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About 12 months ago, we set out to see if it was possible to do what was previously thought to
be impossible to accurately predicting whether a person would be an effective creative
thinker at work. To our knowledge, there was not a single, scientifically validated process to
do this. We found that in the majority of cases, most companies were not using any method for
assessing creativity, despite claiming it to be a critical competency for staff to possess.
There were a couple of exceptions. In creative industries, such as advertising and design,
recruiters would typically look at a job applicants portfolio of past work to see how
creative they were. Of course, we all know peoples tendencies to stretch the truth. I used to
work at the advertising agency that came up with the idea for Earth Hour. And despite the fact
that only one person came up with the idea, I heard about many people from the agency claiming
that they were the one who gave birth to this idea and had put it in their portfolio.
In other industries, creative thinking is sometimes assessed by giving people a difficult
problem to solve and observing how they answer the problem. For example, Microsoft famously
asks job applicants how they would move Mount Fuji, and uses their answers as a test as to how
creative they are. However, this process has never been scientifically validated and is only
testing a small component of workplace creativity.
So we set ourselves the challenge of measuring the unmeasurable. We tested over 1,300 people,
from industries as diverse as advertising, engineering and insurance. We discovered that yes,
we could indeed predict a persons ability to think creatively and work, and could do so
extremely accurately. It was all a matter of identifying the right variables to measure.
There are several components to creative thinking that we found that our test could predict.
These included a persons ability to:
Generate new and effective solutions.
Collaborate well with others.
Sell and communicate ideas to others.
Think creatively under stressful situations.
Our test incorporated over 25 predictors things that we knew were predictive of creative
performance as shown by leading researchers in the field. Here are some of the variables that
came out as the top predictors of creative performance in the workplace that you can use to
help your own predictive powers.
1. Openness to experience
There are hundreds of different personality traits, but we found that there was one trait in
particular that was most predictive of creative performance. This trait, called Openness to
Experience is all about our inclination to seek out and appreciate new experiences. People
who score high on this trait tend to enjoy having a lot of variety in their life, have a high
level of curiosity, and use their imagination a lot. As a result, they perform significantly
more creatively at work.
If you want to try to foster this trait in yourself or in others, start by becoming
consciously aware of routines that you have in your life it might be reading the same types
of magazines, gravitating towards the same types of movies or restaurants and actively
encourage yourself to try something different. Being open to experiencing new activities, and
following through on this, will help improve your openness to experience and thus
significantly boost your creative performance.
2. Creative self-efficacy
Creative self-efficacy relates to a persons confidence in their ability to think creatively.
A persons creative confidence is important because it directly influences the motivation and
ability of a person to get stuck into creative problem-solving tasks. People who are high on
this dimension have a strong belief in their ability to generate creative ideas, will immerse
themselves in tasks that require creativity, and will seek to get the best ideas out of
themselves. Simply having this self belief has been shown to significantly increase a persons
actual ability to think creatively.
If you currently do not see yourself as being an effective creative thinker, it is important
to recognise that this is merely a negative frame of mind that can be changed using positive
reinforcement. Research has consistently shown that creativity is malleable and our creative
potential can be manipulated using a variety of strategies. So next time you do something
creative, like solving a problem or participating in a brainstorm, make sure you acknowledge
this creativity, give yourself a pat on the back and nurture your creative confidence. By
reinforcing your creative triumphs, no matter how small, you will increase your awareness and
confidence of your creative potential.
3. Resilience
Resilience is all about a persons psychological ability to deal with stressful situations.
People who are high in resilience bounce back easily from disappointments and failures, and
can remain optimistic when things are not going their way. We found that people who showed
high levels of resilience were significantly more creative at work. This is because creativity
often involves experiencing failure, such as having ideas rejected and having implemented
ideas perform poorly. Being able to bounce back from rejections is critical to maintaining
creativity and enthusiasm.
Starting to see failure as going hand in hand with creativity can help with setting more
realistic expectations which will help boost resilience. In addition, reminding yourself that
rejections and failures are not personal should also help build up a level of resilience.
4. Confidence in intuition
Intuition is an effortless, quick, and automatic form of thinking (our gut feel) that we
rely on frequently to guide our actions. This is in contrast to analytical thinking which is
deliberate, unhurried and detail-oriented. People who have a lot of confidence in their
intuitive side tend to prefer this way of thinking over more analytical thinking and their
confidence in the accuracy of these intuitive decisions. Having this confidence in ones
intuition can help immensely with creativity, as creative thought often involves tapping into
identify between projects at work and your knowledge and experiences, the better you will
understand the problem you are faced with and the more likely you are to be able to solve it.
So what now?
The six points outlined above are some of the main findings to come out of our research, which
should hopefully give you and your team some direction for enhancing your own creativity.
There were also several other variables that were linked to creative performance in the
workplace, however, the above variables were some of the main ones.
You might also start to think about how you could incorporate these things into your
recruitment process when you are looking for new staff who will be great creative thinkers, or
alternatively, seek out a formal way of measuring these traits as they can be tricky to
assess.