Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Is Creativity only Achieved via Diversity

Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas. 

The world is hyper-connected, there's nothing in the universe that exists in isolation from everything else, and certainly not a culture in particular. Cultures, as collective mindset and habit, are mainly shaped by the “mainstream” mindset at the particular time, need to be reprogrammed when it lags the era we live in, only creative and transformative leadership can make such shift. Culture is like the soil, the key factor to spur the seed of creativity. But what is the real engine of creativity? Is creativity only achieved via diversity? Should diversity mean more about the color of characters and the difference of cognition, than the physical identity?

A creative team shall have the cogitative difference and diversified worldview. Diversity is a facilitator for merging significant building blocks of new and existing ideas and concepts. It is an excellent engine for creativity, although it does not necessarily mean it’s the only success factor to spur innovation. It is important for a creative team to have people who do not have the same view of the small part of the world that the team is dealing with so that they can pay off each other. Do you find yourself getting inspired, challenged or intimidated by people of a different background from you? In a sense, does diversity spur new perspectives in an individual then? Can you always discover new perspectives and really valid learning points in work or any social community? Diversity in the people you socialize with can provide you with new perspectives on life and possibly work as well. 

It is situation-driven. The question of greater diversity bringing greater creativity always depends on what we're talking about. In troubleshooting, it's studied that diversity brings a greater host of possible solutions. But if you think of art it's not that simple, nor theoretical science. For the creative process artist often do as individuals what society is doing all the time. One example may be that the artist will play with changing contexts or juxtaposing differing elements. It may be the artist uses a juxtaposition in culture, contrasting diverse elements. Mostly, human systems (collectives of individuals) are living organisms on their own, different from the sum of its parts. So how collectively creative it depends on the individuals composing that collective and depends on the rationale for the gathering of people. To put simply, diversity can help bringing up creativity, even if not in collectives of individuals, at least as a way of promoting ideas in creative individuals! You never should refuse participation to someone because they are not like the rest of the group, nor should you bring a less qualified person on board to increase DIVERSITY based on their look, not their thought. 

Create a fearless and diversified working environment to spur creativity. The most important characteristic of being creative is to act without fear and let your self-consciousness express itself. Secondly, looking at the creativity at a group level and assuming similar levels of competencies and capabilities, would a diverse group of people come up with a more out-of-box idea/solution than a group of identical people? By generating scenarios where there is no one solution to one problem, but rather to construct an event where the individual inputs must compound and build upon each other - you can observe a creative result that was beyond the capacity of any one individual. Creativity can be enhanced by a team with members who have diverse experiences. It is important to have members of the team with diverse customer experiences and who have worked with different systems and platform and for both small and large corporations. In this case, where we are focusing on designing and implementing a specific application to be used by a wide range of user diversity is a major advantage. 

The diverse mind is more successful and is always going to be more creative as it has more to draw on. The first most successful societies were diverse mixtures of peoples. It has always been so. Ask yourself who does better, a small gene pool or a large one. Diversity is not an idea. It is not something you need to plan for. It is a basic reality of the modern world that needs to be better understood. There isn't even a great need for high elite performers to extract precious new solutions for some old and hurdling problems. Everyone is valid for brainstorming. they are bringing their existing experiences to the situation. However, if they challenge each other to have to translate/transform their PoVs into new expressions, then not only is the combined creative output novel, but their individual inputs are also novel.

Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas. Creative people use specific systems to be creative, the emergent, the divergent, the convergent thought processes and so on. Diversity is always there to increase the probability of such a synthesis. Creativity demands the possibility of the wrong in order to be exploring in a free and playful way. The creativity suspends or defers judgment. However, it doesn’t mean creativity lack of the principles, the well-set disciplines can streamline the train of the diversified thoughts and the fountain of creativity.


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