Let’s start with a story from last century, in the early 1920s. At that time General Electric was wondering how it could have more productive factories. As opposed to trying to come up with a better machine, however, they decided to study the knowledge and talents and aptitudes of the workers.
They tasked a young man named Johnson O’Connor to do the research. What he found was this:
We are most satisfied when we engage in work that utilizes both our knowledge and our own natural talents.
O’Connor’s findings were a radical departure from somebody thought so that memes that were handed down from the Industrial Revolution, again by making things more efficient by looking at the aptitudes and talents of the individual workers themselves.
Think about your own life: I’m sure that there are things that you do well and things that you don’t do well. When you are tasked with something that you do well, you probably take it with ease and it is feels great.
And, of course, there are those things in your tasked to do when you’re not so good at and it feel laborious or tiresome and difficult.
So everybody has things were good were not so good at. That’s the beauty of organizations: we can pair people with different aptitudes and talents to bring out the fullness of everyone involved.
Now, let take things up to a whole other level. The defining trait being human is our innate ability to create. Creativity is not a gift only certain people and not others, it is a defining trait of being human. As a defining trait of being human it is a basic need for true fulfillment.
And beyond that, creativity is a way of being that we can apply to anything and everything. In other words, you can take whatever you have talent you naturally have and apply the awareness of creativity, the way of being associated with creativity to make that talent even better.
And when you bring it to the organizational level, WOW! so much potential is there.
Research shows that less than half the people in United States identify as being creative. And if you look at the world it’s only about a quarter. That means that the vast majority of the people in the world are not tapping into their innate ability to create.
They’re not seeing themselves as creators. And because they don’t see themselves as creators, they’re missing out on a very powerful, very versatile, and very satisfying way of being.
And, as businesses and organizations, when our employees are not tapping into their innate creativity, they are missing out on a lot of potential productivity, revenue, and market share.
In this series of videos, we’ll be exploring the way that creativity, and a creative approach to business can lend itself to the success of an organization
So these are the things that were going to look explore in this series of videos, to look at all the different ways that creativity lends itself in a huge way to the success of an organization.
Austin Hill Shaw is a creativity expert who works with individuals who want to unlock their full creative potential and organizations that want to build cultures of innovation. He is the founder of Creativity Matters, author of The Shoreline of Wonder: On Being Creative, and inventor of The Creativity Quiz.
Go here to schedule a keynote, live training, online training, or hybrid (live and online) training to ignite the creativity in your organization.
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