Creative People Must Be Stopped Read Online Free PDF Page B

company identified in its recruiting process? Were Silver’s creative abilities genetic and unique only to him, or are they ones everyone has but that they just don’t express? And, finally, why on earth wasn’t he fired!?
    Are Innovators Born or Made?
    You may have heard the Post-it saga before and wondered why 3M didn’t see the immense value of Silver’s product much earlier. That is the thought that occupied me the first time I heard it. But after considering the story more carefully over the years, I came to understand it to be less about how organizations recognize a brilliant idea and more about how they make innovation immensely difficult because they don’t understand what creativity is or how to foster it.
    Despite one hundred years of study, there is still a great deal of contention about what creativity is and where it comes from. The one thing that does seem certain, however, may surprise you: there is no such thing as a creative personality (Taggar, 2002). At least, creativity is not a fundamental attribute of “personality” in the technical sense that psychologists reserve for those core behavioral tendencies that are relatively stable over time, such as how introverted or extroverted we are.
    But if personality is not what determines how creative we are, then what is? Research suggests that our habits of perception and thinking drive creativity more than some mysterious genetic trait—and habits are things we can do something about. Specifically, the power to be creative largely relies on three core components:
Perception
Intellection (thinking)
Expression
    But if these three components are the heart of individual creativity, it is also just as true that limitations, or constraints, found within each of these three components can squash creativity flat. We can all learn to be more creative by overcoming the constraints associated with perception, intellection, and expression. By the same token, an understanding of these constraints can help organizations do a better job of supporting individuals’ efforts to be innovative. Let’s look at some of these constraints in detail.
    Perception Constraints: Looking Without Seeing
    The first step in the creative process is to get raw data (perceptions) into your brain, where they can serve as the basis of new ideas. Although this may seem as simple as looking around you, you often look without seeing, certainly without seeing clearly what really matters to your problem.
    Selective Perception and Stereotyping
    Let’s start by considering how our perceptual apparatus actually gathers data we use in everyday life. Most of us are “naive realists,” which is a fancy way of saying that we take for granted that the world outside our bodies is just as we experience it through our senses. In fact, however, perception even at a very physical level, is always selective, limited, and, in a sense, biased.
    Figure 2.2 shows the human body with the parts shown in a size proportional to the number of touch-sensitive nerves that connect that part to the brain. Notice that your big toes have an enormous amount of neural representation, which means that they are constantly sending immense amounts of data to your brain. Yet when was the last time you actually paid close attention to all that “big-toe” data? (Probably it was the last time you stubbed your toe.)
    Figure 2.2
    Source: Adapted from Knapp, 1978.
    This simple example illustrates a larger truth: we’re constantly bombarded by vast amounts of information that we routinely ignore because of the cognitive limits of the human brain. One strategy the brain uses to deal with the onslaught of input coming from the senses is to look for patterns that simplify the data. For example, when you enter a room and experience certain visual sensations, your brain looks for a close-enough match to a set of familiar patterns and very quickly labels its perceptions as