Defining Personal Creativity - Essay Example

?CREATIVITY: DEFINED Creativity is defined as an adjective that can referred to any new creation (be it in anything) that has some value attached to it. As an example, we can call William Shakespeare creative since he created the legendary plays of Hamlet and Macbeth or we can call Fleming creative since he was creative enough to discover urea and penicillin. Discoveries or inventions can be both related to being creative and there is no specific scale to measure creativity since it is inherent and not always tangible (Michalko, 2001). Creativity can be associated with multiple subjects; therefore, it can only be defined in the context of the study matter. Creativity is not an acquired or learnt art. It is inherent and comes out according to the situation. It is indeed the transformation of some ideas into reality. Since it is inherent, it can be always displayed with some thoughtful improvisation and persistence. It has been noted, though, that many people are actually reluctant to show off their real creative skills since they actually are not involved directly in the decision making performance or they are fearful of what other people may think of them or because of the fact that they may lose their current position if they talk awkward. Creativity seems awkward when it’s first discussed, e.g. everyone denied Einstein theories at first but years after they discovered what a creative genius he was! There is another aspect of creativity which is the practical side on it. One can be only termed creative if creativity is applied rather than kept inside the head. This means that one has to not only think but have to make sure that the thinking is appropriately developed into some value (Young, 1985). Creativity can be of two major types. A discovery that was studied before but wasn’t carried out due to some reason but is made now lies under psychological creativity whereas a complete new product launch based on a novel idea is categorized under historical creativity. Historical creativity actually refers to inventions. Example of these can be the Kepler’s Law of planetary motion which was actually thought of first by Plato and other Greek scholars but was officially penned down by Kepler. Illizarov apparatus though lies under historical creativity since Russian doctor was the first to use mechanical engineering in his apparatus to solve open fractures. Creativity is a complete procedure and constitutes of different steps. The foremost step involves recognition of problem and definition of scope of the problem. The second step is where you generally drop the idea for a while and think about different alternative approaches to the problem. The third step is however, the most important step which is when you get enlighten or get the solution, very similar to Archimedes discovery of finding the right mass of gold crown. This moment is generally an impulse moment but actually is the crux of the whole problem and indeed the focal point of the whole creative thought process. The final step is where a creative solution is applied over the problem and the results are analyzed to check how viable the solution is. Creativity can be used best if it is applied as a problem solving agent. The most surprising thing about this problem solving strategy is the fact that we sometimes defy the way our brain works. I say defy because solutions are normally worked on impulse and don’t require learning mechanisms which our brain is normally used to. That’s actually the point where creativity just comes out and solves the problem. The important thing about such solutions is the fact that these solutions wouldn’t have existed before and nobody should have prior knowledge about these problems or their respective solutions. These problems may be or may not be hypothesis but one thing is for sure that we do come across many of these problems in real world scenarios. This creative solution actually leads to an innovation which further down the road converts into a standard. Innovation is dependent on creativity though it’s not necessary that all creative things would become innovation or inventions since they may not have materialistic value or they may be a partial solution to a problem. CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION It has been agreed by most scholars and theologians that creativity is the foremost step of the innovation process. Innovation cannot be started off randomly and it requires a creative solution as the basis step. Innovation is a design procedure but creativity isn’t since its impulse. Creativity doesn’t require modeling or the aid of technology but innovation does. Creativity for most parts an art but innovation is a scientific topic (Legrenzi, 2005, 21-35). Thus, innovation, invention and standardization are all dependent of creativity. Creativity can be both individual or on the basis of a group. Creativity in business and creative leadership are the best elective choices for an MBA courses. Creative and out of the box solutions are highly encouraged since they are the only solutions for real time life scenarios. These solutions can be sometimes expensive but in the long term they can be beneficial. Since I don’t have many real times scenarios where I was very creative, yet I would like to quote an event where I experimented with my creativity and besides winning satisfaction, won some laurels and praise too. THE EXPERIENCE The experience in itself is not a big one but it has all the capabilities of being one of the most memorable incidents of my life since I stretched myself beyond my normal capacity. This event can qualify as an event where I not only showed exceptional creative leadership qualities but truly transformed a team into making an event successful which was way beyond their imagination when it started. The