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There is a lot of buzz around creativity now. Business school have MBA concentrations on it. This may seem strange to many who think creativity just happens. Not true creativity requires nurturing and care. It is easy to squelch. And it is done all the time. It is squelched most often because it is not understood. Like so many things that are not well known there are several myths that surround creativity. Here are 6.

1. Only certain people or types of people are creativity. This is absolutely untrue. We are most likely to think there certain jobs attract creativity types and certain jobs do not.  Jobs like product development, marketing and advertising have creative people while accounting does not.  The reality is, nearly all of the research in this area agrees, anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing creative work. Creativity depends on things like: experience, knowledge and technical skills; and intrinsic motivation i.e.  people who are excited by their work are often creative.
2. Money Motivates Creativity. Experiments show that bonuses and pay for performance can actually have a negative impact on creativity. The reason is that when people believe that ever move they make is being watched and will impact their paycheck they be more risk averse. But money can be a de-motivater. If people feel they are not being fairly compensated they will also have reduced creativity. Again the research indicates that people put far more value on an environment were creativity is supported, valued and recognized.
3. Time Pressure Increase Creativity. Often people will say they are more creative when they are under pressure. The research indicates just the opposite. They only think they are more creative. They are not. In fact the research indicates not only are they not more creative while under the time pressure. Creativity is reduced for the next two days.
4. Fears Force Breakthroughs Again the research indicate that the emotional state we are in effects our creativity. In fact it can often be a predictor. If someone is happy, joyful, feeling loved etc. The next day they will be more creative.  If that person feels anxiety, sadness, anger, etc. The next day they will be less creative.
5. Competition Enhances Creativity. It is widely held that competition between 2 of more teams will produce more creative results. The facts are that it is collaboration not competition that increase creativity. Once the competition begins information is no longer shared. And without the sharing of information ideas are not debated and refined.
6. Streamlining or Right Sizing Forces the Organization to be Creativity. There are some concrete reasons why creativity is reduced. Line of communication between organizations have be severed and need to be rebuilt. Teams have been destroyed. And need to be regenerated. But there are also the less tangible areas. When people feel fear they are less creativity and less productive. The worse of all situation is knowing the cuts are coming but not knowing how each individual is effected prolongs the anxiety.

The research sited here was conducted in 2004 by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School

How do you become more creative? The answer is simple. Are you ready? Practice! Yep! That’s it. Sorry no magic spells with this one. You just have to keep trying.

There is a great debate as to rather or not creativity can be taught. If something has been done then there should be no doubt it can be done. I believe creativity can be taught because it has been taught, thus proving the thesis. The debate is really over rather some people are naturally more creative than others. It is the classic nature versus nurture debate.

Creativity is an art but that does not mean that it does not have rules and guidelines to follow that allow us to be better at it just as all other forms of art do. There are technique and tools can be taught to allow people to be better than they were before. And some people learning the skill is easier that with other people. But the skill can still be and has been taught.

There is some innovation training available but after learning how you will not suddenly be creative. After being taught how to play the clarinet, I could actually make music with the instrument rather than just annoying squawking noises. But it was only through practice I became any good at it. Practice also plays a important role in being creativity. Like other art forms you improve the more you try. I was never, what you would call really good at playing the clarinet. I was just too lazy to practice the amount of time that being good required. But I was pretty good. Today, however, I can barely play the instrument at all. Why? I have not practiced in a very long time. Playing a musical instrument is a perishable skill. I lost the skill of playing the clarinet by not continuing to practice the clarinet. I still know what to do, I just can’t do it. I have the knowledge but not the skill.

When you start practicing being creative, the probability is you will not be good at it. That’s ok! When you start playing a musical instrument you aren’t any good at it either. The only way to become good is to stay at it. It is work but I believe you will find it the most fun work you will ever do.

