Creative Streak

Bits & Bytes, May 29

Again, some miscellanea from around the Internet.

Adults, Play and Creativity

Two posts on ‘play’ for adults, particularly in business. On one hand, it’s fairly well-known that play is an important ingredient for adults, both in creative thinking and in learning. On the other, I know there's real hesitation from the Regular Person who doesn't understand what we often mean by that statement. A random search on Google has some questionable suggestions by creative experts, such as “Learn to cut loose, even at work!” or “When you’re writing your next report, think like a child!”

I'm not sure this is a good example of playing at work, but a few weeks ago, at a workshop for a financial services company in Melbourne, an executive and I were analysing how to improve her 78-page slide presentation for an upcoming meeting of the Board of Directors. Her immediate supervisor demanded she put all of his slides in the presentation, but then said "But feel free to make it your own." (Talk about Creative Paradoxes, see below.)

After getting our heads around the complex topic, we began to joke about how we might turn the presentation into something playful. “What would the Board of Directors never expect?” And, "What would make her presentation a surprise?” Or, “What if the Board were in control of the presentation, instead of her?”

Bits & Bytes, April 26

Some slow posting lately, but lots to read on creativity elsewhere on the web. Here's a few of my recent favourites.

Creativity and Lawyers

Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball in the US, and a lawyer by education, wrote a commentary on how he changed his own views about creativity as it relates to business.

“If a client came up with what we saw as a creative solution to a business problem, it was often our job as lawyers to explain why that route was illegal. In business, we saw creativity as the effort to do — often indirectly — what should have been done directly. In that world, a “creative” answer was not the admirable, straight answer.”

Creativity and Teams

From Edward Glassman’s book, Team Creativity At Work II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best, some interesting thoughts in this article on teams and creativity. Specifically, that the single biggest factor to enable people to be more creativity: other people.

“The biggest factor that helps people to be more creative, according to about half of 450 people I have surveyed, is "other people." Items like time, challenge, and freedom occur at a much lower frequency. Rewards are hardly mentioned. Conspicuously absent are customers and vendors, who usually want to help. One person wrote: "The biggest help to my creativity is when my boss leaves town."

Creativity and Solving Problems

While I can’t exactly account for the background of its author on an online news database, I do agree with this commentary from a news syndicate in Hawaii on the power of problem-solving, and more so, I like the simple definition of creativity.

“The intelligent solution to a problem seems to involve more than trial and error. It often requires a fresh insight based upon a sudden shift in the way the problem is viewed. Creativity always is the answer to a problem.”

Creativity and Accounting

Here’s something I never thought I’d read: an article in favor (correctly!) of “creative accounting”!

"If you think about it, I bet many of you are positively creative every year, month, week and day. You have to find ways to track and get the accounting right on new business transactions. You are asked to find ways to change the old methods of doing things in order to track more transactions, more accurately with less labor. You are asked to find better, faster ways to report the results of the business so that management can make better decisions quicker. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. CPAs need to be creatively accurate.”

Verbal vs Non-Verbal Communications

You may not recognise the name, but Albert Mehrabian authored some of the most famous studies in communications research. His most well-known hypothesis: When two people communicate face-to-face, how much of the meaning is communicated verbally, and how much is communicated non-verbally?

First published in 1971, his research is almost a quaint idea today, considering that a lot of organisational and personal communications uses decidedly non-face-to-face methods of social media.

Despite using Twitter, Facebook, blogs to communicate (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone), there's something in Mehrabian’s research that continues to fascinate.

 He concluded there are three parts to face-to-face communications – sometimes called the 3 V’s – and these three elements determine how much a receiver “likes” the speaker:

• Visual, or body and facial expressions, accounting for 55% of the liking
• Vocal, or tone of voice, accounting for 38% of the liking
• Verbal, or words, accounting for 7% of the liking