Creativity explained with charts

Charts to analyze creativity

I love charts. An image is worth 1,000 digits, right?

When we build a chart we exercise our creativity (too far away sometimes) trying to provide the best visualization of our data, the easiest way to show relationships between parameters, and of course, trying to be elegant and look professional.

Creativity plays an important role since we can handle multiple variables easily, including chart styles, colors, scales, number of parameters, time scope, numeric format, etc.

I wished to dig a little bit into the creative usage of charts and it came to my mind the idea of analyzing the creative process using charts. In other words, inverting the original idea: using charts to analyze creativity instead of using creativity to build charts.

Personal attributes of creative people

Some charts have the dual virtue of allowing disparate or incompatible indexes to coexist while providing instant insight into the data. Such is the case of radar-type graphics. If we put together in one of these graphs the measurement of personal attributes of a highly creative person; such as analytical and mathematical skills, memory, experience, ability to oral expression, imagination, artistic sense, intuition, etc., we would probably find an image similar to this one:?

In my opinion, you don't need the typical attributes of highly intelligent people to be a highly creative person. Great expression skills are not required, nor an extraordinary mathematical capacity. Artistic skills are not required either, although everything helps, of course.

Creativity and age

It is interesting to imagine how a graph could look like in which the creativity of the same person is measured throughout their lives. It would probably be different from what a 'critical' thinker might assume. The curve would have a sinusoidal shape, showing two creativity maxima, both in childhood and in adulthood prior to senescence. To what could this late-age renaissance of creativity be attributed? You will ask yourself. I would attribute it to three very logical factors:

• Stress relief when economic stability and/or retirement are achieved
• Accumulated experience acquired along the way (many patterns of thought, each one of them forming long necklaces)
• Free time for contemplation and free thought

The final decline that you see on the graph does not always occur. There are wonderful examples of great minds who maintained their creativity at an advanced age, such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, Miguel ángel, José Saramago, Johann Goethe, Pablo Picasso, etc.

Creativity and stress

Stress plays a double role in the creativity of the individual. On one side, the set of factors that produce it, such as work or economic pressure, prevent free and disruptive thinking, since problems require concentration and a line of critical thinking, but on the other hand, they maintain alertness and they certainly impulse the instinct for analysis and questioning, which are valuable creative tools, especially in extreme situations. Unfortunately, too much stress, or a dose that exceeds the individual's ability to absorb, will simply wear them down.

Innovation vs Disruption

If you want to achieve a disruptive creation, do not think about the needs of the masses, but about those of the individuals who are on the edges of the distribution curve of your market.

Innovative products are designed with the aim of maximizing demand, while paradigm shifts –the truly disruptive creations– occur when solutions far from the conventional are sought, thinking of the particular needs of some individuals.

Creativity and information

The obsessive search for information to solve problems or to impulse creativity leads to a dead end. New ideas are not inside current data but in the surrounding neighborhood.

Observe the negative effect produced by the obsessive search for information. If you want to get to the root causes of a problem or have the statistics of the last twenty years or all the exploded views of a mechanism before undertaking the search for a solution, probably all you will sink into a jungle of paper and lose objectivity, the overall view, and therefore the possibility of thinking creatively, since you will be immersed in a traditional critical thinking process.

Creativity and tenacity

There is no doubt that tenacity rewards. Solutions do not appear clear and shining like a piece of gold at first sight. They are like diamonds instead, appearing initially as a dark and hard spot that must be worked and polished to reveal their true value. Dedication and hard work are always required to succeed during creative work.

Creativity and productivity

Do not assume that more creativity leads to more productivity. Sometimes a lot is too much. These graphs are intended to show you that finding the best possible solution is probably not necessary – or even convenient.

The time and resources spent on finding a better solution are not always worth it. Experience and common sense will tell us when we have reached an acceptable solution.

Observe how productivity reaches a maximum, when creativity is at an average value. If we force our creativity (going up the curve), we can lose productivity.

The graph above also exposes an undeniable truth: optimal productivity is achieved without achieving excellence in creativity, which implies that any moderately creative person can reach the most productive solutions.

In other words, if you're very creative I'm sure you can always sharpen your pencil a bit more, but probably by the time you get the perfect point, it will be too late.

Creativity and technology

"It is increasingly difficult to create something new. When an idea occurs to me, it turns out that someone else got it first".

Surely you have also heard it, and also your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather, and…

However, technology provides us with better and better tools to impulse our creativity. We can say now that all the accumulated knowledge of all civilizations is one click away. This is amazing. We have more time, we have more tools, we have better testing fields, and we have all the required items for testing and validation. We must become more and more creative every day.

A.I. is the most powerful tool we could ever dream of to increase our creativity skills. It is a great opportunity

In brief

I think Creativity is a voluntary activity that can be impulsed with tenacity and a methodological approach.?Some rules must be observed to release the creative skills of each individual. I summarized them in an acronym that I called PIQAS (Provoke, Ignore, Question, Analyze, Sort). Each one of these rules is explained in deep in my book Creaffity (in Spanish). I will be glad to send it (for free, of course) to anyone who is interested.

Thanks for reading.