creativity

The other day I received a downright inspirational email from my friends at IndieGoGo, a site dedicated to the collaborative funding of ideas. (Here’s a short video of my friend Slava Rubin, co-founder of the company.) The missive pointed to a video featuring 9 year old Jackie Evancho a rising America’s Got Talent star who belts out To Where You Are.

When children first start to draw we teach them to colour in between the lines. We reward accuracy rather than interpretation. Neatness, not expression. This says a lot about our own predispositions. In this short but insightful interview, Seth Godin talks about an education system characterised by an industrial model from an industrial era.

Want to boost your creativity by investing a quarter or so? Buy a lightbulb. Not the fancy LED, halogen, or compact fluorescent variety – just the old-fashioned, cheap incandescent kind that come in four-packs for a buck or so. Skeptical? Read on…

In a world of new economics, perpetual change, and reduced latency, it goes without saying how important creativity is right now to every organisation on the planet. IBM's survey of 1,500 global CEO's identified creativity as the number one 'leadership competency' of the future. When we think of creativity at an individual level we think of moments of inspiration, big ideas, free-flowing associations, uninhibited thinking.

This article has actually been sitting as a draft for a few months now. I knew I wanted to write a follow up to the popular (49 comments at the time of writing!) Design Thinking is Killing Creativity, however I held off, as I wanted to have some time to hear your feedback as well as look at the fall out of Design Thinking all over the Internet.

Popular psychology simplifies the different functions of our brain hemispheres by using “left brain” to indicate analytical thinking and “right brain” to mean creativity and emotion. That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s a useful shorthand. In The Luxury Strategy, authors J. N. Kapferer and V. Bastien emphasize the need for a management team that has both characteristics.

You would have heard everyone’s jaw drop after I mentioned this on Twitter over the weekend.

A fellow designer and I were discussing this in detail and jointly came to this conclusion with much disappointment. It was quite a significant conclusion and likely to be correct, as not only are we both in positions in managing design processes and teams; we are also in positions to shape and influence design centric business strategies.

In the era of the social Web -- when it's possible to tweet, blog or status update every miniscule fact of one's life -- it's fashionable to opine that every personal detail and inner thought should be made public. After all, if you're not going to do it, someone else will. But just how far should you let people peek inside your creative process?