My Views on Creativity

Creativity. Wikipedia says “Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created.” Dictionary.com says “Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like and to create meaningful ideas, forms, methods, interpretations etc.; originality, progressiveness or imagination.” And if I search really extensively, I can probably get numerous other versions of how creativity is defined. This is because creativity is not an exact science. It is one of those things that cannot be limited to the confines of a definition but can mean so much and so many different things for different people. An inventor’s idea, a comedian’s joke, a writer’s story, an artist’s painting, and a musician’s music – all portray creativity. But these are some of the traditional examples, things that can be either readily seen or heard or read. A new approach to an old problem, being able to extract new information from simple data, handling a situation when you kill two birds with one stone – these are some of the less conspicuous but equally relevant portrayals of creativity.

 People are inherently creative, to varying degrees of course, but nonetheless creative. Even a three year old child knows how to manipulate his parents to woo them into playing his favorite cartoon on television. Some can physically create something and for some, it’s a part of their thought process. I see myself belong to the second category. The most recent example that comes to mind is ‘cracking the cases’ while preparing for consulting interviews. It requires a certain combination of creative and logical thinking to be able to come up with a solution in a limited amount of time; and which like music, art or writing gets better with practice. And not surprisingly enough, there are bouts of extreme creativity at one time to absolute blankness at others. External factors play a huge role in shaping the thought process and that’s why a music piece created when happy sounds ‘happier’ than a music piece created when upset. I would like a share one of the most creative piece of art done my dear friend Archana. A painting which portrays one of the Hindu goddess name ‘Kali’. I believe creativity is inborn when it comes to art.

Individual creativity may or may not translate into organizational creativity. Though at an organizational level, it can be a part of the work culture, the presence of which may result in huge successes and the lack of which in ultimate failure. Given the excessive competition in any and every industry, innovation leads to competitive advantage and we all know what that can do for the organization. When I worked at Dell this summer, I could truly see why this company succeeded in the first place – through its innovative supply chain management processes. I can write another entire blog on this one. Going forward, when a new direction is required for the company to change its practice and remain competitive, they are not afraid to go private. When it is practiced at work, it is engraved in the daily routine and becomes a part of being.

Even when working as a team, in a group, creativity starts with an individual. With someone who asks a simple question, someone trying to find a solution for a problem, someone who doesn’t want to stick to status quo and wants to do things faster, smarter and profitably. It may need reinforcements in terms of complements but still, it takes one creative individual to start the bandwagon rolling. Innovations begets innovation and there, we have a creative group in an organization. Let’s take a very simple example. A team of engineers designing the latest chip for Intel microprocessor. This is definitely a result of most creative minds at work and the goals are achieved by leveraging every individual’s skillset to achieve a common objective for the organization.  

I would like to now elaborate on a situation where I used my creative hat at work – After graduating from my undergraduate degree; I started my career as a business consultant with a large Enterprise Resource Process implementer. All new recruits had to go through an intense three week training program. It was really hard for me, to sit in the same room day after day listening to senior consultants explain the system. Surprisingly the senior consultants were not happy either. They had no time to train us during their normal working hours, which meant the tasks related to their projects were being affects, which translated to very unhappy clients. I saw a bottle neck here, and I suggested an idea - digitalize the entire training process - to the top management. They were happy with the idea and asked me to implement it.

The process I followed were

-          I divided and allocated the different training materials amongst the senior consultants.

-          Each of them was asked to record the process, for example – record the process of creating a customer order using free software called i-demo. Once the recordings were completed, they were able to edit them and also add comments if required.

-          I then converted these recordings into flash video files and stored them in a database which all the employees had access to.

-          New recruits are now trained for 2 weeks, of which one week involved senior consultants lecturing and the other week was a self-studying process using these recordings.

-          Not only did this idea reduce the training time, but it had other benefits too. If a consultant from finance wanted to learn about a process in distribution, he/she could access these recordings to help. Even the clients started using these videos to help them learn about modules.

Unfortunately, most of my innovative thinking happens only when it is not required by a competitionJ. For example, if someone said come up with a brilliant idea during a competition, it just does not happen with me.

Sadly with the current education system, numbers are given a heavy weightage. But in the real world, is that what matters? I personally believe the education system needs a change. Instead of having classes based on notes, students should be allowed to practice and innovate in the real world. During engineering, I was taught so many theories of transistors, but instead if I was taught to build circuits using transistors I would have been much more skilled.

Is creativity important for everyone to have? For sure, without creativity, there would be no mac, televisions, and laptops. Not surprisingly, this could be a reason why most successful entrepreneurs ended up being college drop outs.  So why not educate students to be creative and change the entire system?