The Imaginative Mind: Social Creativity
Learning April 9th, 2009 This article continues with the topic of the imaginative mind and today I’ve cover another look at creativity, but from the social aspect this time. If you missed the last article, here it is: The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity
Cycles of Creativity
Creativity is very much a process, not a single event and so there are cycles of creativity in our actions and thoughts. Some days creativity just flows and others, it seems so distant. These cycles exist within our minds in all the same areas covered from the previous section on mental creativity but now we’ll look at it these cycles in a larger social environment. The same type of cycles where creativity is obvious, encouraged, built on, extended and heavily supported occurs in all kinds of social arenas.
- friendships and relationship
- organizations and clubs
- businesses and work groups
Even larger segments like geographic regions, industries, municipalities or media exposure groups can experience these up and down cycles of creativity. All of these cycles occur because of creative influence that either inspires or suppresses creativity throughout that social sphere and it cascades the effects. The same reasons why brainstorming is useful to the mind to spark new ideas and keep associations active in the mind applies here to social creativity. Each idea feeds the ideas of others, expanding the creative impact to larger groups. Things that stifle creativity make a similar impact by slowing down or eliminating the connections for creativity to grow.
Impact on the Mind
Understanding how these cycles impact our work, lives and environment gives us a more accurate model to predict and control the swings that social creativity is impacted by. Keeping active with the actions that spread creativity and avoiding some of the typical problems areas that kill creativity works in a social environment to ensure the imaginative mind has a sandbox to explore. I believe the mind is at its best when learning, growing and building itself and it can only do this to its fullest when the imagination is active with as many options for creativity as possible.
Contributing to Creativity
There are a number of ways to contribute to socially boost your creativity. The ones I think have the biggest impact are the following:
Eliminate Criticism and Complaining
Criticism and complaining are really the quickest things that kill creativity. Criticism can emotionally shut down a person so quickly that the only creative thoughts they will have is of escape or revenge. It is something that naturally transforms our minds into a completely new state unless we learn to handle criticism and control our response and state of mind consciously.
The social impact this can have can reach many people at once and unfortunately this bad behaviour can also be quite contagious. The best thing you can do with these items to contribute more to social creativity is to eliminate criticism of others, of ideas and of actions. The same goes for complaining since it encourages a very negative thought process not helpful in activating the imagination in any way. Obviously eliminating these is not easy, but they can certainly be reduced and they can definitely be done in private at least in order to minimize the influence to any audience available.
Brainstorming
While I covered this in the previous article on mental creativity it is certainly applicable here in a social atmosphere as well. Brainstorming in a group activates the imagination of the whole group and quickly allows ideas to germinate with each other and spread between everyone’s minds. It can be done as a group on purpose with a specific topic or goal in mind or it can happen through other media with no initial intention of doing it! Social media and viral systems are perfect examples of this as a group gains access to shared thoughts and ideas, they become enabled to share more themselves which continues to feed the process. This type of social brainstorming happens a lot with online social groups like twitter (buy cheap twitter followers)and stumbleupon , as with all the other social networks.
Asking Questions – Question everything
Questions come about from curiosity and of course curiosity broods creativity. Therefore, questioning is a powerful action to contribute more to creativity as well. Everything a person questions, they can learn from and gain some kind of insight from. Questions about how and why something is how it is, leads to seeing more pieces of any puzzle and that puts the mind into a state where it has to think beyond the logic to imagine the solution before all the pieces are understood.
Questions are a huge part of a healthy learning process and they will trigger the mind to explore and wonder with curiosity at things. I’ve written about using questions for learning and training others in this article here, Using the 5W Questions to Provide Training . Questioning the things around you has other benefits as well, it is a useful tool to expand your relationships as well. This is because it shows curiosity to another person. Read about that here, Open Ended Questions .
Avoid Perfectionism
My final point in looking at social creativity and the ways to contribute to it is to avoid perfectionism. Perfectionism slows down any creative process and it quickly strangles any new ideas from emerging as it keeps the attention on an original subject or topic while it is closely scrutinized and perfected. There is some room to explore perfecting something with a creative look, but it is usually too focused on one thing where new ideas have no place to be explored until the first topic or item is first perfected.
Getting past perfection so that more ideas can be explored gives way to identify more possibilities and have more options to approach things with. This applies in everything from simple day to day life plans and tasks, to complex engineering design problems or even social planning. The Pareto principle is useful with social creativity as well and that is where you apply the 80/20 rule. Perfectionists try to get things to that 100% level and they spend most of their time and effort making very little progress once past that 80% point.
So, next in my next article, I’m going to explore how the imaginative mind is applied for innovation, which I consider to be the application of creativity. If you are not signed up yet and don’t want to miss any future articles, please sign up for my RSS feed here or by email here .
