Creativity is free inspiration, a defining moment of insight born by letting go, a bubble of energy that can change everything.

According to the Principle of Indeterminism Werner Heisenberg once said  "The path comes into existence only when we observe it".

THE OBSERVER CREATES THE PATH

A Child's path bounces around the playground in an unpredictable motion to discover every corner of their fresh imagination while adults stand a top their vantage points keeping watch over their possessions.

Thomas & Gale wrote: Creativity is the stuff of legend. It's the gripping core of Henry Ford's rise from watch repairman to industrial dynamo with the perfection of mass production. It fuels our awe for Steven Job's rise from garage-bound hustler to computer king, based on his vision of an industry not yet born. It is the source of our pride in the current resurrection of American TV manufacturing with the strategic and technological innovation of digital programming.

Creativity is also the stuff of survival. Without it, you go under. Consequently, business invests a considerable amount of money and verbal steam in creativity. Organizations are constantly redesigned, systems altered, procedures redone, incentives implemented, enlarged, and changed. Consultants make vast sums explaining, enabling, and haranguing. Yet a Presidential blue-ribbon commission published a very disturbing conclusion in the mid-1980s. It said, unequivocally, that the U.S. economy was characterized as having a vast sea of risk-averse mediocrity dotted infrequently with islands of innovation. No wonder the Japanese have been doing so well. They haven't had much competition. More reading findarticals.com

All things change and therefore we must too. Changes evolve perceiving intellectual and physical difference. To see correctly is to look carefully and question.

Good perception is a manner of being open to new possibilities. Most of the time we see what is important to us. For example, The intelligent mind contemplates the visual boundaries of visual art in terms of concepts.  The spiritual being feels visual art in the depths of the soul. The visually sensitive observer looks in detail, queries information in the name of observation. The inventive person celebrates creative genius and experiments with the unknown. The poetic individual relishes emotional relevance and visual balance in a composition.  The skilled technician enjoys the manipulation of materials and extreme examples of skill.  The art educator creates ways to inspire the student and the student creates the master artist within.

Creativity arrives directly from the source where all things meet. It does not come from speech, hearing, seeing or touch. Creative thinking is a culmination of all our senses and brain functions. It is a matter of letting it happen, pop in, or reveal itself like a momentary gust of wind without restrictions. The happenstance is part of its nature and like a butterfly we must be careful not to touch it too much or it will die.

The very act of being creative whether drawing, painting, writing, solving problems and inventing useful things is what its all about.   Play is part of it, the attitude of being open-minded, exposing all possibilities intuitively and experimenting with untried solutions.

The Circle of Creation

1. Adjust your brain: There are two sides to your brain. One side is loud and it works with proven knowledge, rules, order and logic. The other side is silent and feels emotions and relies on the senses. Even though the loud side of the brain is the most noticeable it is the silent side that is the catalyst for our intuition and creative ideas. To begin, empty your mind and don't assume you know the answers to any given problem and eliminate any judgments or the practical. See all that is before you in basic simple generalizations and open yourself up to the idea that you will play by experimenting in as many combinations as possible. You should feel free to make mistakes or explore areas that may not lead to anything. This attitude is vital to creativity. Try to experiment without judgment.

2. Take the time to create: There is no time limit, and trust the answers will come to you at the right moment.

3. Seek Information and inspiration: Gather information from everywhere. What you might learn from a spider could solve a long lasting problem or be the color inspiration for a landscape painting. You will not see it until it is in front of you.

4. Play and Experiment: Play with many different combinations and then experiment for clear results.

5. Visualize the possibilities: Don't take one answer but be open all the possibilities and visualize it upside down, backwards and sideways.

6. Rest: spend time away. Sleep and clear your mind to let the cream rise up to the surface.

7. See it fresh: shift your thinking to the rhythm of your favorite music, let you intuition guide you and look at it again.

8. Commit to the panorama, broad view and the microscopic, detail. Experiment with your discoveries. Repeat the steps if necessary.

Research on organizational creativity has increased rapidly in the last decade. Not only is creativity of interest to scientific researchers, it has become a compelling topic in the popular media, with recent articles in Psychology Today (Gryskiewicz 2000), Fast Company (Dahl 2000), and in business-oriented publications such as the Harvard Business Review (Hargadon and Sutton 2000). Why this intense interest, and why now? Part of the answer comes from the nature of science and business today, especially in competitive fields where the pressure for innovation and maintaining a competitive edge has become more intense. Creativity provides the raw intellectual materials – ideas, concepts, insights, and discovery – that eventually become new theories, approaches, tools, products, and services that underlie innovation. Innovation is the adoption and social transmission of creative discovery.

What is Creativity?

Although creativity and innovation are closely intertwined in the public eye, they have often been studied in isolation by researchers using different methodologies and models. Creativity has been the province of psychology, with its emphasis on individuals and small groups, while innovation has been the focus of sociologists, economists, and others who take a larger, systems perspective.

This separation is unfortunate, because creativity (producing something for the first time) represents "a dramatic aspect of organizational change that may provide a key to understanding change phenomena and, ultimately, organizational effectiveness and survival" (Woodman et al. 1993). Recent attempts to integrate the psychological and sociological perspectives include work by Ford (1996, 2000), Cummings and Oldham (1997), and Drazin, Glynn and Kazanjian (1999). Creativity is generally defined as useful novelty – not novelty for its own sake, but novelty that can be applied and add value to an organization's products and services (Oldham and Cummings 1996). Creativity includes the generation of ideas, alternatives, and possibilities (Smith 1998). Creativity research has a long history in psychology, focusing on individual differences in personality, cognitive abilities, and problem-solving styles. However, recent theoretical and empirical work looks at creativity as something the brain does naturally. That is, creativity is an adaptive feature of normal cognitive functioning that evolved to aid problem solving under conditions of uncertainty. Under such circumstances, novel approaches and invention are highly advantageous (Simonton 2000; Findlay and Lumsden 1988). This perspective asserts that all human beings have the potential for creativity because we share common neural processes; however, whether the creativity is expressed or suppressed depends on the socio-cultural context, personality differences, and specific personal experiences (such as knowledge and skills). Within work settings, it is also apparent that organizational policies and practices as well as managerial behaviors influence creativity among workers.

By defining creativity as useful novelty, psychologists have clearly placed the emphasis on creativity as an outcome. Regardless of whether creativity is considered a process or an outcome, it is ultimately linked to social processes and contexts and can be considered from a systems perspective (Csikszentmihalyi 1988). The systems perspective views the individual as the source of variation and change (new ideas) that are presented to others who then select and retain creative ideas that are used to elaborate the larger domain. The results of the elaboration are fed back to the individual and the process continues. A key question for organizational leaders is: What sparks the variation in the first place? How do creative ideas happen? What inhibits or suppresses creative ideation? More reading Charter 15

J.P. Guilford 1957 a pioneer in the study of creativity speaks a great deal about fluency and flexibility of thought.

* Fluency refers to the number of concepts one produces in a given length of time.

* Flexibility refers to the diversity of the ideas generated.

Were you aware of what went on in your mind to solve the last problem, focus, premature judgment, choosing only stereotyped usages and so on?  Question your process.

Artists utilize creativity to discover new ideas and methods everyday. Creativity is essential for growth and change. Without it there is no future.  Come up with a process that incorporates change and use different strategies. There are many methods out there, but being flexible, looking carefully and questioning is the key.