Exposed to the danger of not being innovative? Creative thinking for corporates - explained

Creativity is the heart of innovation. On one hand, the understanding of creative thinking is extremely simplistic when we say that everyone is creative and that it is an intrinsic part of human nature. On the other hand, it is not easy to understand the creative thinking in all its dimensions and complexities.

I have been conducting corporate workshops on creativity, innovation and design thinking for quite some time and have found that recently the demand and urgency for an understanding of creative thinking has increased. This is partly due to increasing awareness and being exposed to the danger of not being innovative.

In such workshops, the first challenge is to remove the layers of conformity and have a sense of wonder and excitement like that of a child.

I have always wondered why we wake up to the need for creativity and innovation in organisations while throughout our lives we have tried to trample it.

Children are creative: they are curious, they are not afraid to ask seemingly stupid questions, they like to try out things, to explore, to experiment, they are not scared of failure and they have tremendous energy, enthusiasm and optimism.

All the attributes we are looking for in a creative individual. And yet both our conventional schooling system as well as our social system kills creativity in a child.

If professionals can become like children in their approach to ideation, they would be able to come up with wonderful innovative ideas.

And yet when it comes to innovation, what children do not have is subject-specific knowledge and expertise. Otherwise, children could very well be creative directors and CEO of innovative companies.

Associative thinking is a very important aspect of creativity. How well do we associate completely disparate things together in our mind determines how creatively we can think. Poets and creative writers do it all the time.

If we only focus on being curious about knowledge from different areas, our associative thinking could become much richer. Our entire approach in professional education has been to specialise and super specialise.

If an engineer was interested in wildlife, a manager was interested in sociology, a psychologist was interested in technology, imagine how many ideas would materialise through these connections?

Finally, it is not enough to come up with out of the box creative ideas. The people responsible for the 9/11 attack were very creative in the use of a plane as a dangerous weapon.

But is that what the world wants and needs? These ideas have a great power to change the lives of people- for good or bad.

Great ideas can only come with a liberal mindset which thinks about the larger good rather than narrow self-interest. This is perhaps as difficult as it is to be a child.

There are three main lessons to learn from this:
1. Be creative as a child. Nurture creativity in schools and in society.
2. Have breadth of knowledge like a young professional. Don’t be a specialist, be a generalist with a wide range of interests
3. Be wise as an old person. Use creative thinking with a great degree of responsibility.

By, Gayatri Menon
(The writer is a senior faculty at the National Institute of Design. She believes that we have a lot to learn from children.)

Source: DNA Money