Creative Strategies for Change

• Creativity-squelching preconceptions/misconceptions

Creativity has to do with genius, and you either have it or don’t have it.
Creativity requires inspiration.
Creative work is about great insights and breakthroughs.
Creative work is unreliable because it is neither logical nor sequential.
Creative work produces “soft” solutions, not efficient, effective results.
Creative work is impossible without adequate resources.
Playfulness is not a part of serious work.

• Creativity keys (facts confirmed by research)

Ideational fluency — the ability to generate many possible answers or solutions is essential to generating successful creative strategies.
Balance logic with analogic — creativity becomes possible only when analogical and logical thinking are both active in a dynamic tension.
Intrinsic motivation — creative results are possible only when one is motivated to engage in a process by internal personal reasons. Another term for this is “internal locus of control” — one experiences the choice to engage as self-generated.

• A creative solution becomes more likely:

the longer it is worked on (with breaks along the way)
the more variable the thought trials
the greater the number of people working on it independently
the more heterogeneous the group of individuals working on it
the less the initial time pressure

• Creativity killers

Expectation of evaluation
Fear of failure
Surveillance
Deadlines imposed before innovative work has gestated
Working predominantly for extrinsic rewards
Demand for immediate results
Single right answer thinking
“Satisficing,” grabbing the first workable solution
A working environment that is not experienced as “safe enough”

• Attributes of creative people

They are willing to make mistakes. They recognize that creativity begins in failure.
They actively notice the anomalous, finding delight in the new, the different, and in slight changes in norms.
They are fascinated with the relationship between parts and wholes in systems and situations.
They have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to not-know for a while as they seek answers.
They have a taste for appreciating the complexity of things balanced by a drive toward simplest, most elegant, expression of things.
They are good problem identifiers, an ability deemed more critical than good problem-solving skills.
They are not distracted by the tension that appears between various polarities during the creative process.
They have an active appreciation for beauty in its many manifestations.
They are independent in their judgment and value that quality highly; they tend to challenge assumptions.
They are deeply dedicated, steeped in their field, and yet curious to think outside it—they are given to making connections between the two.
They are flexible in their processes, knowing when to persist in a strategy and when to nimbly change their strategies toward reaching a goal.
They hold a conviction that their judgment of things can be trusted.
They ask effective questions and appreciate the quality of questions.

• The Six Ingredients of Creativity as a Human Resource
(Results of a study at Chevron in the 1980s)

- Recognizing patterns
- Making connections
- Taking risks
- Challenging assumptions
- Taking advantage of chance
- Seeing in new ways

• The key aspects in nurturing creativity in others:

creating a conducive environment
regular provocation (stimulation)
consistent encouragement

• Two kinds of thinking:
creative engagement requires a balance of the two.

Practical                              Imaginative
logic                                   analogic (metaphoric mind)
reason                                 multiple modes of knowing
precision                             approximation
consistency                         impulses
certainty                             ambiguity
deduction                           intuition
work                                   play
serious                                humorous
reality-based                     imaginative
direct                                 diffuse
focused                                multidirectional
analysis                               hunch, intuition
specific                               generalized
“tunnel”                               “web”
discussion                           dialogue

• Some reasons we naturally incline toward creative work:

The natural tendency of the mind to take liberties, to play with, what is real; often done in less conscious ways.
The natural drive to change things, to reorder the world to make it conform more to our wishes and sensibilities.
Wanting to make a difference; enhanced by a natural appreciation of things others have made that prove a person’s efforts count. Also called the cosmological motive—to make stuff, to make sense, to make worlds, to make the world a better place.
Satisfaction, the result of completing any intrinsically-motivated project, is pleasurable, one of the deepest rewards humans get.
Many humans are inherently optimistic, and creativity is an irrepressible impulse from the optimistic attitude.
We like to play with, test boundaries. We have exhausted the opportunities or solutions within the boundary.
There are many other arguments made from spiritual, religious, evolutionary, and psychological perspectives.

• Essential Questions, some characteristics

- Non-judgmental, open-ended (have many possible correct answers)
- Answerable on more than one level
- Productively focus an inquiry
- Have an emotive force or intellectual bite

• Creativity in Nursing
From a study of nurses deemed to be creative by their supervisors. The following factors appeared universally in the full account of every incident of creativity:

1) a motivating situation (patient in distress)
2) a failure of the usual procedures to do any good
3) a deeply felt intrinsic motivation by the nurse to help the patient
4) an improvisation, including the unusual use of common objects
5) clever ways of distracting attention from painful procedures for the just the few moments needed to get them done
6) having an ally among the other nurses
7) occasionally having the courage to proceed counter to protocol (risking censure, especially from the MD in charge)

[Doctoral dissertation by Catherine R. Davis, The Lived Experience of Creativity in Nursing Practice, Adelphi University, Long Island, NY 1992]

I would distill those elements to read:
a novel problem
a failure of usual practices
intrinsic motivation
improvisation with new ideas
support
courage in risk-taking.

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