Creativity is commonly accepted as a critical skill in most human pursuits from the arts to marketing and considered of great value both in academia and industry.
With the exponential boom in technological development, computers and AI are taking over thousands of human jobs. Almost every sector of endeavour has become and is becoming more competitive due to the growing population and rise of technology. More and more, creativity is becoming an invaluable skill. Our unique and unreplicable (hopefully) edge over technology and AI.
For example, a landmark study in 2010 for IBM to understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs met face-to-face with 1541 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders in 60 nations and 33 industries, who cumulatively singled out creativity as the number one leadership competency of the future.
Furthermore, LinkedIn Learning performed a study using their Economic Graph to determine the one skill companies needed the most. Can you guess what it was?
In order to successfully navigate an increasingly complex and uncertain world such as new government regulations, changes in global economic power centres, exponential technological transformation, and rapidly evolving customer preferences, CEOs believe that ‘creativity’, more than rigour, management discipline, or even vision, is required.
There is a clear desire and necessity for the cultivation of creativity. Unfortunately, this same study also discovered that under 50% of global CEOs believe their enterprises are sufficiently trained to appropriately meet the complexities of the ever-changing business environments. This is despite the fact that 25% of companies with over 100 employees provide some method of creativity training for their employees. Furthermore, an article published in 2014 by the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation reported that design tutors are unable to articulate HOW they helped their students develop their individual creativity.
The problem is not that we don’t recognise the importance of creativity. It is that we do not know how to train it. Our understanding of the type and quality of training best suited to teach and stimulate creativity is lacklustre in many cases.
Academic reviews have identified hundreds of different creativity training programs, including divergent thinking to creative persuasion. These same reviews concluded most of these methods to be ineffective and extracting what has worked from these programs and why has been just as ambiguous.
It is clear that there is an enormous discrepancy between our desire for creativity and our ability to train it. This is a problem.
This is where Flow training has something to offer.
Ordinarily, creativity training targets cognitive changes or out-of-the-box thinking strategies, helping individuals to think differently. However, being truly creative is not solely about adopting new thinking processes, although this can help, rather changing the state in which we are operating.
Our brains are capable of performing beyond your perceived limits, all the information you need is already there. Just waiting to be realised. One’s ability to connect disparate thoughts and produce new ideas is a state of being, not a definitive process or method.
You only have to think back on a moment when you were at your most creative. You will realise that you were in a different state, immersed in a different experience to normal.
If you want to learn more about this state and how to cultivate it into your life, we have an excellent team of experts who have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching flow in others. We offer one-to-one coaching as well as evidence-based online courses, updated constantly, and based on cutting edge flow research.
Join our community and become a Flow Seeker.
Think less, be more.