1. What are you personal experiences with individual creativity? Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?
My experiences with individual creativity have been mixed since there are specific areas that I feel I am able to think more creatively and others I am not.
For example, I feel especially uncreative in the areas of drawing, singing, or decorating my home. Even if I practiced singing or drawing every day I would not become good or great, but if I started reading more home decoration magazines and visited consignment shops, antique shops and paid attention when I visited people’s homes I think I would get more ideas which would make me better.
I feel especially creative when I am asked to solve a business problem that does not have a correct answer or when I am walking through scenarios or when I am thinking about the best and worst possible outcome for a situation. I also feel creative when I am thinking about technology solutions that do and do not exist today.
2. What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity? Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?
I have been working in consulting since 2001 and I have always felt like the consulting environment has offered me the opportunity to be very creative. Because I have had the opportunity to work at and assess business problems at 30+ companies I feel like I have a diverse set of experiences that allows me to practice the art of bricolage. We studied bricolage in Professor McDaniel’s Managing Complexity and studied the theory behind not having the resources readily available to you that you would normally have or being in a new situation but being able to pull ideas from all of your past situations to make a decision. The bricolage is enabled by a diverse set of experiences as well as being constrained by your situation.
I have consulted at Kaiser Permanente, United HealthCare, PacifiCare and I felt like the environment at all 3 of them was especially uncreative. I also had the same feeling while visiting a friend at Lockheed Martin. I believe that there are particular industries that do not lend themselves very much to creativity because they are interacting with safety-critical systems or procedures on a daily basis so it is often not possible to improvise or think out-of-the-box especially if someone’s life may be at risk.
safety-critical system: A computer, electronic or electromechanical system whose failure may cause injury or death to human beings.
When I was consulting at PacifiCare, I was conducting an assessment of their people, processes and systems. While interviewing a claims adjuster, I asked her a question about why she did her job a particular way since it seemed that she could save time and process twice as many claims if I modified her work instructions. She told me that she didn't know why she did her job that particular way and that she just followed the manual. She proceeded to explain to me the concept of hospice and the implications of her making an error when reviewing the claim from the hospice provider could lead to a terminally ill person getting kicked out of hospice.
On the other hand when I was at Google, Yahoo! and Intel I felt that the environment was particularly creative. At Google people are allowed to carve out 20% of their work week to work on personal projects which helps facilitate creativity. Three start-ups have emerged from these personal projects include Ooyala, Aardvark, and FriendFeed. At Yahoo! it was very common for people to take a 2 hour lunch to work out or breaks to play ping pong or volleyball outdoors so I felt the culture allowed for relaxation or personal time that it allowed for clearer thinking when you were working. At Intel people are given paid sabbaticals and it is common for people to come back from sabbatical energized and with out-of-the-box ideas that often times turn into very profitable ideas.
3. Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself? And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?
I think as an individual I am capable of being creative by myself, meaning that I understand and own the ideas and the thoughts and outputs that resulted from my creativity, however I don't think I would be able to think creatively if I didn't have external influences. If I didn't read every day and talk to people from school, co-workers, x-clients, friend from undergrad or relatives from home I wouldn't have a basis to develop my ideas or thoughts. Also, I wouldn't have a sounding board to bounce my ideas or thought off of so it would significantly hinder my creative ability if all of the external resources were not available.
I believe a group within an organization is capable of being creative. For example, classmates Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded the file-syncing service Dropbox to stop digital chaos. They were getting tired of carrying around USB drives and external hard drives to and from school and work. They were part of an organization, MIT and were students who had a problem with misplacing their devices as well as exceeding the device size since they were programmers and stored memory intensive files. They were also annoyed with having to transfer files from device to device so they decided to solve the problem by writing file-synching code.
I also think that sometimes group think hinders creativity, especially when the group of people within the organization are homogenous. Sometimes it takes an outsider to be able to solve a problem because they are not tainted with the ideas or rules that the rest of the group is operating under.
4. What do you think about this article and the way this author describes different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes? Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?
I think that the author did an excellent job in describing the different process and methods a person uses to creatively solve problems. However, whether a person consciously uses what he describes as the “moment-of-insight or nose-to-the-grindstone” problem solving methods, ultimately the success rate increases with exposure, education and open-mindedness to people and life. The exposure to different people, ideas and experiences allows a person see a problem from different perspectives, and thus come up with a solution by “connecting the different dots.” I don’t believe that we should trust ourselves to know a point in time when one approach will work better for a particular problem. This could lead to simply wasting time by focusing on one method. I believe we should be open-minded and try both approaches when we feel “stuck” or like we are “hitting the wall.”
This reminds of a time when I spent many hours trying to solve a coding problem for a computer science class. I was tired and frustrated after trying different methods to no avail. I gave up and decided to go to sleep. However, my mind kept thinking about the problem and at some point in the middle of the night, when I was more relaxed, I came up with a solution. I got up at 4:00am and implemented the solution to my computer program to much of my delight.
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