“Talent Master” Book Introduction Chapter 3 Digital Creativity

Digital is the age of innovation. Human creativity is perhaps far more advanced than what can be achieved by a machine so far. Our thoughts, “gut feeling,” “intuition,” “insight,” and many more complex aspects of our consciousness and awareness greatly enhance our thinking and learning creativity. Creativity is #1 wanted quality for digital leaders and professionals today. All of us have a creative or artistic side, while also having a curious and scientific side to us. Creativity is, by nature, unique to each person. There is no template which you can apply and have a creative workforce an as overnight sensation, The reality is that creativity is both nature and nurtured. Especially today businesses get more cut-throat and it is understandable for them to push employees doing more with less, this puts stress on the talented people that is not conductive to experimental thinking, so unfortunately, it stifles workforce creativity and business competency for the long term.
Creativity is a long-term endeavor: It must be cultivated. However, most businesses measure success at the end of every growth cycle via quantitative way only. The best way to foster creativity is to help people communicate in a way that instills confidence. Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination with which you create new ideas and concreteness with which you can transform ideas into real work. Hence, it is practical to set a creative team in which, under the guidance of an innovative leader, visionary people work together synergistically with practical people to achieve a shared vision and well-defined goal to transform novel ideas to achieve their business values.  
People who can solve problems in a new way are innovators with creative wisdom: Creativity is expressive, productive, inventive, innovative and emergent. People with creative wisdom are simply those who can see around the corner, underneath and beyond, and effortlessly discover a better way to do things. To be a super problem-solver, individuals’ attitudes and aptitudes are all valid within the context of their own personal experiences. People also can learn several things relating to creativity and these can come under the heading of innovation management. For example, people can learn a process to define the innovation challenge, generate and select ideas, plan for these to be implemented. Hence management should direct workflow, support the health of the team, create an environment where people want to work, encourage brainstorming. And business innovation is bravery, and it could take you to a whole different place.  
Innovation is in a progress, and progress is simplicity: Creativity is a high level thinking process. Although we know that every intelligence has certain complexity in it, complexity is not equal to the complication, complexity is sometimes necessary, but complication can always be optimized. Creative minds not only have abundance of curiosity, but also follow the simplicity principle, or more precisely, “Simplexity,” having the mind to gain in-depth understanding about complexity, because people are complex, businesses are complex, and the world is complex, but having a “Keep it simple” attitude to see things as and what and where they are and be content and cool as it is. When exploring solutions to problems, keep it as simple as possible. Thus, digital professionals today need to be sophisticated enough to embrace digital complexity, but also be passionate about simplicity.
Hence, from talent management perspective, it’s important to assess the traits of innovators. The performance indicators to assess the intrinsic capacity of individuals include interdisciplinary skills, knowledge, plasticity, and synthesizing capability. Creative minds also have the ability to reframe the circumstances or conditions around a problem, and solve it creatively. Creativity is both innate and a skill. Only a few can really develop it to be something breathtaking so creativity at its inception is a very intimate personal pursuit, but from talent management perspective, it’s about how to build a creative working environment and unleash the collective human potential, for achieving business prosperity as well.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu