Which creative preferences do your employees have?
Teams are formed, adjusted and reinforced in companies in order to perform certain tasks. Production teams produce, development teams develop. In hiring people for a particular task, you obviously pay close attention to the skills these potential employees possess. It is far from unusual to see want ads that require the candidate to be ‘creative’. That’s great, but how can you ascertain this let alone measure it? After making it through an initial probationary period, the employee will usually ease into the routine approach the company demands he or she take, and creativity is squashed in the process.
Imbalance
Another often invisible problem is that the team is imbalanced. Imbalance? Yes, a creative imbalance!
Remember that every process, even those in your company, which involves coming up with new ideas requires a more or lesscreative approach. You can break a creative thought process down into four phases: clarification of the question, generation of ideas, development, and implementation. Not everyone feels completely comfortable in all four phases! Everyone has their own natural preferences. One person may prefer to be the ‘clarifier’ of problems, while another feels more comfortable being the person to think up ideas. Someone else may be a natural developer of ideas, and yet another may like nothing better than to be the one to get things moving. Each person is at their best in their personal, natural preference and he or she will achieve the best results in this position.
FourSight investigates!
Professor Gerard Puccio designed the FourSight assessment tool based on these preferences. Gerard Puccio PhD is a professor and chair of the Center for Creative Studies in Buffalo, New York (USA). In 2010 Sjra took a class from Puccio and his colleague Blair Miller in Italy in order to successfully complete his certification as an Advanced Trainer for the FourSight research method. FourSight is an important assessment technique that was designed to study individual and group preferences in solving critical and creative problems, and to train these where necessary. Available online or in document form, this study containing 37 questions is supported by 50 years of academic research, and backed by 16 years of scientific evidence. Hundreds of clients from business, education and non-profit organizations use FourSight to gain insight into the four different phases of the creative thinking process to determine those areas in which they excel, and those in which they score lower.
Leveraging
As an individual, team or organization, you will find out whether you are a Clarifier, an Ideator, an Implementer or a Developer. Are you strictly only one of these, or a combination of several styles? What does being involved in creativity or innovation mean for your day-to-day tasks? Is the nature of the teams you work in well-suited to the job they were designed to do? Understanding your profile and that of others has a leveraging effect, and is the first step towards a higher level of creativity. You can read more about this powerful tool on www.foursightonline.com.