This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
• Some morning thoughts on yesterday's late night posting on nurturing creativity. I do buy into the Einstein quote that says "The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap." The nurturing of which I speak involves making it safe to leap, or even consider leaping. Creativity can certainly be stifled through fear, uncertainty, and doubt about reactions to one's creative offerings. There's no reason I can see that, by driving out those responses, creativity is not supported or nurtured.
My favorite path to creative solutions for problems is to immerse myself in the dilemma/conflict of the situation through the TOC Thinking Processes, particularly with the "desert island" tool known as the Evarporating Cloud. Understanding the rational, logical underpinnings of "rock and hard place" circumstances and then digging deeper and deeper for assumptions that can be questioned is my common process for "creative" solutions. It's not a matter of living outside the rational system, but rather digging into it until it can be broken down at deep causes that prove to be ambiguous or erroneous. But back to the nurturing -- the process only works if someone is comfortable enough to undertake it, and it yields something truly creative if the analyst is willing to kill and eat some sacred cows of previous thoughtware.
At some point, once an environment has proven to be receptive to "questioning creativity," and people become practiced with a process of questioning, "creative," "out-of-the-box" solutions to dilemmas should be able to become commonplace.
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