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That 5th Creativity Language

 

If you’ve not heard of the Five love languages you have to check out this book (Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman) these love languages explain how we need and prefer to be loved by our spouse.

  1. Words of Affirmation
  2. Quality Time
  3. Receiving Gifts
  4. Acts of Service
  5. Physical Touch

Understanding your own and your spouses love language can go a long way towards a better marriage.

In the summer I formulated four creativity languages. I am writing about this in my book Unleashing Creativity.  Through feedback from a beta tester and a feeling of incompleteness I realized there is a missing language.  For the past 6 months or so I’ve been pondering that fifth creativity language.  I know it is out there, but what is it.

Well due to my time at the platform conference, a conversation with Stu McLaren and a recent brainstorming session that I led. I realized what that 5th language is.  I am calling this 5th language it the innovating creator.  An innovating creator is a person with constant ideas around many or certain topics.

For example, there is a friend of mine who whenever we get together we talk about our ideas.  We both seem to have constant ideas and half-baked plans and sometimes money-making schemes.  Some of these ideas are great, some not so great, but almost never are either of us good at executing on them.  We have what Stu McLaren called idea diarrhea, I’ve had this for a long time.  What I realized in context of creativity that this is a strength, I know people who never have ideas and poo poo every idea they hear, those same people are excellent executors, excellent developing creators.

I work with some great scientists and engineers who have constant and ever evolving ideas.  Some of them become highly profitable products and processes, idea-diarrhea is valuable as long as there is someone able to execute on them.

The person with constant ideas, the 5th creativity language is the innovating creator.

All creativity can be grouped into one of the following 5 Creativity Languages, we can learn to understand and create more by understanding what our language(s) are:

  1. The Researching Creator
  2. The Artistic Creator
  3. The Developing Creator
  4. The Connecting Creator
  5. The Innovating Creator

I think that language terminology fits very well with creativity. Most people categorize creativity much too narrowly, most view creativity as only the artistic people around us, I think little is understood and recognized about the different forms of creativity.  Similar to the custom needs and wants for love between spouses everyone is able to and enjoys creating in a different ways.

Our creativity is not our personality, I think it goes deeper than our personality, our personality is one function of our creativity. Our creative language(s) are fundamental to how we create and how we give to the world in which we live.

What do you think your creative language might be?

PS…One more thing, it is official the creative languages test is now live and you can go here to purchase at an introductory price of $29, once you click the buy now button a link with a password will be sent to you to take the online test, the test results will be shared with you on the page, then a custom pdf write up will sent to your email address. Don’t miss out.

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Evaluating Your Ideas

Some people do the bulk of their creativity through the generation of ideas. The language of ideas is what they know and how they create.   Ideas constantly, they are not always good at execution but ideas come to their mind all the time. Some have called this idea-diarrhea, Stu McLaren referred to this recently at the platform conference and I realize that I’ve “suffered” from this condition.  Coming up with idea after idea before I’ve had a chance to significantly execute on any one of them.

Ideas may come easy, but to take the next step of execution we must learn to put our ideas through an evaluation process to screen out the bad ones, or at least the ones to not spend time on.

Every idea-person can learn to evaluate their ideas with the following three evaluating questions.

  1. Is the idea some thing that I can execute on? if the idea is not something I can make happen then I must learn to drop it or sell it, ideas are sold in the form of patents or trademarks, if you can’t do that then drop the idea or sit on it until you can execute. Write it down and wait on a day when perhaps you can execute.
  2. Is the idea based on your knowledge or on your ignorance? Many ideas occur because of the large body of knowledge that we have, knowledge often stimulates ideas.  But many other ideas are based on ignorance. We often have ideas due to things that we don’t fully understand. Ignorance-based ideas can be powerful, missing knowledge that would normally kill and idea prematurely in the mind of a person more knowledgeable, can stay alive and develop to the point of a great idea. I’ve seen this in action more than once, people who normally are not knowledgeable around a topic can innovate better than the expert.  In this situation others who understand more have already processed and often dismissed an idea long ago.
  3. Does the idea need further development? the answer to this question is almost always yes, sharing ideas is usually what gives them legs. Most ideas at the start are vague concepts that the person has little understanding around. Discussion of ideas and research either kills them or strengthens them.  It helps to have multiple people help with this process of idea evaluation.  After the initial idea phase, partnership with an execution person is often just the thing that your idea needs.

Use of these 3 idea-evaluating questions can help your idea and get it into the execution phase.

How many ideas and projects do you have sitting around waiting to be completed?

Sign up for email updates below, people have asked about my creative language test, if you are interested in this online test (similar to a personality test) it will be launched this week.

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The Lagging Learning Curves

 

It takes time to teach people, it takes time for knowledge to spread around a culture. Knowledge sometimes can not penetrate business cultures readily. Some people learn slower than do others, decision makers are not as brilliant as all team members in every area of life.

Working in R&D I am constantly reminded and focused on learning curves; my own learning curve on a variety of subjects, my team’s learning curve covering our projects, my department’s learning curve on the technology that we are developing and finally the entire corporation’s learning curve on a wide variety of technologies and markets.

We are constantly learning, and learning progresses as a rapid and as a gradual process.

Corporate learning curves are the learning curves that a team or corporation undergoes in order to execute in a market.  The corporate learning curve is not the sum of the knowledge in each team member’s mind.  Rather the corporate learning curve is the body of knowledge and wisdom about a technology that leaders use to make business decisions. The knowledge may include fundamental scientific understanding, it may include understanding about processes to competitively manufacture, it may include supply-chain connections and it may include insight into future market demand. Anything that the team uses to make business decisions is a part of the corporate learning curve.

The corporate learning curve almost always lags behind (in time) the sum of individual contributor’s learning curve on any topic unless the company is very small or if it communicates very often and very effectively.

There may be 10 scientists on a team who have an understanding of the mechanism and process in order to build the next great cell phone technology however if the management in that team or company do not have a grasp of the technology, or have knowledge of what the technology can and cannot do proper business decisions can not be made.  If the commercial team does not understand and cannot market the technology then the team overall has not advanced up the corporate learning curve and therefore cannot monetize their knowledge.

There can be a gap between what the scientists, engineers and middle management knows and what the organization can execute on in the marketplace.  Because of this, the importance of teaching cannot be over emphasized; if the informed team members cannot (or will not) communicate well to the business leaders then the company will not be able to capitalize on the knowledge.

In fact individuals in any part of the organization may be further up the curve but, if they do not have the ability or authority to lead the technical teams who will to execute and create the divisions and products then the knowledge is of no value to the company.   Claiming technical success and promising a product prematurely is a function of poor teaching and poor communication, knowledge is not enough to create revenue.

Sometimes it is important for ambitious leaders who feel very confident in the team’s abilities themselves and feel far along the learning curve to recognize that what really matters is the corporate learning curve. If they do not have the political clout to educate and persuade, if they do not have the willingness and the ability to teach the organization it does not matter what they know. The only thing that matters is what the organization “knows and will accept” as a whole and can prove in that company’s labs or manufacturing processes.

What is even more remarkable is how much organizational culture can further slow down the corporate learning curve. It is not necessarily a delay due to inability to understand or is it stubbornness in management, sometimes complex office politics further slows down learning curves.  I have seen refusal to learn by senior members of teams from junior members simply because of lack of relationship or competitive resistance.  The organization is accustomed to learning in a certain way and sometimes deviations from that way are rejected.

To read more on this topic click here for part 2 of this post.

 

What is the best way to keep an organization together in learning?

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