The Creativity Factor

CREATIVITY SPECIAL | by CELESTE TELL

I’M ALWAYS BLOWN AWAY BY PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY AREN’T CREATIVE. As if creativity is a rare and elusive anomaly.

“I can’t draw a straight line,” they might say. Where is it written that drawing a straight line is the functional equivalent of creativity?

There are many theories of creativity, but my three favorites (at the moment anyway) come from Sir Kenneth Robinson, Milenko Matanovic and Daniel Pink.

Sir Kenneth Robinson is someone I have admired for many years. He says that “creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before.” I call this “connecting the dots”. Think dumpster chic, fire hoses into hip handbags or homes insulated with old jeans. OK, the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

My friend Milenko Matanovic speaks of creative tension as the “interplay of the actual and the possible” — and the holding of that space with courage, humor and vision. I think of this as the fertile environment where creativity happens. Think arts incubators, cultural entrepreneurship and sustainable business innovation.

In his book, “A Whole New Mind”, Daniel Pink explores the territory of right-brain thinking and teaches us to nurture and strengthen those skills that are the individual elements of creativity — inventiveness, storytelling, synthesis, empathy, play and meaning. Think everything. Everywhere. All the time.

So the next time you think you don’t have a creative bone in your body, think again. And just forget about even trying to draw a straight line.