Nurturing Creativity: An ideal Ideology

An idea is for LIFE.
Making those ideas work is Creativity.
To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t.” – Robert Sutton
With the competition reaching the skies, it is almost inevitable that by the time we realize that our minds are designed to work in
“DIFFERENTLY special ways”, we are already leading the RAT Race.
Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Proctor & Gamble, Ogilvy & Mather, Nintendo, Toyota & Toshiba are some of the companies topping the
Forbes charts for Innovation & Creativity.
Any organization in this competitive era has to have continuous Innovation and should encourage & reward brilliant ideas.
Nurturing of an Idea does not happen in isolation. Infact, “Organization, Community & Leadership” are three factors which have direct correlation with its
nurturing.
Organization is a place where creative people work collectively.
Community is the environment necessary to foster and grow any idea.
Leadership is to implement the idea such that its benefits can be reaped for years and years to come, by not only the bearer but also by the society as a
whole.
Having entered the era of budding Entrepreneurs (and Intrapreneurs) we should understand that no economy can be successful without them. Ironically,
instead of nurturing it we tend to discourage those who are different in their own unique ways.
What is Entrepreneurship? – “Today’s BUZZ word” or “The most popular mode of employment” - one may say!
But, Entrepreneurship actually is the ability to foster a new idea and the courage to make it rise higher than the highest tide!
With these words I’d like to propose that “Creativity be stressed upon and encouraged in all schools across the globe”. Creativity does not come in a day.
Infact, most times it takes like ‘forever’ for a world changing idea to pop-up, but I guess – Archimedes would have been ecstatic while shouting ‘Eureka’
because he knew that the idea was worth the wait!
In the words of Sir Ken Robinson (A Creativity expert) – “ creativity is as important as literacy in education and that we should treat it with the same status.
The fostering of creativity demands an environment that permits mistakes, he said, but our schools don’t provide it.”
“We are educating people out of their creative capacities”
Schools should encourage children to make mistakes because “If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original” !!

Fundamental restructuring, of our education system, is required!

Creativity can be emphasized by the generation and expression of ideas in a non-evaluative framework and by concentrating on both divergent and convergent thinking. Adults can also try to ensure that children have the opportunity and confidence to take risks, challenge assumptions, and see things in a new way.

At this juncture, I’d like to give a couple of examples of Creative thinking as written under -

# A young boy was asked why are brakes provided in a car?
He replied – “To be able to drive Faster”!!
She replied – “From my dreams”!!

# A 5 year old girl making “a piece of art” from a heap of clay, was asked where did your ideas come from?

I propose not only emphasizing to young children to give “Out of Box” answers but to also reward them for it. Not to discourage, detain or punish them if they make a mistake, as mistakes are just another way of looking at the same thing differently.

We should at a very fundamental level breed this creative thinking because it is always these world changing ideas that make the difference!

The Onus lies on the child, his/her family, and the teacher “To get out of the line every time they find themselves in ONE!” because no matter how brilliant the shop owner’s child is, he still chose to become the next “kirana-wala”!

Let us get together to promote Creativity & nurture talent as they want to grow and not as we want them to!