“Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2011
So here at Now Go Create we’re proud to be more than a little bit geeky about creativity, defining it, practicing it, teaching it! And one of the things we often start with on our training is trying to align the group on how to talk about and define creativity. After all if you can’t agree what good is, how can you evaluate your own and others ideas or decide what to pursue or not? The first chapter of our founder Claire’s book is all about this topic and to say thanks for being here you can download the first chapter here In Your Creative Element chapter one
In this chapter we discuss:
- Research from some of the key thinkers in creativity, along with definitions to help inform your work and creative conversations.
- We share how companies like Google and Heineken use shared definitions to shape their work and my go-to definition. We’ll also look at factors beyond the rational, including serendipity
Creativity is a famously tricky thing to define.
As part of her Masters research and personal practice, Claire evaluated many definitions, asked business leaders and hundreds of professionals in our workshops for their thoughts on creativity. Here’s a selection:
Michael Acton Smith, Internet entrepreneur and Founder, Mind Candy says
“I think creative people are very curious and I think I am, too… I think that mindset of always being open and excited and looking at different things rather than being stuck in a rut (as many people are) exposes you to new ideas and you start to be able to connect the dots between different industries. That’s when the more creative things start to emerge” (Acton Smith, 2015).
“I believe creativity is simply letting the little things stirring inside you come out and play in the real world. Ideas, sentences, art, businesses, movements. Anything really. It’s giving space for things to emerge from you and through you, and then unleashing those things into the world” Matt Trinetti, Co Founder, The Escape School (2015).
Bruce Daisley, UK MD Twitter told me “creativity isn’t a skill it’s a practice” (2015).
“People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love… However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas” Dr Ed Catmull, President Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (2008).
“No organization is creative. People are creative, but the organization can foster or inhibit the creative by how work is conducted and how individual initiative is encouraged” NASA’s Jim Hodges, (2011).
Do you have your own definition?
Download the chapter and dive right in! Please contact us for more information on our creativity courses.