Self Improvement...

Is it true that creative people are different from everyone else? Or do they just pretend to be? How do they manage to conjure up new ideas, just like that, out of thin air, whenever they have to? Why are they so egotistic, temperamental and undisciplined? What drives them on? Ambition? Money? Fame? Self-fulfillment? How can they be motivated, managed and controlled? How can their creativity be optimized within organizational disciplines and constraints?

Modern society appears to have an almost insatiable demand for creativity, and many of today's major industries depend for their very existence upon the output of highly talented individuals.

How can we keep creativity alive? Given below are the three possible suggestions.

First, it is important to have a high level of knowledge and experience. The overall level of creativity in an idea or a product is determined jointly by a person's level of domain-relevant skills, creativity relevant skills and task motivation.

If intrinsic motivation is somewhat low, that might be partially compensated for by high levels of skills. A person might be able to produce moderately creative work, even if somewhat more extrinsically than intrinsically motivated, if he or she is extremely skilled in the domain and experienced in thinking up new ideas.

The second method for keeping creativity alive is to take the focus off extrinsic goals and constraints. Ideally, we should be able to maintain our intrinsic motivation (and our creativity) by somehow shrugging off the strong extrinsic pressures under which we must work. But since this is difficult to do, it would help if our work environments did not impose unnecessarily strong systems of evaluation, reward, competition and other forms of extrinsic motivators.

Third, it should help if we can concentrate on intrinsic motives. This suggestion is a companion to the previous one. If we can somehow be really aware of our interest, enjoyment, personal challenge and internal satisfaction in our work, then we might be less subject to the ill effects of extrinsic constraints on our motivation and creativity.

The fact that creative people are 'judged by their output' both makes them dependent upon, and exacerbates their egotism. Most authorities who have studied creative people agree that one of their most notable characteristics is independence. This displays itself particularly in the fact that they are much more influenced by their own, inner standards than by those of the society or profession to which they belong. In a study of architects in which the subjects were divided into three groups according to their creativity, the most creative group were primarily concerned with meeting a standard of excellence which they discovered within themselves; the least creative group with conforming to the standards of the architectural profession.

Sympathetic understanding, yes; concessions, no. That is the vital principle underlying the management of creativity. In one sense, it is not so very different from the basic principle involved in the management of all people, but understanding' creative calls for a great deal more time, patience and effort than understanding others.

Management is not, and never will be, a predictive science like physics; less still is it like engineering. (Human engineering' is a fatuous phrase, implying a scientific causality that does not and never will exist.) Creative people being what they are, nobody will ever succeed in managing them unerringly. However some managers are a great deal better at it than others. All management is difficult. The management of creativity raises its own very particular problems. The more profoundly they are understood, the more effectively they can be resolved.