DEVELOPMENT
Why creativity is
the skill you will
need to succeed in
the future of work
Most people think creativity is something we
are born with (or without). Innovation expert
Evette Cordy disagrees, creativity can be
learned—all it takes is practice.
THE EXPERT
Evette is an innovation
expert, registered
psychologist and the
chief investigator and
co-founder at Agents
of Spring. She has a
rich understanding of
behaviours, motivations
and needs that can
aid organisations to
formulate new ways of
thinking.
In their 2019 talent report, LinkedIn identified
creativity as the most in-demand soft skill. This
behavioural insight was derived from 590 million
LinkedIn members in 200+ countries. While hard
skills still matter, 92 per cent of the thousands
of recruiters interviewed by LinkedIn for this
report noted that soft skills matter just as much
or even more. People often say they are not
creative. Creativity is most often associated with
the arts or design industries, yet it is a skill that
applies to almost any role. Creativity is the use of
imagination and originality in solving problems.
If you are one of those people who doesn’t
consider yourself creative, the good news is that
creativity is a skill that can be learned—it’s not
an innate quality. With practice anyone can be
creative, not just a privileged few.
One of the big five personality traits is our
openness to experience. It reflects how much we
are motivated to consider new ideas, concepts and
experiences. Most creative people are typically
very open. In research undertaken by psychologist
Dr Scott Barry Kaufman and several other
54 Chief of Staff | Issue 2 2019
scholars, openness to experience was revealed
as the strongest and most consistent personality
trait that predicts creative achievement. Are you
someone who resists new ideas and experiences?
If so, this does not mean you cannot be creative. It
just suggests you need to train yourself to be more
open and develop practices that expand your
capacity for newness. Challenge yourself to try
something for the first time.
People who are good at seeing connections are
more creative. In a 1996 Wired interview, Steve
Jobs shared: “Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because they
didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”
Connections are everywhere. All of our senses
—vision, touch, hearing, smell and taste—can be
used to observe the world around us. For example,
designers of the Japanese bullet train sourced
the wonders of nature to solve a significant
performance problem. Japan has noise pollution
laws that mean trains are not allowed to produce
more than 70 decibels while travelling through
populated areas. Through one of the engineer’s
bird-watching experiences, he observed that a
kingfisher dives at high speed with barely a splash,
and surmised this was due to the shape of its bill. As
a result of this observation, the nose of the train was
designed in a beak shape, which allowed it to run
at world-record speeds while adhering to stringent
noise standards. Does this make you wonder what
other problems have answers that can be found in
the world around us, just waiting to be discovered?
We can all train our ability to make connections.
If you want to improve your capacity to think
more creatively, you need to be willing to
surround yourself with new stimulus to make
new connections. Grab a notebook to capture
these observations.
One of the biggest obstacles to creative
thinking is our tendency to edit and criticise
our thoughts before we have shared them. To
enhance your creativity, suspend such judgement
long enough to push your thinking beyond the
obvious solutions. Numerous studies have shown
that through quantity of idea generation comes
quality. That is, significantly more quality ideas
occur in the second half of the idea generation
process. Your capacity to think creatively will be
enhanced if you can give yourself the permission
and freedom to generatively explore all thoughts
and options before you judge and evaluate them.
Cultivating your creativity can help you to
succeed at work today and in the future. It can
deliver experiences you would not have thought
possible. Just remember creativity is not a one-off
activity or event —it’s a daily practice, a way of
living. S
www.agentsofspring.com