A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

Relative to organizational performance, there are two beliefs/myths which has a tendency to bias our thinking about the ability of individuals to learn. They are in part true but they are also false. One is individuals are readily and able to learn and the other is we can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

There is the belief that individuals are readily able to learn and the evidence for the belief is the powerful way that children learn. It is believed that deep down we are all learners for there is much one never needs to teach an infant to learn. The very young child learns to walk, speak and learn how to live life without anyone having to teach them how. What we do teach them is how to be a member of a given society. But they learn to live life pretty much on their own. Although this is true and there is a learning ability deep within our being, most lose this capable to quickly learn as they grown older. In fact, the very fact that individuals seemingly lose the ability to be playfully creative to experiment and learn new approaches to address the root cause of problems that are encounter in the workplace was the occasion to begin to explore creativity in the workplace.

Rather than being open to learning, as a result of the experiences we have in life, we move to protect our creative spirit from being harmed and thwarted but we end up placing our creative spirit in a cage of our own making. In doing so, we constrain our ability to learn as that small young child and we no longer readily learn as we once did. Although not realized by many the inability to learn is reflective of how we are trying to protect our creative spirit from being thwarted or hurt. Quite simply we have been hurt in the past when we tried something new so we become less that enthusiastic to learn in order to step into the new. Many prefer to remain in the past and what we know where it is safe for we know and understand the hazards.

Additionally, As children we realize all our desires cannot be fulfilled and we learn there are limitation in life. Often we are taught limitations on our actions because we are children and do not have the understanding or experience to act in ways that we will not harm ourselves. However, rather than shedding the limitation with our adult mind, we continue to impost the limitations on ourselves that were never meant to exist beyond childhood. Also, since we are routinely told there are things we can or cannot have and things we can and can’t do by some authority figure, many come to generalize the understanding and assume we are limited in what we are both allowed to do and are capable of doing. As a result we adopt an inability to create what we desire.

In addition to responding to life in a way we constrain our creative spirit, we also develop habits. The order we are the more and more habits and predetermined response patterns we have to life. As we grow older and need to develop new ways of being to adapt to the changing world, we must face these habits. Hence, that adage, "we can’t teach a dog new tricks." It is not that we cannot learn new and different ways of being and behaving. It is just that it becomes more difficult because of the habits and patterns we develop in life.

That antidote to both these issues, placing our creative spirit in a cage of our own making and restraining habits of the past, is to continual learn and create new and different ways being. Here we need to remember there is an intellectual learning and an experiential learning. Continual learning is not about intellectually gaining more and more information. Rather it is about learning new concept but then living and applying them in our life. The more we live the new ways of being we learn the more adaptable we become. In becoming adaptable we become responsive to what life presents to us. In doing so we do retain the ability to readily learn and we need not worry about becoming an "old dog" who cannot be retrained.

It is here that also lies the root of the responsive and improvisational organization. It is to create a workforce that is adaptable in both how it thinks and how it acts.

Related topics
Loss of creative play
A cage of our own making

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