Values › Creation › Creativity
Core value · Creation family
Creativity
Generating new ideas and approaches
Also covers Creation and Inspiration
What does creativity mean as a core value?
Creativity as a core value means bringing new ideas into being, whether that’s a plan, a product, a meal or a better way of running something ordinary.
You’re at your best facing a blank page, a problem nobody has solved or a room full of half-formed ideas. Making something new, whether a campaign, a meal, a song or a better way to run the rota, gives you a charge that routine rarely does. Inspiration can strike anywhere, and you’ve learned to catch it. With creativity as a core value, being handed a finished process to follow can feel a lot like being told to stop thinking.
What does creativity look like in practice?
- You come back from a walk with three new ideas for a problem you’d been stuck on.
- You keep notebooks, voice memos or folders of things that inspire you.
- You offer several options when you were only asked for one.
- You cook without a recipe, or change the recipe every time.
- You get restless in roles where the main job is maintaining what already exists.
When is creativity overplayed?
Ideas come cheaply to you, and that can be the trouble. You may generate more options than a team can absorb, reopen settled decisions because you’ve thought of something better, or lose interest when the creative phase ends and delivery begins. People around you can feel whiplashed. In balance, it pairs generating with finishing, and knows when a good new idea is the enemy of a shipped one. One way to keep it in check is to count how many of last year’s ideas actually exist in the world, and give the next one a finish date before you start.
Often confused with
Creativity vs Imagination
Imagination pictures what could be. Creativity turns ideas into something made or tried: a plan, an object, a new way of doing things.
Creativity vs Innovation
Innovation is about better ways that get adopted and change how things work. Creativity doesn’t need a practical payoff to be worth it.
Creativity vs Originality
Originality cares that the work is unmistakably your own. Creativity borrows, remixes and combines freely.
Questions to sit with
- What’s the last thing you created that someone else actually used or enjoyed?
- Where do your best ideas come from, and how much of your week gives them room?
- Which settled decision have you reopened because a new idea excited you, and who had to pick up the pieces?
More values in Creation
Making things that didn’t exist before.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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