There are a lot of popular show on television you the do it yourselfer, from the long lasting “This Old House” to craft show on PBS. In the technology area Linux and open-source software are allowing people to take charge and do it themselves. The latest DYI  is education. Ordinary people taking their education into their own hands. People are using Web 2.0 tools to access a whole world of knowledge that is available to them. They are by passing classrooms, lectures, and official curricula. People are coming up with their own ways of educating themselves. Ways that don’t include conventional tools, but rather new devices like wikis, blogs, and open-source textbooks to learn what they want.

The educational system is too slow to respond to today’s world. It is attempting to do the impossible. It attempts to train students for be able to perform specific jobs in the real world and by the time the student graduates, the real world has changed. The reason for this is very simple. Colleges and universities see themselves as trade schools. They teach you to be a computer programmer. They teach you how to be a marketeer. They teach how to be an accountant. They teach you a skill. They do not educate. With the availability of today’s technology skill development can be done online. No one needs the type of  four year program we have today to learn job skills. Our education system does not understand that. They keep trying to turn out students with a specific skill set. And by the time the student graduates the skills are out dated.

But part of the problem is businesses do not know what to ask for.  They ask for someone who can do task X. Not realizing that by the time they get that person out of the educational system task X no longer needs to be accomplished. Rather, they now need task Y completed.

How to solve the dilemma? Stop having colleges and universities trying to be trade schools. With web 2.0 people can self educate themselves in skill development.  Colleges and universities need to get back to a liberal arts education and teaching students to think critically.

A recent post on Intellectual Property Watch is a very good article on how corporations don’t get innovation. Even if you buy a piece of property e.g. an iphone you can not innovate with it. Quoting  Leander Kahney, editor of Cultofmac.com and author of Inside Steve’s Brain “Apple is selling directly to consumers, who aren’t the best guardians of their own self-interest. The open PC model works for knowledgeable users who know what they are doing and how to protect themselves, but not so for 15-year-old fashionist as and techno-phobic geriatrics, Kahney said. “A measure of lock down is exactly why Apple is successful, it hides complexity while ensuring a certain level of reliability and stability. The vast majority of Apple’s customers are utterly unconcerned. They could give two hoots that they can’t hack their devices.”

I think it is thoughtful of Apple to protect dumb kids, senile old people, and all the rest of us from ourselves. After all we are all just too stupid to make our own decisions. My mother recently fell and hurt herself very badly. It was life threatening. So to continue with this line of thought we need to ban all ladders, and rugs (tripping hazards)  We need to shut down Home Depot these guys actually sell high-powered welding machines, bandsaws, nailguns, great big heavy pieces of lumber, bottles of sulfuric acid, pesticides, and many other scary dangerous products it anyone that can pay for it. That’s right, anyone could walk in off the street and purchase literal truckloads of lethal implements and chemicals. It’s a good thing none of the titans of tech own the hardware stores.

The argument then comes back to intellectual property rights. What I find amusing is these same Titans of Technology got to be titians by doing exactly what they don’t want anyone else to do. Taking apart devices and figuring out how they work and then (hopefully) improving them. Are we to believe products like the Apple/Mac, the PC, among many other examples just “popped” into their heads one day and sprang into being without ever a backward glance at what came before them!?

With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1997. Many of our rights disappeared and much of our future innovation went over seas. Innovation is not dead but we are trying really hard to kill it.

I recently came across a book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron that reminded me of a method my high school English teacher taught to increase creativity. It works and it works well. I don’t know why I forgot it. Here it is. Write. Yep it is that simply. It does not matter what your field is, writing helps increase your creativity. However, the writing technique is special. My High School English teacher  would have us write for 30 minutes non-stop. If we could not think of any thing to write, that is what we wrote, that we could not think of any thing to write. We just needed to keep writing non-stop. A point that can be missed here is that writing is the key, that is, the physical act of writing. Do not type it on a computer, write. There is something about the physical act of writing that causes the brain be creative. Something that typing will not allow. Second do not edit. Just write.  Spelling does not count. Grammar and punctuation do not count. The only thing to worry about is writing. In her book Julia Cameron has a philosophy that I do not agree with but that does not mean her techniques for reawakening the creativity in your does not work. The book is well worth the read and applying the techniques in it will help you re-awaken your creative abilities.