I was asked this question recently by a neuroscientist who is interested in conducting a study on creativity from a multi-disciplinary perspective. I spent a week contemplating the answer and this is what I came up with:
Creativity involves two processes: imaginative thinking, then producing or implementing that which you conceive. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. Which is more of a challenge? The ability to generate creative ideas, or the ability to act on them. When I observe organizations, it appears that for most, the greatest challenge is the ability to act.
What are your thoughts?
The thing that concerns me most is Franticness.
It seems to me that an unintended residue byproduce of the capitalist system is Franticness. The system itself constantly stimulates competition and unmet meeds which creates a kind of pervasive low great Franticness. The result is that we don’t’ have time to think and we don’t have time to feel and we don’t have time to think about how we feel. The result is an inablity to listen to the much softer inner voice which includes our intuition. We can still create from a place of Franticness but is what we are creating what we really want to put out in the world?
Allan Hunkin,
Speaker, Writer, Broadcaster
http://www.successtalk.com/hunkin
There is a an old Zen saying which states:”As a blade cannot cut itself, as a finger cannot touch itself, so a thought cannot see itself”. Thinking is crucial to help us survive, to organise our activity yet it does not seem to be the crucial factor in creativity. We have to allow the creaitve process to blossom and this seems to be an emotional flowering. If we can let the Deeper feelings out to play, then the mind can do its busy stuff and then later make things, one way or another. It can be difficult for us serious grown-ups to give oursleves permission to play.
The act of creativity needs discipline : to be able to generate a lot of fresh ideas, to assess without bias and then to be able to choose the best out of the lot. After this the process of implementing this idea also requires persistence, patience and ability to convince the stakeholders. Most of us are in a hurry to finish things and this discipline does not come naturally to us.