biggest event was the launch of my father’s convenience store and the associated “change for life” scheme. This event had been nationally supported and was all over the television around two years ago; however, it has died down ever since. The length of the event was only a day, however, it was very intense and we had to put in a lot of effort prior to it. The event attracted the local paper “Mansfield Radio”, and the local community. This event because of its immense national television advertisements and campaign by the Government, was always of keen interest to the local NHS, our symbol group Costcutter and the local community. The event was fully organized by me with some help from my area manager from Costcutter and the local NHS team. We wanted to ensure that we had presence in our local community. We also wanted to inculcate a feel that our store is more than a store and it’s always involved with them in their mattes. Change for life, precisely, did just that for us. Change4Life, is a nationwide campaign which has been developed by the department of health to change family life’s by improving diet, exercise and inducing an attitude to good health. The main aims of this campaign are to target young families and infusing changes to the modern ways of living instead of accusing parents. If plans of this nature are not implemented, it has been predicted that 90 percent of today’s children would be overweight or obese by 2050. Change4Life promotes 5 a day tips for healthy shopping and cooking and, recipes as well as ideas on how to inspire kids to get moving. The preparations of this event started in early February, 2010. Since it was coinciding with my universities’ end of year exams and assignment deadlines, I found it to be a difficult period. Now, a little bit of background about me. Since my college times, I have been always involved in my family businesses. The start was from the manufacturing industry and then we went into retail business. I always looked after the paperwork and relationships with my stakeholders. I believe, in any business, stakeholders are the key. The Convenience store my father bought in 2007 needed an uplift and renovation. We, therefore, after buying the business, slowly started to develop and revamp the store. Because I had always believed that stakeholders were the key and I needed to develop relationships in my local community, I started researching on things I needed to do to achieve this. That’s when I saw this opportunity that my symbol group was offering about promoting change4life. This was a perfect opportunity for me since my college was right opposite to the store. Before I could move forward with my new innovative idea, I had to confirm if the school was on board with me. As I am still quite young and have a lot on hand, I didn’t always come across professional, maybe, sometimes due to being caught off guard dressed in joggers, etc. For this reason, I was afraid that the school would not take me seriously. I found this to be the case when dealing face to face with other stakeholders of the business. However, they all slowly found out that I was the only central point of contact within the business and I was thoroughly professional in what I did. Hence, they slowly started to take me seriously. This was a huge problem for me at the beginning, however, I found out that other stakeholders were slowly adapting to it since they started commenting on how responsible I was at my age. I gave the school a quick call to setup an initial meeting where I could introduce the “change for life” campaign to them. The school was more than happy at my idea and therefore, allowed me to setup a meeting with the head teacher and the business relations manager. Before, I went in to meet the head teacher and the business relationship manager in the school; I had to ensure that I was prepared on what I was going to say to them, to ensure that they were 100% on board, and to attract their presence to my store on the day of the launch. Hence, I started brainstorming the benefits the school would get if they decided to come on board with us. Firstly, I gave the head office a call to inquire about the funds that were required. “Making A Difference Locally” is a charity that was launched to help independently-run local stores so that they can add value to their communities with the help of donations for local charities or good causes - such as local football teams, hospices or other qualifying charities. The scheme is truly local as money is raised by local stores over time through the sales of specific products in their stores. I then choose the beneficiary for the money and a donation was paid to the charity or cause by the “Making A Difference Locally Charity”. The head office confirmed me that I have raised ?200 for selling products with the making a difference locally, logo. This was great news as I could use this money to donate to the school if they were a registered charity. Hence, this was one of the questions I had to ask from the school administration. I quickly jotted down the ideas I had and went along to the meeting. The Head teacher and the business relationship manager were impressed with my ideas and impressed with what I had done so far. Because they had offices right opposite to my store, they knew my parents very well and had noticed me too, before but never actually got round to meeting me in person. They also confirmed me that they were a registered charity which was great news as I could now tell them that I had ?200 to donate to them for new sporting activities. They were both chuffed at the donation and said they were looking to buy a football kit for the team; hence the funds could be used for that. It was great to know that they were on board; hence, I could now start moving forward with my event plans. Because this was my first ever event