“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
― Albert Einstein

I have been to hundreds of job interviews. All of them appreciated structured thinking, judged skills and dug to know domain experience.

None of them tested creativity.

And later I figured, neither did I.

Why do we not? Is it not important anymore? Do we not need creativity?
Because its damn difficult.

Creativity can almost never be tested.

Its easier to verify Creativity in hindsight than to test for it.

So what do we do?

You and me are more alike than we know. The person at the other end of the Zoom call also bears unknown resemblances. Your team probably thinks very much alike.

The economy is filled with, not people, but clusters of thinkers.

Our Manufacturing industries cradled in Six Sigma could not have touched the rate of x per hour with less than y% defect, if its workforce went the creative route and did what they desired.

The industry survives and flourishes on every person doing the exact same thing in the exact same time with the exact same quality.

But, a painting is not sold, however, because it looks and feels the same as the other.

Products do not get sold, however, because they solve the same problem in a similar fashion.

Technology welcomes differences.

How do you know your Team needs a boost of Creativity?

• Converging Answers — Being on the same page is not always good
• Perpetual Alignment —Sheep following the Shephard

So, What Is Creativity?

Most of us would agree to it being something around “Ability to accomplish an outcome by thinking and doing something different.

Creativity is associated with Divergent thinking.

Creativity is a good factor to keep in mind when evaluating your team or candidates for hiring.

Hunting For The Treasure

General Awareness

The more diverse knowledge base one has the farther they could think, the more associations thy can make across areas, the more range of possibilities one could come up with.

Judge a person on Breadth as well as Depth.

Measure Creativity

If creativity is related to divergent thinking, lets just measure that.

Divergent thinking is demonstrated by presence of a range of solutions (not just one), and the difference between the suggested solutions.

There aren’t many established methods to measure creativity or divergent thinking. Asking simple questions and judging the answers on certain parameters provide us a good indicator:
- How many uses can you think of a Brick?
- Where can you use Milk Cartons?

Judge based for number of answers, originality, flexibility and level of detail.

Hire & Reward for difference

Individuals can be creative, but so can be teams.

I always wondered why diversity was a big deal in Business Schools. And then Class participation happened. Which was basically a war to get themselves heard to get easy marks. We were like vendors in a fish market.

I knew and talked Tech. My friend talked Finance. Another friend looked at the case from a completely different angle of demographics.

If one person can have x divergent thoughts, imagine what a diverse team could do.

In our hiring, we are often looking for similarity — similarity with others in the team, similarity of experiences, sometimes even similarity of demographics while all this while we should have been doing the opposite.

Others

Apart from the above, we have our pre-established ways of course to judge creativity based on past achievements.

Although its easier to use this method in areas predominantly known as creative — Art, Architecture, Writing, Design, etc.

The elegance of a piece of code, or a solution to a big problem is more difficult to judge owing to the heavy involvement of context and requirement of prior knowledge.

Final Thoughts

Creative teams make creative products, and creative products can capture markets.

Apart from hiring for skill, experience, and knowledge, let’s aim to hire for creativity as well.