Creativity is process of developing original ideas that have value. Innovation on the other hand is the process of putting new ideas into practice.
There exist a myth in our minds that “I'm not creative” and it was my mindset for a major part of my life too. But that's not true. Everyone has creative capacities. The challenge is to develop them. Its still like any other.
We just don't know how to be creative.
Creativity isn't about special activities. Creativity is possible in any activity that engages our intelligence.
Another misunderstanding creativity is about its essence. Being creative often involve playing with ideas and having fun. It's also about working hard on ideas and projects, crafting them into their best forms and making critical judgments along the way about which ones work best and why. In every discipline, creativity draws on skill, knowledge and control. It's not only about letting go, it's about holding on.
How it works?
Our physical configuration determines what we can perceive of the world. There are factors that affect what we do perceive. Human intelligence is not just process of perception but of selection. Otherwise there would be to much information coming in. We don't pay attention to everything, we notice just something.
The constitution of our bodies, senses, and off our brain deeply affects what we think about. It also affects how we think. our health, physical condition and appetites can deeply affect our states of mind.
We see the world not as it is, but through a veil of conceptions. The nature of our senses determines what we can perceive. People see same events differently. Our own view of what is going on is influenced by the ideas, values, and beliefs through which we interpret our experience. These affect what we actually do perceive and what we make of it all.
Culture affect it as well as language. As children grow into their cultures they absorb ways of thinking that are embedded in the particular languages they learn. In this way, languages play a central role in the growth of consciousness. Important as they are, words are not the only way in which we think.
Thinking about intelligence
People are so much more than either academic or non-academic. I am not arguing for an expanded conception of intelligence that includes but goes beyond them.
They may never know what they are capable of and who or what they might become. All these skills are fundamental to the vitality and sustainability of human life. Practical studies are not anything less than academic degree.
We all have profound natural capacities, but we all have them differently. If we fail to promote full sense of people's abilities through education and training, some, perhaps most, will never discover what their real capacities are. To that extent they do not really know who they are or what they might become. Now, more than ever, human communities friend on a diversity of talents not in a singular conception of ability. When we talk of realizing our potential, we should aim to do so in both senses of the word. We need to understand it's range and variety. We also need to turn it into reality. This is why creativity should be center stage in school, work and life.
So what is creativity? How does it work and how does it relate to intelligence?
Being creative involves doing something. They are creative in something.
I define creativity as process of having original ideas that have value. 3 key therms: process, original, value. Being creative involves two main processes that interweave with each other. The first is generative, the second is evaluative. There are many shifts between them. The quality of creative achievement is related to both.
In all creative processes we are pushing boundaries of what we know now, to explore new possibilities. Creativity doesn't always require freedom from constrains. A lot of creative work has to conform to a specific brief or set of conventions, and great work often comes from working within formal constrains. These do not inhibit the writers creativity, they set a framework for it.
“Creativity is a dialogue between the ideas and the media in which they are being formed.”
Creativity isn't only about generating ideas, it involves making judgements about them. It involves elaborating on the initial ideas, testing and refining then and even rejecting then in favor of others that emerge along the way. There can be dead ends, ideas and design that do not work.
You're just finding out what doesn't work.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake had never tried anything new.” A. Einstein
If you're not prepared to be wing, it is unlikely that you'll ever come up with anything original.
Generative thinking has to be given time to flower. At the right time and in the right way, critical appraisal is essential. At wrong point, it can kill an emerging idea. So timing is everything.
They need to understand that creativity moves through different phases and to have some sense where they are in the process. Not understanding this can make people think that they are not creative at all.
Creativity is about coming with new ideas. Do you have to come up with something no one has thought before? Common sense suggest no. A creative outcome can be original on different levels: for the person involved, for a particular community, for humanity as a whole.
Creative insights often occur by making unusual connections between things out ideas that have not previously been related. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.
In general though, creative development goes hand in hand with increasing technical facility with the instruments or materials that are being used.
Being creative is about speculating, exploring new horizons and using imagination. Facilitating creative development is about finding a balance between exploring new ideas and acquiring the skills to realize them.
General creativity
Original thinking is possible in anything we do.
“The questions we ask are as important as the answers we search for. Every question leads to particular lines of inquiry. Change the question and whole new horizons may open up to us. The true value of a generative idea is that it leads to new sorts of questions.” Edward de Bono.
We often focus separately on identifying and analyzing problems, generating solutions and evaluating the best options. They focus on giving positive rather than negatives responses to people's ideas and the value of sharing multiple points of view.
Personal creativity
In addition to general capacities for creative thinking, we all have unique talents and passions and our own personal creative potential. We each have skills and abilities that can be developed. It's personal dimension of creative achievement: the point where individual talent meets personal passion. It often comes from a love for particular materials. Discovering the right medium is often a tidal moment in the creative life of the individual.
Creative process can operate in all fields of human intelligence, it is about making dynamic connections, and the results are always in some way unique. It involves many different mental functions, combinations of skills and personal attributes.
We all have creative capacities but many people conclude that they're not creative when they haven't learnt and practiced what's involved. The capacity for creativity is essentially human and it holds the constant promise of alternative ways of seeing, of thinking and of doing.
Being creative is not only about thinking: it's about feeling.
Individual creativity is stimulated by the work, ideas and achievements of other people.
Our physical senses affect what we can perceive of the world but there are other factors that influence what we do perceive. Many of these factors are cultural.
Creativity environment
The task of creative leader is too facilitate that relationship between the external and internal cultures. The internal can be thought of as habits (patterns of everyday work) and habitats.
Creative leadership
The first role: to facilitate the creative abilities of every member of the organization.
The second role: to form and facilitate dynamic creative teams.
The third role: to protože a general culture of innovation.
A creative organization is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence. Where there are no stupid questions and no right answers. It is place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamics, the surprising, the playful.
Creativity in education
One of the roles of education is to broaden people's horizons, but it should also develop their personal talents and interests.
Alongside any common curriculum, there have to be opportunities for students to go more deeply into areas that interest them particularly and to pursue different sorts of career options.
When education connects with the world beyond school, young people can achieve remarkable things.
There is a difference between teaching through creativity and teaching for creativity. Good teachers know that their role is to engage and inspire their students. Teaching for creativity is about facilitating other people's creative work. It involves asking open-ended questions where there may be multiple solutions, working in groups on collaborative projects, using imagination to explore possibilities, making connecting between different ways of seeing, and exploring the ambiguities and tensions that may lie between them. Teaching for creativity involves teaching creatively. There are three related tasks on teaching for creativity: encouraging, identifying and developing.
ATP
For a long time i've been thinking about me as a non-creative person. I was just admiring others around me and what they were able to do. I thought that i don't have imagination good enough for that. But now i realize a new things:
· It's ability like any other, so it can be practiced
· I just haven’t discover the right medium and i also need to master him
· Creativity has a lot of different forms, maybe I'm not performing in the classical ones but that doesn't mean i'm not creative at all.
Thank to this book i have broaden my understanding of creativity and of the processes it involves. I also connected two processs of creativity - generative and evaluative with two phases of dialogue – convergent and divergent. Thank to that and knowledge from this book i realized now much is dialogue creative technique or how much it supports creativity. I also understand how much our environment affects us and our creativity. Creativity is so much more than how do people
perceive it in today's world. It's essential for our lives and we should definitely work with it even in schools which we don’t associate with creativity now not at all.