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Next: The Imaginative Mind: Innovation
April 9th, 2009 at 8:42 AM
Hey Mike,
I really appreciate both of these articles and how you dissected the creative process. I like to think of the spark of creativity as a seed. Like any seed they grow better in certain conditions. Things like brainstorming and asking questions create favorable conditions for growth. Whereas complaining and criticism are the opposite.
I have to fight the tendency toward Perfectionism. I have learned to let the creative energy flow unhindered until I have something to work with. Then I go back and refine things. Some days creativity just doesn’t seem to be there. The next time that happens I am going to check and see if I am doing any of the negative things you mentioned.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:51 AM
You make some excellent points in this post. I particularly like the ideaing of avoiding perfectionism. Perfect is often the enemy of good, as I’m sure you’ve heard before.
This post on my blog might interest you:
http://positivelypresent.typepad.com/positively_present/2009/04/stop-slackin-get-crackin.html
April 9th, 2009 at 11:54 AM
My grandfather, who was a rough tough German, told me to never stop asking questions. I was one pain in the butt curious kid. He liked it and encouraged my behavior. It’s why I still ask as many questions as I can. Learning is forever.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:01 PM
I left criticism and complaining in the past,but as for perfectionism,it is still present in my life,I realize it is a kind of extremety and must be avoided,every day I face the problems and they must be solved easily and quickly with the help of tools I have in my hands at the moment.This training helps me in finding simple solutions and feeling satisfaction from it.It really makes me happy.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:37 AM
Avoiding perfectionism sure is one that is backwards from what we would first think, but is actually helpful. In the battle between someone who puts out garbage product and the person who is still trying to perfect their unreleased product, the garbage product will actually have a chance. That should be enough to convince people to put out what they have before giving up without even making a bold release of it. Kids tend to release what is on their mind and show their creations without thinking as much about results, and that is one of the biggest strengths of kids. The minute you catch yourself slowing down because of something perfectionist-related, produce whatever comes first and continue on, because the “potential improvement value” of the slowdown is usually not substantial.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:53 AM
I certainly enjoyed this post, especially the practical guide on how to enhance social creativity. I must add as always that potting a group / a team in unknown conditions – i.e. out of the comfort zone – is often a very quick igniter of the creative process. If you’re forced by the environment to find a solution you’ll do i usually faster than when you’re not.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:32 PM
@Jonathan – I like the concept of it being a seed for growth! Creativity is such a contagious process if done in the social atmosphere. Creativity does tend to come and go in cycles but often that is because of a lacking social influence factor or even perfection getting in the way.
@Positivity Present – That’s a great saying and an important one especially with killing creativity. Thanks for the linklove at your blog as well!
@Karl – Its great seeing that in children and how much love and curiosity they have for new unexplored things. If one our systems didn’t stifle that so much, we’d have more people with that attitude later in life like you, still asking questions to learn!
@Dicki – If you’ve stopped critism and complaining, perfectionism will be much simpler. If you focus on creative ideas and processes, you can drive yourself from perfectionism even faster. Keep at it, you’ll surely overcome!
@Armen – Great points about relating this to kids. The creative mind is so visible in children they can teach us a lot. Perfectionism really is a creativity killer if you let it interfere with getting starting on something or moving on to new things. Its funny how this is also taught and trained in society by so many of our systems yet its completely stifling to a creative culture. That fear of failure is a powerful roadblock for many people who hide or block their creative ideas.
@Dragos – Nice addition, the comfort zone is definitely a trap (just like I mentioned in my comment back to Armen) since it blocks a lot of people and ideas into repetitive cycles instead of new and creative ones. Great point!
April 12th, 2009 at 11:09 PM
Hi Mike, the problem about brainstorming is when we present our ideas we would worry that others won’t accept our ideas. We should get over this worrying because it makes us less creative.
Thanks for sharing, Mike. 🙂
April 13th, 2009 at 5:11 PM
Arswino, yes you are right. However, it is not a problem with brainstorming, its a problem with how people participate and respond during brainstorming that makes it less creative. I think I’ll have to write an article specifically on that to to point out some good ways to brainstorm and things to watch out for.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:00 PM
Fear of negative criticism is definitely a creativity killer. Always strive to give your criticism in as positive of a light as possible, and others will be encouraged to let their creativity shine, instead of holding it back.
Great article, and series!
~ Kristi
April 28th, 2009 at 7:17 AM
In my opinion, perfectionism is sometimes an excuse for procrastination. People sometimes wait for all the information before makingany decisions. The problem is that they will never get all the information they want.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:57 PM
@Start Blogging – You nailed it! Exactly what I think when I see perfectionism. It just makes people procrastinate more and more all while believing they are justified in doing so.
May 12th, 2009 at 8:27 AM
I agree with start blogging.
September 1st, 2010 at 1:06 AM
Don’t want to be perfectionist, but I think you misspelled Pareto. In your text, we can read Perato
September 1st, 2010 at 6:27 AM
Thanks Michel, always appreciate getting minor fixes like that.