Almost every business, of every size, across sectors, employs creativity training, from whiteboard brainstorming sessions to design thinking. It’s a billion-dollar industry, and with good reason: Creativity is the main engine of innovation and entrepreneurship, and a major driver of resilience.
Juan Moyano/Stocksy
Summary.
Organizations today spend great sums of money on creativity training, hoping that it will spur innovative and entrepreneurial thinking among the ranks. Unfortunately, most of this training just doesn’t work. Why not? Because it puts too much faith in the powers of “divergent thinking,” or the random generation of new ideas — a process most of us today call brainstorming. A better approach, the author argues, is to stop relying on the overrated power of randomness in fostering creativity, and instead to adopt a more method-driven approach. In this article, he describes three new training techniques, which, as he puts it, overturn the “most common creativity practices employed by modern businesses.”