Creativity

CREATIVITY What makes a person creative? Certain characteristics – like a willingness to take risks, the ability to connect diverse ideas, and open-mindedness. Everyone has a creative potential. Understanding the characteristics you possess that boost your creativity and those that inhibit it can help you enhance your creative output in the workplace. Is creativity within everyone's grasp? Does creativity come naturally, or is this a skill that some learn and others don't? Creativity can flourish when cultivated with the right tools. How to maximize team creativity? Does diversity among team members help encourage creativity? Methods for fostering creativity include techniques such as brainstorming and role playing. Generating creative ideas can be exciting and stimulating especially during the initial stages of idea generation, when many adopt an 'anything goes' approach. Later, however, the workability of ideas needs to be verified. Ideas are more likely to be relevant when they have been assessed in the context of organizational needs, strategies, and resources. Some techniques that can help verify ideas are getting the opinions of key people and using simulations. Building on ideas continues the process of verifying ideas by helping to make those ideas clear, relevant, and feasible. How does one build on creative ideas? One should know when to use research and when to use simulations to check the workability of an idea.