Use all resources to tap creativity

Employers have long put a price tag on it. Bonuses and incentive pay have rewarded original ideas, work-saving plans, inventions and better office procedures. Now employers are being frank about it and telling employees that their performance evaluations include rating scales for creativity.

Don’t let the term throw you. Being creative means using all your resources to make your work place or the world around you better. But you may need some help in utilizing your resources and setting them on a creative path.

How do you become creative? Creative people have tried to explain how they wrote a poem, solved a scientific problem, invented a new machine or leaped to a solution. And the answers vary.

Edison was supposed to have said that creativity was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Amy Lowell said of her poetry, “It just came to me.”

Musicians have written scores on table cloths, and Archimedes was said to have shouted “Eureka” when he solved the theory of buoyancy.

Other creative people have said creativity came during a time of serenity and reflection, or that it was like a bubbling spring. Others describe it as coming after a time of dreams, of fitful sleep, of awakening and knowing the solution.

Most agree there has to be a period of perspiration, followed by a period of incubation, before “happy” ideas come to mind. This may be called daydreaming, with the problem or the creative idea sitting on the back burner waiting to be kindled into flame. Contrary to some beliefs, drugs do not induce creativity. They may stimulate images and visions, but do not work to produce new ideas.

So if your employer tells you to produce some innovative ideas before your evaluation, you might ask him for his cooperation.

• Tell him that creativity is an interaction and would-be creative employees need time for creativity and interaction with other employees.

• Invite your co-workers to talk about ways to make things work.

• Examine plans and strategies of other companies in similar endeavors.

• Use the plant newspaper or the bulletin board to post ideas and exchange comments.

• Generate discussion in committees. Spark interest by posing questions like, “How can we do this better, more efficiently, at less cost?”

• Brainstorm. Organize, reorganize, try, retry. Poke, prod.

• Develop your intuition. Successful people use intuition plus analytic thinking. They make both sides of their brain work together. When thinking about a problem, intuitive people tend to hop back and forth between analysis and intuition. Intuition works with information that may have been stored in the mind through subliminal or other nonsensory means. It is the product of the mind’s ability to do many things at once.

• If you feel you have an original idea, work on it. Explore it, let it sit for a while, and then bring it back out in the open. The old adage, “sleep on it,” has some merit in this process.

• Never discourage creativity in yourself. If you feel you have a potential winner, go for it.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1986