Creativity is the Most Crucial Factor for Future Success

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which surveyed 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, CEOs believe that, “more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.”

Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs.

Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate

CEOs said they are operating in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.

So how do organisations and leaders go about nurturing this vital leadership attribute and fostering a culture of creativity and innovation?

Learning how to develop a culture of innovation and successfully implementing strategies and processes will lead to growth and sustainability in an increasingly complex global environment.

We are all creative

We need to get out of the mindset that only some people are creative. We are all creative. Leaders need to develop that skill as they do all other leadership skills; and then start to unlock it in their teams.

As Edward de Bono said: “Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learnt. It empowers people, adding strength to their natural abilities, which...improves teamwork, productivity and, where appropriate, profits.”

We share a clear strategy for innovation

Adopt a clear vision and core values that encourage the pursuit of organisational objectives, including creativity and innovation. Work with all stakeholders to determine how you will go about unlocking new initiatives.

Creative and innovation leadership is required throughout the organisation. Too often companies believe that innovation comes from the bottom up. Identifying creative catalysts within the organisation at all levels can make a huge difference to delivering outcomes, but at the end of the day it is the CEO and executive team (and even the Board) who must be proactive and lead the change to an innovative culture.

Our culture encourages people to be creative

This means that the people in your organisation can communicate openly, challenge the status quo, trust others with their ideas and teamwork is highly valued. A key factor is reducing siloes and building an environment of sharing, participation, learning and fun across the organisation. Professional development of employees to help unlock their creative potential and build their creative skillset is essential to harness your true competitive advantage and give everyone a “voice”.

Failure is OK

If you want to develop a culture of innovation then it is essential to tolerate some calculated risks. It is often only through the learning from failure that we find true success.

New ideas + new opportunities = sustainability and growth

Creativity is a key driver of innovation by providing new ideas and new ways to solve problems within any organisational structure. Through managing the ideas and “incubating” and developing the best of them there is endless potential to develop new products and services, improvements and new processes that contribute to the organisation’s survival and growth.

THE BRAIN AND MUSIC

Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.

One of the most promising is music - and not via the famous but controversial "Mozart effect", whereby merely listening to classical music is supposed to improve brain performance. Learning to play an instrument brings about dramatic brain changes that not only improve musical skills but can also spill over into other cognitive abilities, including speech, language, memory, attention, IQ and even empathy. Should I dust off my trumpet and get practising?

Musical training, especially at a young age, seems to significantly alter the structure of your brain. For instance, after 15 months of piano lessons young children had more highly developed auditory and motor areas than their untrained peers. These brain areas are very active when you play an instrument (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 3019).

Professional musicians have an increased volume of grey matter, which routes information around the brain, in areas that deal with motor control, audition and visuo-spatial processing (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 23, p 9240). Musicians who started training before the age of 7 also have a thicker corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibres that shunts information between the two halves of the brain (Neuropsychologia, vol 33, p 1047).

These structural changes have been shown to tally with the development of musical ability. But can music reach outside of its own domain and improve other aspects of cognition?

The tentative answer is yes. Musically trained people perform better on tests of auditory memory - the ability to remember lists of spoken words, for example - and auditory attention. Children with a musical training have larger vocabularies and higher reading ability than those who do not (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol 11, p 599). There is even some evidence that early musical training increases IQ (Psychological Science, vol 15, p 511).

Better learning

Patrick Ragert at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and colleagues have an idea why this should be so. They found that professional pianists were much better than non-musicians at a standard test of spatial acuity - the ability to discriminate two closely separated points. Crucially, they also improved faster with practise (European Journal of Neuroscience, vol 19, p 473). This is evidence that the brains of trained musicians are more plastic, says Ragert, suggesting that learning an instrument may enhance your capacity to learn other skills.

This can even extend to languages. Trained musicians are better at discriminating pitch changes in made-up words similar to those found in Mandarin, a "tonal" language where such changes can alter the meaning of a word. This is evidence that they are better equipped to learn new languages (Applied Psycholinguistics, vol 28, p 565). And that is not all. Music training has even been shown to enhance empathy because it fine-tunes your ability to recognise emotional nuances in speech (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol 1169, p 209).

