Effect of Creativity to the Environment

Partridge remarks that there are "... 120 different, special and measurable aspects of creative thinking which particularly distinguish humans from other species. These wide-ranging creative faculties have been, and continue to be, critical to mankind's ability to adopt to changing situations, environments, and systems....Extensive studies of creative thinking have firmly established that individuals exhibiting higher than average scores in creative thinking also exhibit higher than average scores in areas of mental/emotional health. Systematic courses of instruction in applied imagination produce significant gains in personality traits such as confidence, self reliance, persuasiveness, initiative, and leadership." The challenge is to build an environment that will bring out the creativity of everyone and make those who have established creativity even more creative.
For example, the 3M Corporation. The 3M Corporation shows how creativity can be encouraged. David Windorski is a product development specialist with the Stationery and Office Supplies Division of 3M. His management placed his idea for a Post-itTM Easel Roll on a very low priority, so he used the "3M 15% Rule," which allows employees to spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing. He used the CPS process, plastic sewer pipes, and boards from the lumber yard to model his idea. The product is now on the market. Not only that, it even received an award from the Society of Plastics Engineers for innovative manufacturing and an award from the International Frankfurt Trade Fair for "outstandingly innovative, technological, functional qualities and excellent design."
The social environment can affect basic motivation. A company’s employee had developed a reliable and valid 78-item device to learn how the work environment of highly creative projects differed from those of less creative ones. Their research identified six factors of environmental stimulants to creativity (freedom, positive challenge, management support, employment group supports, organizational back-up, and sufficient resources) and two environmental obstacles to creativity (organizational impediments and too much workload pressure.) To make an innovative environment the administrative will need to look at the workers opinion of the state of these eight factors.
The Synectics Corporation, a consulting firm, had over 700 responses to its survey of senior managers in more than 150 of the largest and best-known companies. The survey shows that companies failed at innovation because the executives competed, rather than cooperated; cross-functional teams did not work; meetings did not produce innovative results; there were no proper innovation programs or techniques; and they were not willing to consider new perspectives.
A creative environment requires more than providing essential rewards. It requires rethinking organizational designs.
The quotation from Fortune at the opening of this article stressed the point that innovation requires a style of organizational behavior that is comfortable with new ideas, change, risk and failure. Creating an environment that is tolerant of mistakes is not easy. It have to be made clear that mistakes are acceptable if they are based on solid thinking, enhance learning of what will not work, and are caught early before the harm is severe. There must be support for the people who were on the team of the project that failed. One corporation has a "wake," complete with black candles on a black cake, to cut down the sorrow time and move on. Another corporation calls a project an experiment, thus recognizing that experiments fail, but they gain new knowledge.
Creative leadership must ease positive relationships in organizations to create profitable growth through innovation. Creativity is not an individuality attribute that is available to a few geniuses, everyone has unique knowledge and experiences that can be tapped, given the suitable environment. This environment must be free-flowing and non-judging to take people throughout the mental blocks that they learned during childhood. These psychological blocks are related with the risk of being wrong. Many educational processes give rewards only for getting the correct answer, not for experimenting with new approaches or exploring the risky unknown.
taken from 'http://www.unc.edu/~gdhughes/ARTICLES.HTM'