people’s thinking so they can create new futures. She has traveled the world as a creativity expert for over 30 years, working with senior teams, inspiring audiences, and engaging leaders in conversations that demystify creativity and bring it into everyone’s reach. Marci is Canada’s first Master of Science graduate in Creativity and Change Leadership from the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, an author of three books, and loves living in Canmore.