Creativity is too often linked to being a genius, a wizard capable of creating spectacles and charming the crowd. A almost demi-god persona which some have and most don’t. Those some are blessed and others are good to be audiences and admirers. But this is not what a Creative Thinker is.
Creativity is often wrongly understood as a personality type, an innate trait that some are born with. All of this is true but what is often ignored and not celebrated enough is that creativity is a skill that can be imbibed, practiced and inculcated. And the Imagination Age (Insert the link to the blog on The Imagination age) creativity is almost a must-have for survival and stand out of the large amounts of ideas and knowledge churned out by the machines.
A creative person is seen and identified as an artist, a designer, the “ideas person” in the room but this framing is heavily inaccurate and also dangerous in the Imagination Age . This framing is not just inaccurate. In the Imagination Age, it is dangerous and I say this because in the current times with technology and machines churning out solutions to every problem, it is important to do the following two things: be curious to identify the real problem than be driven by the apparent discomfort and unease to label it as the real problem and secondly a creative thinker will be able to assess the solutions given the machines, and consolidate the various responses to create a comprehensive solution.
Creative thinkers question and not to simply oppose or challenge but constructively questioning to the ambiguity and assumptions before generating solutions. They can be curious much longer than what is comfortable for most people. They probe and ask the, ‘so what’ a few more times than everyone else to table the missing perspective , emotion or situation in the problem being discussed. A creative thinker is adept at cutting through the articulations to deal with the underlying issue and so they can narrate a story off a data set and then present a strategy to contextualise it.
Emphasis on creation and generation is also an overemphasised trait for being a creative thinker but what goes under discussed is their being a keen observer and recognising identifying to train the intuition and senses to generate faster and better. The fundamental point being discipline. Creativity is not the absence of structure. It is the willingness to build a new one when the existing one stops working.
At MICA, we believe communication is the primary site of creative thinking. The way you frame an idea, sequence an argument, or choose a metaphor, are all acts of imagination and not just stylistic choices.
