Creativity seems to be one of those buzz words we float around in business and education, but what exactly is creativity and how does one successfully develop it?
Harvard professor, David Perkins, identified six common traits of creative people. These six traits, referred to as the Snowflake Model of Creativity are present in varying degrees in all creative people.
Successful Creatives have:
- A strong commitment to a personal aesthetic. Creators have a high tolerance for complexity, disorganization, and asymmetry. They enjoy the challenge of struggling through chaos and struggling toward a resolution and synthesis.
- The ability to excel in finding problems. Scientists value good questions because they lead to discoveries and creative solutions, to good answers.
- Mental mobility allows creative people to find new perspectives on and approaches to problems. Creative people have a strong tendency to think in opposites or contraries. They often think in metaphors and analogies and challenge assumptions as a matter of course.
- A willingness to take risks and the ability to accept failure as part of the creative quest. These people also exhibit the ability to learn from their failures. By working at the edge of their competence, where the possibility of failure lurks, mental risk-takers are more likely to produce creative results.
- Creative people not only scrutinize and judge their ideas or projects, they also seek criticism. Objectivity involves more than luck or talent; it means putting aside your ego, seeking advice from trusted colleagues, and testing your ideas.
- The last trait is that of inner motivation. Creators are involved in an enterprise for its own sake, not for school grades or paychecks. Their catalysts are the enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.
Howard Gardner describes the early years of our childhoods as the "Golden Age of Creativity". He observes that a five to seven year old child "sings while drawing, dances while singing, tells stories while playing." Some of us maintain this creative mode throughout our lifetimes, others discover it later in life, and still others have completely lost track of it.
How about you-how creative are you? What do you do to re-ignite and unleash your creative powers? What lessons can be learned from children?
Photo on Flickr by Buddymaxx50