for the store, I wanted to make a big deal about it. I had communicated this to my area manager and one day we both sat and brainstormed on what we can actually do to make a huge impact which we were aiming for. It’s always said that two heads are better than one and on that day we realized why the statement is true. We brainstormed lots of ideas and I did some exploratory research on it. When I was researching I came across the fact that NHS had a department that promotes “change 4 life” as well, therefore, I thought about getting in touch with them to see if they can give us some extra support on the event day. Hence, I gave them a call and arranged a meeting with one of the staff members who was intrigued to know that we knew about the campaign and what were our ideas for promoting it to the local school. They seemed to be overwhelmed by the idea and confirmed their availability even before we met them. This meeting was setup yet everything just seemed to be whirling out of my control. University exams and assignment deadlines were getting closer. Paperwork just seemed to keep piling on and I had a dozens of emails to respond to as well as going to lectures, seminars and actually planning the whole event. This was when I realized I had to be more organized as I had so much work on hand that I kept forgetting things I had to do. I got myself a diary and started maintaining a daily to do lists. Whenever I remembered something I had to do, I used to jot it down in my phone and then transfer it over to my diary. This made it very easy for me to remember all my daily to-do’s and helped me to organize, prioritize and delegate tasks to lessen my workload. The meetings came and went, with both the NHS and the school and we kept on brainstorming on the activities we needed to do. However, the main problem with NHS was that they were short on funds; hence, we had to do as much as possible in-house. I and my father also worked out a budget of ?250 which we could use for bits and bobs of the event. With this money, we decided to create a “change4life” goody bag for every student in the primary school which would contain a change for life booklet on recipe ideas, healthy shopping, and some information on keeping active and, little things you can change to keep a healthy diet. This was accompanied along with a complimentary apple and banana given by the store to the school kids. This was very hard to do because firstly I had to ensure that I had enough budgets to provide this for the whole school. When I did all the calculations, I found that I was falling short with the budget but before I approached my father with this information, I decided to go to my supplier of fruit and vegetables and told him about the campaign and what we were looking to do. I mentioned to him that we were looking to increase our range of fruit and vegetables and promote it in our local area. I made him realize the positives of the campaign and what it would do to both our sales and his sales of fresh produce. For example, I made them realize that I would be promoting it a not only on the event day but will keep a larger proportion of their supplies in my store; hence, we will be buying more produce from them and therefore, we would not be increasing only our own sales but there’s too. The supplier seemed to be impressed with the idea. He promised to be on board and gave me some free stock to as a giveaway on the day. This was great news since it meant I had more money to play around with for other activities on the day. Once this was sorted, we brainstormed other ideas such as live cooking on the day to show how to make a healthy snack in minutes. We asked if we can borrow a table from the opposite school as we already had a little gas cooker that we could use. The ingredients needed were to be donated by the store as the NHS could provide a cook who would look out for all the criteria to ensure that we qualify on health and hygiene parameters. This was another confirmed idea we would do on the day. We then looked at other ideas such as having a bouncing castle on the day and face painters; however this plan did not worked out. We researched a bit into it and found that face painting especially during school hours was not appropriate and was just expensive for what it was and the bouncing castle idea was not viable, as we needed soft ground to put it on, just in case a child was to fall of the castle. We then did some further research and looked into activities that could help us build a little fund that NHS could use to buy materials to promote theses campaign in future; hence we set up raffles on the day and these activities would generate a little income that would go to the change4life cause. The NHS helped me a lot in making the day into what it was. We were fishing around and came across a smoothie bike which we thought was just perfect. The store again would donate fruit to make smoothies and the children from the school could peddle themselves a nice little glass of smoothie. This again would be a great idea introduce smoothies to keep kids healthy and active. Because of all the commotion of how the big day was going to be, we thought why not shout out about it. Therefore, we invited more local stakeholders and made posters and leaflets for the launch day to bring it in front of the local community. The posters were mostly handmade and some were from the NHS which we borrowed for the day. For the leaflets I negotiated with our Symbol group to provide us for free since we were promoting the symbol group as well. We then distributed these out and got in touch with the local police, fire wardens and local sporting teams to come over on the day. Most of them were more than happy to come and support the event. Before the big day, we had a couple of early hiccups since the British weather couldn’t make its mind