Creative Caffeine

If you're asking this, you're not alone. It's a good question.

In answer, let me tell you a (true) story.

Nope. It's not about the cute little construction worker below. That's my daughter, a few years ago, getting ready to fix/ break something (we are never sure. I don't think she is either.)

My story is about a group of workers (many in hard hats) who were facing layoffs before creative thinking saved the day.

A small municipality in Orange County California was struggling. There were issues everywhere and not enough funds to resolve them (sound familiar, Joburgers?) The city manager realised that the problems weren't being solved by committees in board rooms. He wanted to involve more staff in finding solutions. He wanted workers from every deparment involved, from Roadworks to Parks & Recreation, from Police to Human Resources. The idea was to get those closest to the problems to apply their own thinking to the solutions.

So, the city manager put 173 employees...

Nina and I were excited to receive an email from Professor David Gill, telling us about his new paper that clearly demonstrates that creativity measured in childhood predicts future success.

Professor Gill wrote to us saying, "I've just finished writing a new paper where we show that creativity measured in childhood predicts educational attainment and success in the labor market, over and above the effect of traditional cognitive ability. Incredibly, we are not aware of any other work that links creativity in childhood to labor market outcomes!"

This is indeed extraordinary given society's huge interest in childhood creativity. Sir Ken Robinson's talk "Do schools kill creativity?" is the most watched TED talk of all time and has been downloaded more that 71 million times.

We would like to thank Professor Gill for sharing his excellent paper with us and would like to share his key findings with you. The quotations that follow are from his academic paper entitled "The...

The demand for creativity is growing

It’s hard not to notice all the limelight that creativity is getting in press and on social media lately. The clarion call is sounding ever louder.

• Creativity is first on the list of soft skills that companies need today (Sourced: LinkedIn Learning 2020 Workplace Learning Report)
• Creativity is in the top three most important skills for the workforce, along with complex problem solving and critical thinking (Source: World Economic Forum)
• Creativity is the number one capability that businesses require in order to navigate an increasingly complex world (Source: IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs)

We get it. Creativity is important!

Yet, we are not investing in creativity

Despite the ground swell of demand for this skill, the investment in creativity is lagging. Leaders are not putting their money where their mouth is.

We are still in a creativity crisis.

• Average creativity scores for the total population have been falling since 1990 (Source: Prof....