Thursday, March 24, 2011

Fostering Creativity

Understanding the creative process helps you to develop it in your organization.

Creativity not only generates the ideas that start an innovation, but also the means of fixing problems along the way. Scaling up, getting the bugs out of the system, and revising prototypes all require creative input. Understanding the creative process helps you to develop it in your organization.

Creative problem-solving is a process psychologists have studied for years. There are four stages:
  • Recognition: realizing you have a problem to solve.
  • Exploration: examining different potential solutions. These may be obvious answers, or they may be tough, complex ideas that develop over time.
  • Insight: the moment of connection, when an answer comes to you that you feel will resolve the problem.
  • Validation: further examination of the idea as it is implemented to make sure it really is the solution.
In a business context, review and analysis should follow validation, to ensure the problem is solved. If not the cycle repeats until an answer emerges.

ACTION POINT: Creative problem solving is a skill like any other. Provide training to your employees and make sure they obtain experience in finding and solving problems.

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