up. We decided to have a shelter just in case if it rained. Buying a gazebo was very expensive and useless after the day; hence I did some searching around and was able to borrow one from a friend. This was great, however, putting it up couple of days beforehand, I found that it had holes and was not in the greatest of states. The only way around this was to cover the holes with fabric material which we were lucky to have due to having some stocks leftover from our previous clothes manufacturing business. This was rectified and set up a day before to ensure that we don’t have any further hiccups. The nerves were kicking in now as the day was getting closer and I didn’t know whether everything was in place, therefore, I sent out an email to all the parties involved just to confirm everything was going all right. By this time I was exhausted and just thought of packing it all, simply due to the excess work load. I just thought to myself I’ve got this far up so I just need to hang in there. I just couldn’t wait until it was over and done with. Finally the day came and the event kicked off well. The morning was quite manic as we were all running around to ensure that there were enough goody bags made so we can hand them on time for the assembly in the school and ensured that everything was ready for the 12pm start. All went well and the day went to the plan. A section of kids came from the school and we had great fun. I myself dressed up as a banana, and other members from the NHS came dressed in cauliflowers and oranges. Members from the local police came down and let the kids take pictures with them. Firemen came and showed kids around the fire truck, the local football team came down and donated a football to the raffle with all the team members signature on it and so did the local hockey team. The Mansfield team came and did an article. It was all great and the event fared off well. The locals were really impressed with what we did and it turned out to be just great. The fresh fruit and vegetable sales grew rapidly. Surely, the message was successfully communicated. MY CREATIVITY My creativity actually lies in leading the team from front and coming up with out of the box solutions to counter problems that weren’t experienced before. We were resource parsimonious and actually had to bring in people from different spheres of life. The cancellation of the event would have put our store’s reputation at stake. This event had media coverage and was the only source of discrimination between all the leading stores of the locality. The first creative idea that came to my mind was in recognizing the opportunity and since I didn’t had any experience of organizing such an event beforehand, I always knew that this event will take a lot out of me but is the only way to promote the store and pave some donations for the school. Of course, the facilities weren’t that good but they weren’t bad either. The second idea was to make sure that all stakeholders were on the same wavelength so that things can be arranged in an organized fashion. Psychoanalytical Theory of Creativity can be rightly applied in my case since I had scarce resources and had to be unconventional in raising funds for the conference (Oremland & Cremland, 1997). The other theory that can be associated with my creative moves is the humanistic theory since everyone wants fame and recognition more than money (Rzadkiewicz, 2009). This event even at the start guaranteed my store popularity amongst the other stores in the area. Sales were all luck that I somehow managed to get due to some unconventional strategies and the ability to negotiate with different people. OUTCOME The impact that my creativity had on the event was tremendous. I say this because we not only covered the event expenses within the lessened budget but also managed to generate income with the constraint of scarce resources. Nothing went wrong in the event except for the fact that the team had sleepless nights for a week’s time. My creativity was well appreciated by the school administration and other stakeholders of the store. Adding to it was the psychological feeling of performing well against all the odds was a big release factor. CONCLUSION Following are the learning outcomes of this assignment: Creativity is spontaneous Creativity can even come for the lowest level of hierarchy Decision making is a team effort Creative Leaders are the best Formal solutions are not the only existing solutions of a problem Some entrepreneurial skills are required for one to pursue creativity Creative solutions are risky and may be disruptive if not applied properly This assignment helped me to correlate the theories that I learnt in this course with a true event of my life. If I would have known these formal theories and basis of creativity before, I would have been better equipped to tackle the rough situations. Moreover, this assignment has taught me on making a choice between where it is wise to be creative and where not to be. We actually don’t realize that we were creative until we know the formal description and categorization of what is creativity. The assignment has actually given me more confidence and now I can deal real life situations with more creativity and confidence. References Legrenzi, P., 2005. Creativity and Innovation pp. 21-35[online] Available at: [Accessed 27 April 2012] Michalko, M., 2001. Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius. Ten Speed Press Oremland, J. D., & Cremland, J. D., 1997. The Origins and Psychodynamics of Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. International University Press Rzadkiewicz, C., 2009. The Five Major Theories of Creativity [online] Available at: [Accessed 27 April, 2012] YOUNG, J. G., 1985. What Is Creativity? The Journal of Creative Behavior [online] Available at: [Accessed 27 April 2012] Read More