Enhance Your Creativity: Increase Your Value to a Green Company

This headline caught my eye earlier this week...

The Creativity Crisis - For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong--and how we can fix it.

In my mind, innovation and creativity are some of the best ways to turn the tide on the long list of issues we face in our country and around the world. Global warming, climate change, unsustainable environmental practices, economic crisis, dependence on carbon-based fuel, and the list goes on!

We can't continue with a business-as-usual philosophy. We must push ourselves to find new solutions and new opportunities to make a difference.

How Do You Make an Impact?

If you are naturally creative, make sure your contacts, colleagues and potential employers are aware of your talents.

Highlight your creativity in your accomplishment statements on your online profiles and resume.

Prepare crisp descriptions of how you've used creativity to come up with new systems and solutions in your previous jobs. If you are able to quantify your past results, all the better!

Find ways to demonstrate your creativity in conversations, meetings, and interviews...not in a know-it-all kind of way, but because you have a novel way to perceive a situation that leads to new sustainable solutions.

If you don't feel you are naturally creative, don't count yourself out just yet. You may be more creative than you give yourself credit for and it is possible to learn to be more creative. Being able to contribute to a company's green future enhances your value to any company.

Let's start with a description of the creativity process. (Refer to the Newsweek article for more details.)

Step 1: Assess what you already know about the problem and existing solutions. To do this you must be observant and deliberate in recording the details.

Step 2: Scan for your memories, knowledge, and similar situations to uncover patterns, consistencies, inconsistencies, and analogous circumstances. To do this you must be able to think in a divergent way, searching in broader and broader circles to find possible clues and solutions.

Step 3: Grab viable ideas as they surface and record them for further evaluation. To do this you must be able to spot the ideas that have the potential to be "it" and record them correctly.

Step 4: Experiment with different ways to combine promising ideas to come up with innovative solutions. To do this you must be able to vacillate between linear thinking and making connections.

Step 5: Evaluate the effectiveness of each idea to determine whether it's a viable solution to the problem at hand. To do this you must be able to work through the pros and cons systematically to find the best solution.

Are you naturally well suited to do any of these steps? If so, claim those skills!

If you are missing the skills for a couple of the steps, acknowledge that and then look for ways to strengthen your ability to participate in those steps. Observe people who excel in those steps. What can you learn from them? Is there a way you can contribute to strengthen the final result.

If you want to have some fun with this...look for puzzles, games, and every day situations that allow you to practice your own creativity skills.