Creativity | Are you Creative enough for the future?

Creativity | If you’re able to connect the dots with seemingly disparate information, and throw all the ideas together to present something ‘new’, then you are a creative person…Quote from 10 Job Skills You’ll Need in 2020 and Beyond1

Creativity – quoted as one of the top 10 skills we must have to thrive in the future…

many would feel that creativity is a skill exuded more by people who are in the field of arts and music.  However, in my work that has involved corporate individuals, business owners, and even proud homeowners, creativity is more of the ability and willingness to try something new to resolve a problem or situation.

Seen from this perspective, it is easy to understand why many regard this as a crucial skill to survive in the future.  In fact, in a Jan 2019 LinkedIn learning blog titled “Why Creativity is the Most Important Skill in the World2” Paul Petrone wrote that Creativity was the top soft skill companies needed the most from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph determined at that point in time.

Why is Creativity important in the future?

With that many articles written on the advent of robots, AI, Machine-learning replacing more process-oriented jobs,  the jobs that “fit” or remain where human-beings will triumph will no doubt be of a nature that requires the flexibility, creativity, and innovativeness of the human mind.   This skill where we need to learn to be open to see new ways of doing things and solving problems…new improved and better ways to communicate, connect, coordinate, etc will definitely push our boundaries especially when the disruptions brought about by the technological changes are rapid.

Can Creativity be developed?

Research has shown that to be Creative, one has to become Creative.  Many articles have been written on why traditional teaching methodologies like reading, lecturing, testing, and memorization do not help with creativity as this methodology focuses on providing answers in a linear step by step manner.   To be creative, we need to think and solve problems in a non-linear fashion.  However, it would be tough for most of us who have been brought up in this traditional system to be creative, to think out of the box, to think in a non-linear way…

There are also many courses and methods that have been shared on how one can become creative.  However, from my perspective, before one can become creative, one has to have clarity of our situation, our motivations, our strengths, our weaknesses, etc.

Mr. Tim Hamons, a visual thinking strategist and visual storyteller, has worked with over 100 organizations and leadership teams across a broad range of industries (including Healthcare, Tech, finance, consulting,) to clarify their challenges, navigate changes, and articulate future visions using maps, models and visual stories for over 25 years.  In a LinkedIn article: Visualize Your Value: Find Your Key Message in a Circle, Tim utilizes the Ikigai model in the article, through visualization to help us identify our core message and shows us how we can have better clarity of ourselves to take the first steps to be creative.  The following is a quote from the above-mentioned article:

Our brains have a bias toward complexity, yet at the same time, we value simplicity. We find pleasure in solving problems and making sense of the world around us. Efficiency and simplicity in solutions contain their inherent rewards.

The key is finding the balance between simplicity and complexity. That’s why diagrams such as these are attractive; they offer simplicity in the model, yet richness in our interaction and discovery through using the model.

 

Sign up as a client for free on CoporateTrainerConnect.com and connect with Tim Hamons.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. This article is part of the series from our newly launched corporatetrainerconnect.com platform where we help connect corporations to trainers in the region. You can now search, qualify and connect directly with your best-fit trainer on one single platform, saving you time and hassle. We aim to share the subject matter expertise of our qualified trainers on the corporatetrainerconnect.com platform through these articles.

Written by Janet Yung, founder of Trilogy People Performance Consultancy. We enable learning for businesses and individuals by bringing you programs, learning, and design delivery services, and technologies cum platforms, that will aid you and your team to build skills and be ready for current and future business needs.

References:

1. The 10 Skills You’ll Need By 2020 (And Beyond), July 12, 2016, Vivien Luu, https://www.careerfaqs.com.au/news/news-and-views/the-10-skills-you-ll-need-by-2020-and-beyond
2. Why Creativity is the Most Important Skill in the World, January 1, 2019, Paul Petrone, https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/top-skills/why-creativity-is-the-most-important-skill-in-the-world