Creativity
involves an ability to come up with new and different viewpoints on a subject.
It
involves breaking down and restructuring our knowledge about the subject in
order to gain new insights into its nature. The process of becoming sensitive
to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies,
and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses
or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies; testing and retesting them;
and finally communicating the results
What
is creative thinking?
Wertheimer
([1959) suggested that creative thinking involved breaking down and restructuring
our knowledge about something in order to gain new insights into its nature. Understanding
our own cognitive model of reality may therefore be an important determinant of
our ability to think creatively. Kelly (1955) and Rogers (1954) both supported
this argument by maintaining that we can be creative by gaining an understanding
of how we think about a subject. Creativity is something which occurs when we
are able to organize our thoughts in such a way that readily leads to a
different and even better understanding of the subject or situation we are
considering.
Importance
of creativity in business;
The
rapid growth of competition in business and industry is often quoted as a
reason for wanting to understand more about the creative process.
Many
firms are continually experiencing pressure to enhance old systems and
products. Growth and survival can be related directly to an organization’s
ability to produce (or adopt) and implement new products or services, and
processes (Van Gundy, 1987). One of the key aspects of any organization’s
success or failure is its ability to stay ahead of the competition in a rapidly
changing environment. The modern business, with its emphasis on competition,
building larger markets, strategic planning, team working, etc., has created
the need for new problem solving and decision making strategies.
Creativity
is considered to be a vital asset for any person who is in a leadership role, managers need to discover new and
better ways to solve problems. In particular, an increasing number of problems
have few or no precedents, hence there are fewer tried and tested ways of
approaching them with the anticipation of reaching a successful outcome. To
stay in business a company has to respond creatively to the problems it faces.
Problems may exist in both the external and internal environments. The former
poses problems such as how to cope with slow economic growth, how to deal with
new entrants to an industry, how to grow sales at the pace of competition in
high-growth markets, how to deal with new technological developments and how to
cope with shorter product life-cycles. The latter poses problems to do with
poor internal communications, financial problems, alienated or poorly motivated
staff and inadequate planning. Creative leaders actively hunt for new problems
and are especially successful in handling new challenges which demand solutions
outside the routine of orthodox strategies.
Conclusion, It is argued that
creativity is an important human resource which exists in all organizations.
Organizations have to try to make use of this resource by devising settings
which permit creative talents to thrive.
By Segesela Blandina
BAPRM 42663
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