Thinking and doing the same things faster and better is not enough; we need creativity. Fortunately, creativity is a skill you can learn. This course will examine when, why, and how we can be creative. It examines the cues that trigger us to consider being creative. It provides a road map of the creative process – the process of changing our perspectives – and the kinds of outcomes that result from creativity. It examines how we can go through the creative process more efficiently and more effectively by examining what is changing about our thinking and how we can make those changes. The end result is more flexible thinking that can be used to recognize and develop new opportunities.
Creativity is a Journey
Loading...
From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Creativity Toolkit I: Changing Perspectives
114 ratings
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
114 ratings
Course 3 of 7 in the Specialization Innovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship
From the lesson
Module 4: The Creative Journey
In this module, you will learn that creativity can be joyful, intrinsically motivating, and even liberating. You will also learn how to manage your organization so that your employees find ways to persist through the process as well.
Meet the Instructors
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
So, we talked about how the creative process isn't
just one insight and that it ends there.
Archimedes can jump out of a bathtub but he has to actually do the work involved
in collecting those insights and pursuing
them to the point of reaching an invention or an enlightenment.
So here, we really want to talk about all of
the adversity that can occur in this creative process.
There are bumps in the road.
You have to persist.
You can't give up at the first bump.
You got to keep going.
Maybe we can even learn from those bumps in the road and
profit from adversity and view it as an opportunity.
So one question that arises is,
why do people persist?
And then how? So, why do we put up with
all that trouble and then what can we do to make it easier
and maybe less adverse so that
we accomplish creative pursuits rather than fail along the way?
Right. So, that's the creative journey.
Creativity doesn't just happen in easy flashes of insight.
In fact, it feels a lot more like a grind and people appreciate it.
Part of that is because the ideas get rejected.
It's not as if I generate a great idea and the world just goes,
"Amazing, we'll take it."
There's so many great examples of this and I think it really helps to think
about very creative ideas that we know now to be really important,
they were often rejected.
One example would be Stephen King's first novel.
Sure.
Carrie. People probably don't know that it was rejected 30 times.
In fact, Stephen King
He threw it away, right?
He threw it out. His wife actually fished it out the trash.
Thanks to her, we have it.
And his career. I mean,
all that follows from that first success.
He could've given up on that first book.
So persistence is key.
And we get that from everyone.
I mean, Harry Potter is the more contemporary example that people talk about.
I think, at least 20 publishers rejected that.
Rejection is part of it.
Part of the problem is that creative ideas are initially untested and unproven.
So, you're dealing in the realm of
uncertainty and so there are a lot of examples of it as well.
No one knows. No one knows if it's a good idea or not.
I mean, every major invention has this.
So you hear about the telephone.
The initial rejection was they just don't see any use for the telephone.
There's too many problems to ever be useful to Western Union.
Exactly.
This was from there internal communication.
Other examples like, for example,
when people had the idea of introducing sound into movies.
The initial response was,
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
This is another very famous one.
Spoken like a director.
Yeah, another one of my favorites.
We can just run through these all day but I think
they're funny and worth sort of thinking about.
Yeah, I mean, remember.
So, the head of Microsoft basically said the iPhone is going to be worthless and a flop.
Every major invention that we see,
somebody is saying, "This will never work.
Why would we ever want one of those?"
We initially have to persist through that period of uncertainty to get our ideas heard.
Yeah, they're going to be rejected
because we don't know about them yet. You have to keep going.
Creativity is also a journey,
maybe even a grind,
because creativity doesn't involve just one idea.
It involves potentially multiple ideas that are generated and integrated over time.
A great story that illustrates this is from Gordon Gould
who explained how he invented the laser,
and by his account,
it just sort of flashed into his head as a moment of insight one Saturday night and he
just saw the whole picture of how to build a laser all at once.
But he was quick to point out though that,
that one moment of insight, even though it was quick,
came about after 20 years of hard work in two very different fields, physics and optics.
Only by working through the problems in each of
those fields and then combining them did he
really reach that one moment of insight that seemingly occurred out of nowhere.
I think it's also telling that he talked about all of those ideas
as really like separate bricks that had to be arranged in just the right way.
So, sometimes, there's a temptation to focus on
the end result of that insight that occurs easily and out of nowhere.
But in reality, it's the culmination of many different ideas and
changes and perspectives that have to be combined.
Again, creativity is not just one idea, it's many ideas.
Creativity evolves over time and takes
us in directions we couldn't even have imagined from the starting point.
That could be in the course of one particular product or invention.
It can also be over the long haul of multiple inventions,
multiple products, multiple stories joining together into a larger story.
So for example, 3M,
the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
That's where it got its name, 3M's.
And it started out in 1902, I think,
as a mining company that sold a popular mineral to grinding wheel manufacturers.
And from that mineral,
then they began selling sand paper,
and then tape, and then more kinds of tape,
first, masking tape and then clear tape,
and now they sell 55,000 different
products including everything from car care products to touch screens.
The point is that,
where you start may be pretty far away from where
you end up as one idea leads to another idea,
leads to another idea and there you have it.
So, take a different example.
David McConnell started Avon in 1886.
He was a door-to-door book salesman,
a job that had already been around,
but he had trouble selling books.
And then he realized, he could get attention of the people he was
visiting at their homes by offering them perfume samples.
Well, soon, it was the perfume sample and not the book that sold.
And as a result, he founded
the California perfume company in New York and eventually turned into Avon.
So the point is, you don't really know where you're
going to end up based on where you're starting.
Honda, for example, came into the American market with motorcycles
and they tried to build a giant big heavy powerful motorcycle.
And it turns out, no one was particularly interested in those but everybody loved
the tiny scooters they brought and wanted to buy those from Honda,
that they were planning to only use for their own employees.
Again, you don't know where it's going to take you.
You have to be open and flexible to where that journey goes.
So, we've seen that creativity doesn't really have a beginning and an ending.
It's really kind of a moving target in a lot of ways.
But even if we settle on a creative idea,
the world changes, our perspectives have to change.
And so, the process just continues to kind of unfold over time.
If we can change our perspective and in so doing change our goal,
change what we think we're doing,
change who we think we are,
then this could morph into something very different.
That, to me, implies that we have to get used to being in the middle of
the process rather than thinking it's going to start and end and will be done.
The bad news is, though, as we'll see,
the process isn't always fun.
There are bumps in the road.
So, we'll turn now to what those bumps are and how do we deal with them.
Right and persisting.
Explore our Catalog
Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.
Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education,
partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.
© 2019 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.
