The article was titled, “The Idea of Creativity, the Creativity Behind an Idea.” Of course it intrigued me.
The importance of creativity and creative thinking has risen to the top of the MBA curriculum and now finds itself in all discussions about business, success, and the need to stave off the decline of America.
Evidently you can be a creativity expert, and Frank Härén is positioned as that by putting on seminars, writing a book, and founding the Interesting Organization. He and his work were the focus of the article. It’s worth a read and can be found here.
The article has various aspects, but in it he talks about creativity and also about the idea. He even has a formula for the idea –- idea=p(k+i). P is people, K is knowledge, and I is information. I didn’t find this too creative.
But I did find something interesting under the subheading “Where did our creativity go?”
Creativity does not come overnight. Showing how difficult it was for an individual to think beyond the common, Härén asked his audience to use their imaginations to come up with a list of ten impossible things that they wish to have. When he compared the answers to his own list of ten things, most of the responses were, as he predicted, similar – the 'the ability to be invisible', 'the ability to fly', etc – perhaps like "model answers" to the question. “There are one billion things we could have used our imagination to say and we don’t even have ten unique answers!”
Pre-schoolers, on the other hand, answered differently. They wanted to be able to touch love, to lift a bus without breaking a finger, to see with their fingers, etc. This, to Härén, is proof that we are born to think creatively, but we lose our creativity along the way as we conform to norms, expectations and institutions. “We’re animals of habits, gaps and comfort zones. When we do things differently, someone comes and tells us that we’re doing it wrong and we stop doing it,” he said.
I’ve had this discussion with many people over the years and believe that we do or can lose some confidence in our creative abilities as we grow. I found this paragraph to aptly fit something I experienced recently.
I was surfing around the Writer’s Digest website and found myself on a page that suggested writing prompts. A quick scan didn’t yield anything until the following caught my eye:
You wake up one day with an unusual super power that seems pretty worthless – until you are caught in a situation that requires that specific ‘talent.’
I was at attention, but let’s just say that I wasn’t thinking like a pre-schooler. I tried. Honest. Here’s how my thought process began…
Hmmm. Strength is usually one of those super skills. The ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. To become invisible. To see through concrete or steel or whatever. To grow into a giant when irritated. To turn green.
None of that is really appealing, and some of that is actually quite useful. So a worthless power, well that takes some tossing around.
How about holding your nose and turning your body into a powerful magnet? Rather useless unless you’re in a room full of thugs with guns.
Where did that come from?
Making a sound like… a whistle to attract an animal or to scare an animal…ears that glow…the ability to click your tongue – I read all of the Ladies Detective Agency books and it stuck with me…
I abandoned the exercise after staring out of the window for a good while, coming up blank. Had I been one of those pre-schoolers, I would have come up with all kinds of creative ideas. Like the ability to taste something and know its origin – worthless unless you’re trying to determine if you’ve been sold the wrong grapes, like Gallo. Or the ability to look at a handwritten note and see the face of the person wrote it – worthless unless you’re reading a ransom note from the person(s) who stole the Friesian cow. Or how about if you could think of an event that happened in the past and close your eyes to see the quantum bumps that it created, sort of like a film, perhaps like Sliding Doors. Worthless but useful in so many ways.
We have read that everything we know we learned in kindergarten, and while it’s put forth that life and environment affect our confidence in our abilities, I’d say the best super power to have is the one that lets us see that we’ve been given infinite gifts and abilities and that we possess and use them every day.
Worthless?
