Creativity is a strange topic. Schools spend years suppressing the natural creativity of students, emphasising that there is only one right answer - the teacher’s. Survival also teaches that creativity is dangerous. Any caveman who decided to take a creative approach and pull faces at a wild animal rather than run away did not have time to write up his experiment. Yet relying invariably on experience is just as risky. The result is tunnel vision, ignoring the fact that the world is changing at an immense pace. Business, especially small business, needs creativity or it dies. As Tom Peters puts it, "creativity and zest have become the prime creators of economic value".

It’s a common assumption that creativity is something you have or haven’t got, yet appropriate techniques can bring out anyone’s creative potential. Since the 1960s, creativity experts have been devising techniques for stimulating creativity to the extent that it is now a practical business discipline. Traditional management practices predate the current frenetic pace of change; creativity is one of a new set of skills necessary to manage in today’s business environment.

Creativity is rather like an under-used muscle: it needs exercise to build it up. Try this: spend a minute devising a way to use a single spoon to feed one hundred people simultaneously. Have you done the exercise yet? Don’t cheat - do it first, then read on. A single minute is all I’m asking for. Then click on the More button.

Copyright © Creativity Unleashed Limited 2006
Last update 01 April 2005

Originally published in the BT online magazine Business Connections.

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