Much of this research has been done in children or professional musicians who started training very young. Developing brains are known to be more malleable than adult ones - for music, there seems to be a sensitive period at around 7. So would the same kind of training make any difference to me? "Those who begin musical training earlier in life see greater enhancements," says Dana Strait, who works in music cognition at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

All the signs point to musical training being powerful at any point in life.

Melbourne Sings - Our Amazing Stories

Please take a moment to watch and listen to some of the amazing stories that have come from With One Voice's Melbourne Sings Choir.

Just beautiful!

Unlocking Creative Potential - Tania de Jong AM

Sustained growth in the future can only be achieved by the continuous generation of new, creative ideas and strategies. There are a range of ways in which organisations address this issue including structures, processes, incentives, systems and unleashing the creative potential of individuals. Many organisations today have turned to workplace innovation programs in the conviction that creativity is one key to competitive survival. And organisations know their ability to innovate lies in the creativity and abilities of their people. The individual needs to understand and adopt internal thinking processes that increase the potential for new thinking. Organisations have to do the same.

Creativity will be the strategic tool for the 21st Century and will help us solve community, organisational and global challenges.

ELEVEN TIPS TO UNLOCK YOUR PERSONAL AND ORGANISATIONAL CREATIVE POTENTIAL

1. We are all far more creative than we believe. Remove self-limiting beliefs.


2. Ask why? not why not?


3. Questions for leaders to re-invent the future:
   
   • What could exist that does not exist now?
   
   
   • What could be happening that is not happening now?
   
   
   • How can we learn how to acknowledge each unique voice and unlock our human potential?
   
   


4. Unlocking creativity leads to ideas that create value in individuals, teams and organisations


5. Diversity leads to innovation. Listen to all the voices around you and share your ideas across barriers of siloes, age, gender and cultures.


6. Find ways to develop a culture of creativity and innovation across your teams, departments and organisation.


7. All it takes is nurturing enquiring minds - who knows what may be possible!


8. Unlocking creativity leads to greater wellbeing, engagement and sense of meaning and purpose, as well as innovation!


9. Share stories of positive outcomes you achieve through your creative leadership programs


10. Start to measure the outcomes of your creativity and innovation programs so you can show hard data to the skeptics and gain their support and investment for future programs.


11. Don’t miss Creative Innovation 2010 – Registrations are now open at www.ci2010.com.au

Tania de Jong AM is Founder Creative Universe, Creativity Australia, Music Theatre Australia, Pot-Pourri, The Song Room and Founder and Executive

How's this for creativity? Using sand...

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent," Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears, and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple, sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear, and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives, and the woman smiles again. Once again, war returns, and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside, and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population's being killed, with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And, there's surely no bigger compliment."

Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art ...

The importance of innovation in business

Creativity encourages innovation and innovation plays a vital role in the development of new business concepts, processes and products. Innovation drives growth and opportunity in new markets and breathes life into a mature industry.

Once considered just in the areas of science and advertising, creativity and innovation now play an important role in all levels and departments of a business. Executives at all levels have a responsibility to lead and stimulate innovative thinking across the entire enterprise. Shareholders, employees and customers rely on executives to create a healthy, innovative work environment. This adds meaning and purpose to all aspects of an organisation’s brand, service and culture.

In today’s fast paced business environment, creativity and innovation is a prerequisite for success, and perhaps even for survival. That is why creativity and innovation are now moving to the top of the agenda for organizations around the world.

Creativity and innovation will be the most important factors in establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage. Logic and linear thinking will remain important, but are no longer sufficient to succeed in a global economy. Many experts and futurists believe that organizations need to place greater emphasis on right-brain functions such as artistic, big picture thinking and the ability to conceptualise.

Creativity and innovation is a core competency for leaders and managers. We need to teach people how to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, to ask important questions and to generate solutions. Generating fresh solutions to problems, and the ability to create new products, processes or services for a changing market and new world are part of the intellectual capital that gives a company its competitive edge. Creativity is a crucial part of the innovation equation.

OPERA singer Tania de Jong has managed to combine her passions for singing and entrepreneurship to develop business interests around music.

De Jong's business mix is the ensemble Pot-Pourri, "the first group to do opera with a touch of musical comedy", and Music Theatre Australia, a one-stop entertainment and event production company representing more than 2000 acts, from classical musicians to stand-up comedians.

For more, click here.