I was talking to someone earlier today about creativity and the need for creative ideas to drive innovation to enable us to solve difficult problems like climate change and achieving the SDG goals..
I was surprised when he said, that he was not the creative type and that he finds it really difficult to come up with creative ideas and so avoids participating in brainstorming sessions..
I strongly and fully believe that we are all born creative and
“Deep inside us, creative ideas are already there! We just need to let them surface!”
Mukesh Gupta
This requires us to be a bit less critical of ourselves and a bit more vulnerable with our peers.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that we create a culture where people feel that it is ok to be vulnerable and share their ideas openly and candidly, irrespective of how brilliant or not the idea is.
A lot of times, brilliant ideas come through when we combine facets of different ideas from different sources. And as a leader, we need to learn to create and hold the space for this to emerge and when this seems stuck, to be able to remove the roadblocks that keep our teams stuck.
In conclusion, I will only say that creative ideas are abundant. Fully formed, brilliant ideas may be in short supply. Our obsession with brilliant, billion dollar ideas blinds us from the very things that can help us come up with them.
Let us allow the free flow of creative ideas and then mine the brilliance out of them.
PS: I did deliver a masterclass on how to be creative on-demand, which you can watch here.
