Creativity

Personal creativity
Goethe's thoughts on creativity involve 4 key focus point: Edison's thoughts are:
 * 1) Use subjectivity, embrace the things around you and see them as a pulse to incorporate them.
 * 2) Carpe diem, Use the right moment, let them rest, and follow your pleasure.
 * 3) Persistency, Stay tuned and polish your ideas (40 years to write Faust)
 * 4) Protect your creativity, when thinking, remove distractions, negativity and unjustified criticism
 * 1) Comprehend the problem. In a group, everyone must understand the problem the same way.
 * 2) Contest, talk with people who think differently.
 * 3) Change your perspective continuously, don't be satisfied with your first idea.
 * 4) Check, stay tuned, experiment, and persistent

The Creability diamond
Diamond is a rare, valuable gem that appears under high pressure. Like creative ideas. This is where the Creability diamond framework makes sens.

The 5C
Clarify: Make sure you really understand the subject, and how to check its resolution.

Change: Can we look at the problem in a different way? "What is we were trying to make things worse"

Check: make sure that your assumptions are right and you are actually solving the issue. Ask experts for example. Are you overlooking anything?

Challenge: Change the perspective and look at the problem in a different way. "The customer is not ready to pay more, Ok how can we change the product so our client is ready to pay more".

Combine: Try to combine different ideas or combine with ideas from previous projects, teams, fields, etc.

Stage II: produce
This is a stage were the goals is to generate as many ideas as possible

The 635-method.
You ask 6 persons to generate 3 ideas for 5 minutes. You can repeat the process several times in a row to generate a lot of ideas. It works using the following template:

After a full circle, you get your sheet back and mark the top 3 ideas in your sheet. Or you can use post it for all ideas and cluster them. The cluster with the most idea is ether a burning issue or common ideas that everybody has. The lonely ideas are either impossible or real breakthroughs.

The downsides, very analytical, work on small groups. The upsides, produce refine ideas.

SCAMPER:
Scamper is an acronym that helps to make sure you are not overlooking anything.

Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Rearrange or reverse.

The best way is to use once again a table where you list all attributes in a row and letters in columns. For example, in the case of McDonald's, attributes are menus, food, drinks, tables, etc.

Then you can only focus on 1 attribute or be more open. Because there are strong overlaps between letters, the goal is not to fill all the tables but just the relevant boxes. It is more efficient to do it individually and then share it with the rest of the group.

Reframing Matrix
You put your question/problem in the middle of 4 boxes. Each box refer to Product, plannin, Potential and people. Then you move from 1 boxe to another and list all the difficulties that relate.

Part III: Check your idea

Use Iteration Spiral in Duo. It is a 3 round back and forth game where on generate an idea and someone challenge it 3 times. Everytime, you can make a comeback with additional benefits or counter point.

Dot-mocracy: you vote for the best idea in a set of proposed solutions

How, Now, Wow, use a 2 scale framework based on easyness to implement and originality.

Motivating creativity in organizations (Teresa M.Amabile)
Organizations' creativity is the combination of individuals' creativity and work environment.

Work environment
The work environment has the capacity to boost or hinder innovation. The organization must be willing to innovate, allocates the corresponding resources, and implements the correct management practices.

If the organization is willing to innovate, it should put a value on innovation and creativity and be more risk-taker. The communication should foster open and active communication, rewards creative work and fairly evaluate projects (including failures). There should be a sense of pride and enthusiasm about what they are capable of doing while pursuing an offensive strategy of taking a leap toward the future. Finally, turf battles, destructive criticism, strict control of management, excess of procedures will undermine creativity.

In terms of resources, the company needs to provide knowledge, training, expertise, time, material, and funds.

Management practices include the capacity to set clear goals while allowing procedural autonomy. The company needs a supportive environment based on clear planning, supportive feedback from supervisors, good communication and enthusiasm for the work of individuals as well as groups. Group dynamics are positively influenced by diversity, effective communication, mutual support, constructive challenge and commitment to the task.

Individual-level
On the individual level, creativity is influenced by expertise, creativity skills, and task motivation. The expertise included knowledge, technical proficiency and any special talent relevant to the task. Creative skills or creative thinking involve the capability of taking new perspectives on problems and using new cognitive paths.

Finally, task motivation is about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic is far more powerful than extrinsic, as it allows people to draw skills from other domains or apply effort to acquire the needed skills. Extrinsic rewards can have negative effects, they can motivate persons to do the task just to get the reward. The higher the initial intrinsic motivation, the lower the risk of negative extrinsic effect. Furthermore, extrinsic in a form of positive feedbacks or the allocation of additional resources may boost intrinsic motivation. Finally, the timing of extrinsic rewards is important.