Creative Capers!
The key to creativity
I ONCE did an experiment way back when I was still struggling to prove to my examiners in college that I was not trying to get through examinations by sleeping over them.
The experiment involved two groups of people. One group comprised adults, some were my classmates, others were my long-suffering professors and there were several hapless parents who were press-ganged into taking part.
One parent was so obliging as to sacrifice his entire office staff to the experiment as I had sworn myself blue in the face that the entire experiment would not take more than half an hour.
The second group were the students of a primary school and comprised children between the ages of seven and ten. In both groups the gender distribution was about equal.
I gave each group a simple instruction after first having provided everyone with several foolscap sheets and writing implements. The instruction was to make `smiley' faces one after the other and fill the pages as much as they could.
The youth brigade got off to a headstart and barrelled on filling in half a page in less than three minutes. The adults went about their task steadily and were still at it twenty minutes later. All the children had given up within five minutes before they had completed even one side of one page. The adults had not only covered the three pages on both sides, several had asked for `extra' sheets and had filled those up too. It was the largest collection of smiley faces I had seen - or want ever to see.
The lesson from the experiment is that children have an attention span that is far less than that of adults who can go on doing the same thing over and over again till they dropped with exhaustion. The reason is not far to find. Why children gave up was because they got bored.
They were doing nothing new; the routine and uncreative task palled on them because after four minutes the lack of change and innovation began to tire them out mentally.
Adults, on the other hand, were comfortable with routine and were content not to think too much.
On close examination, it was significant that several children had begun changing the `smiley' they had originally drawn, in some case adding ears, horns and one child had actually transformed his `smiley' into a `frownie'!
With the adults, the smileys became clearer and more exact, closer to the large poster of one that was in front of them.
This was a possible indication of innovation on one hand and resistance to change on the other.
Many years later, when I became an HR facilitator, I found that most candidates who were applying successfully for jobs or were being considered for promotion were exceptionally creative and looked beyond the mundane and impressed their interlocutors and bosses.
Obviously creativity is an attribute that recruiters and bosses look at most favourably and is something that people need to develop in themselves so that they can actualise their potential.
For a long time I thought that creativity was not something that you could actually develop but that one was either born with it or without it.
Close observation over the years, mostly looking at the way creative people did things they did ,led me to see that others, if they were to do the same things, could develop their own creativity. Edward DeBono got it right when he said that this was possible if one approached a problem laterally instead of from only the established route.
It is important to become like the children in my experiment, and begin to find new ways to do things we were doing and see if we could do them better after the experiment.
The first step is to question everything: For instance, would we continue to write reports the way we do now if we had a paper shortage? If such were the case we would try and be more succint and brief, thereby using less paper - and people would have read it and asked for details if they wanted it - much as they do now even with several more sheets of details. Ergo, one might as well create slimmer reports and answer the same questions they would have anyway
Plan for scenarios both likely and unlikely: Imagine a situation! The world is at peace and you are struggling for existence in a viciously competetive market how do you create a need among people for your product? Then change it around and consider an epidemic or a tsunami, and imagine pushing your product despite it all. If you plan for unlikely eventualities, the chances are that you'll stay on top come what may
When salesmen are rewarded on the basis of their performance, why not reward managers on the basis of the performers he develops? A win-win situation for everybody
Give yourself a `space-out' time where you can do some crazy thinking. Use it to think of new ways to do things that you are doing. Faster perhaps, or change the process so that the work can be shared around differently and done better
Watching TV is educative, but watching it with the sound turned off and imagining the story is a great way to get those creative juices working. It becomes better if you you catch the re-run the next day with the sound on to see if you were right
When you go out to eat, give your favourite cuisine a miss and try something you have never tried before if you like it, good - try and make it at home if it is horrible it's actually better because you can figure out a stomach churning description of it and circulate the desription among your friends so that they can be warned off the place or, try and see how you can fix it to make it taste better
Try your hand at Sudoku and even jigsaw puzzles - without looking at the picture on the box. It might be frustrating at first but then your right brain kicks in and it will get easier because you'll start looking for shape fitment rather than picture fitment in a more creative way to solve such puzzles which will make you creative as well as carefully diligent
Try and design something you've never seen before: Something like a stage setting for a Japanese `Kabuki' style performance of the Sanskrit play `Mrichakatika'. You'll surprise yourself - because you'll have to read the play first and then understand the Kabuki style before adapting - hence, learning and innovation
Why all these crazy ways? The idea is that you get jolted out of your established paradigms, and think differently. Once you start thinking differently, you'll start doing things differently and not be `routinised' and boring.
You begin to metaphorically leap about the place, instead of plodding on like the rest of the crowd, numbed as they have become with years of mind-killing adulthood. Return to your youth where every day was a new day to discover new things and finding new ways to do them, and unleash your creativity - we all have it in us and make life fun again.
ARMITY GAUR
faqs@cnkonline.com
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