“Why measure creativity? Because you need an innovative workforce,” say Sparcit, the pioneers in automated measurement of creativity.
Increasingly, organisations want people to have the capacity to develop ideas from insight through to implementation. In leaner organisations, with many of us in market and customer facing roles, the onus for innovation is being pushed out into the wider workforce.
We believe that creativity is a meta-skill that many of us will need for our long term careers, in knowledge-rich work in particular. And it’s learnable.
Creativity is learnable
There is good evidence behind our approach. 50 years ago, Joy Guilford and Paul Torrance developed research that showed 4 different aspects to divergent thinking:
- Fluency: measures the quantity of ideas we generate – important because more ideas can simply give more choices.
- Flexibility: the variety of types of ideas – so that we have very different options.
- Originality: how unusual are those ideas, compared to other people’s ideas? This matters because these ideas can be difficult for competitors to imitate.
- Elaboration: the level of detail in ideas – so that ideas begin to take shape.
Guilford and Torrance developed tests to measure our ability in these areas. Their impact on creative thinking has been evaluated in many educational and workplace settings. Sparcit’s leap-forward is to automate the scoring process for these tests, so the results are available in seconds, rather than days.
We use the Sparcit assessment during our programmes, to guide participants’ to develop learning goals that matter to them. Some choose to work on developing more original solutions; others on greater quantity of ideas, and so on. We develop:
- Fluency – through tools like Morphological Analysis and Lotus Blossom.
- Flexibility – using tools like Superhero and Analogies
- Originality – by tools such as Force-Fitting, Excursion and Pictures as Prompts. See this video animation: (https://youtu.be/NtQjls9yhkA)
- Elaboration – through tools including Brainwriting 365
If you’d like to know how to develop these skills, we run 2 day programmes.
Contact Rob for more details
On rob@bluegreenlearning or 07811 944782.
The whole team thoroughly enjoyed the Creative Thinking Course. For Solverboard this is was a critical piece of training to allow our team to support clients in getting the most out of our platform and the course did not fail to deliver! The team were so enthused by what they were learning on the course and, importantly, how it can be applied practically and relatively simply. Rob’s style is relaxed, informative and light hearted yet incredibly efficient – we got through a vast amount of information and his approach meant were engaged all the way.
A few weeks on and the team are still referring to how much they enjoyed and benefited and from the course. Highly recommended.
PHIL ATHERTON, FOUNDER, SOLVERBOARD
