Truth 9: Creativity is a Process not Accident

Creativity is thought of as a gift to only selected few and these are the people whoa re thought to be creative and no one else. However this is not the case. Creativity is a process and yes it can be learned. It needs consistency to learn it and although learning it is no doubt a difficult thing but once done, you will be able to soon master this process.

To be creative, first of all, you should develop a habit of looking at the things in a logical way and try to create links between the events and facts surrounding you. By events and facts we don't mean that you have to look into your area of interest only but you have to work on the general knowledge of yours and get yourself familiarized with new fields. After all what is creativity? It is the mix and match of old ideas. so if you have a broader knowledge base it is going to help you in your creative thinking process.

When you become good at collecting the knowledge and creating links between these facts, the very same facts which seemed a hurdle become the building blocks of creativity. In one of my earlier blogs i mentioned that if you want to be creative never think that the first solution to a problem is the best one but try to find alternatives. Same is the case with creativity.

When you start learning this process, you will learn a lot of ideas. Try to collect as many ideas as you can but do not try to judge one of them as the best one. When you will have a bunch of ideas, you will realize that your ideas are almost same in terms of potential and there is no single best.

At this time, take sometime off, enjoy a drink and get in touch with your social circle. Your head will get cleared out and you will unconsciously match the pool of ideas and bring yourself the most amazing idea standing apart from the previous ideas.

Since this process can be learned so it can get better with the passage of time and with the practice of this process.      

Truth 8: Better to Ask Forgiveness than Permission

When i was going through this truth, I found it more related to the organizational level than related to an innovator at individual level. The author is of the view that since asking for permissions takes a lot of time and following the standard procedures will delay the innovation hence its better to try new things and if they workout no body is going to ask about the formal procedures but if it does not, then there is always room for forgiveness.

As rightly put, the rules are meant to be broken or at least bent according to the need of the hour. however, i think if the organization is too much rigid then there is not going to be any innovation at the first place and if there are some departments doing that even then they will be afraid of policies and hence the fruits of innovation could not be tasted in full potential.

Why is are employees afraid of bending or breaking the rules? The first reason argued is that people love to have authority and whenever there is a breach to their authority, most of them want to make a good example out of that for others in the organization. Such authoritative behaviour leads to the problems and hence people become afraid of doing anything new on their own. 

No body wants to push their own comfort zone in normal circumstances and hence people do not want to challenge the existing rules. Instead, they try to change themselves according to the rules. Since change is a phenomena which is resisted so much hence the door to innovation in most of the organizations remain closed.

The solution to above two problems lies in skunkworks and bootlegging. Skunkworks are the teams of those people who are natural rule breakers and hence they are organized in a team by the organization itself and free to work in the way they want to. this keeps harmony in rest of the team and also there is innovation is going on in the organization. Bootlegging means that organizations, in way challenge the employees that the offer organization has brought on the table, if they can make it even better, it would be recognized and hence motive people in the organization to work towards a better future for the organization.  

If the above two solutions are part of your organization then its great, otherwise its better to ASK FORGIVENESS THAN PERMISSION