Creative people can think of new ideas, and creative ideas are those ideas that are new, useful, and different. It all starts with the creative person. What is so special about them?

What are the Qualities of a Creative Person?

Creative people often have a sense of limitless creative freedom and experimentation. Their creative genius is a natural part of who they are. If you are not naturally creative, you can learn and develop your creativity by applying creative qualities.

12 Qualities of a Creative Person

1. Curious: Creative people are always asking questions/looking for new ideas. They're not content with the status quo.
2. Creative Confidence: Creative confidence is the feeling when you know that what you are about to do/say/or create is original. Creative, confident people are not afraid to fail because they know it's part of the process.
3. Thick Skin:Creative people need to have thick skin, take criticism, reject rejection, stay persistent, and be unafraid of failure.
4. Independent Rebellious Streak:Creatives can't be afraid to blaze their trail and stand up for their ideas. They need to find the right balance between their independent, rebellious streak and supporting the team mission.
5. Flexibility: Creative people need to be flexible. If not, they might overlook new ideas, or you might not be able to adapt to changes a new idea would impose.
6. Playful: Playing with ideas can help break through mental blocks by going outside the box to create new solutions or inventive ways of looking at old ones.
7. Thorough: Creative people are more comprehensive than most because they never stop at the first idea. They always look around at what else they can do.
8. Ambitious: Creatives are ambitiously striving to push the boundaries of what is possible. They crave feedback from others to improve and have a desire to create something new and unique.
9. Energetic: Creative people are constantly moving, inspiring others with their creativity and constant energy.
10. Naïve: Creative people are often naïve about their limitations but can also be more creative than others because of this naivete. It's important to balance creativity and practicality.
11. Dreamer: Creative people are sometimes referred to as "dreamers" because they imagine new possibilities.
12. Persistence: Creatives are persistent in their efforts over time despite any obstacles they may face. Creative solutions result from patience and tenacity.

Most people are afraid of what others will think about them if they do anything out of the box. It's easy for people to lose sight of their identity and uniqueness. So how do leaders and individuals combat this fear of taking risks?

3 Factors That Encourage Risk-Taking

Suppose you want to build an environment where everyone works together towards a common goal without fear of failure or judgment - one that encourages risk-taking alongside calculated caution - these steps will help guide your efforts!

1. Open Communication:Consider open communication between all employees at every level. This fosters trust, allowing employees to contribute valuable input, empowering them rather than confining them.
2. Active Collaboration:Active collaboration takes things to the next level. Design and construct your collaboration by looking for opportunities to leverage capabilities, expertise, resources, diversity of thinking styles, and experiences. Involving all employees in everything from start to finish can lead to impressive results because it utilizes their unique strengths and abilities.
3. Extreme Transparency:Transparency is a key component in building an effective innovation cycle. When employees at every level are aware of major and minor changes, they feel empowered and included. Transparency builds trust, which then creates confidence.

Conclusion

To cultivate a growing organization, leaders need to ensure employees feel comfortable taking risks and not judged if they fail. Leaders need to set clear objectives and expectations for their team.

For innovation leaders, it is vital to learn how to turn failures into successes. Innovation is all about seeing opportunities others don’t see and seizing them. Successful failures lead to successful innovations.

The Importance of Failure

The experimentation phase is within the innovation process, often full of failures. These failures are not always negative. When things don’t go as planned, failures allow us to see what needs change. Successful innovations require risk and a capacity for productive failures, which reveal something new about the problem you are trying to solve. To experience productive failure, you have to fail successfully. Three characteristics help you figure out if your failures are successful.

Three Characteristics of Successful Failures

1. Effort: Innovators must have a strong sense of commitment even when others give up hope. Ask yourself this question, “did you put your 100% best effort into a project”?. If so, you are one step closer to a productive failure.
2. Perspective: Reflect on what happened during each failure, learn from it, and apply what you learned to future innovations. Ask yourself, “what does the experience teach you about what works and what doesn’t”?
3. Inspiration: Failure from experiments might lead to lessons about the nature of the problem, inspiring better solutions. They can also teach us something about how we think. Through failures, you can learn how to solve problems better. Ask this question, “Does this new understanding inspire a new understanding that wasn’t there before?”

It is crucial to stand out among the crowd in a world filled with so many innovations. Organizations that want to improve their innovation impact need to implement a high-impact strategy. We will be exploring the seven essential ingredients of agile innovation. 

Agile Innovations

Agile is the ability to think/understand quickly and move quickly and flexibly. Agile innovation helps teams deliver high-impact innovations. It consists of constant testing and experimenting to solve a problem. The ultimate goal is to provide innovation that is scalable and sustainable.

It is essential to keep in mind that agile innovation is a process. When viewing the agile innovation framework, understand that it’s not a “one size fits all.” It would be best if you adapted this framework to your organization. 

The Seven Essential Ingredients of Agile Innovation

The first ingredient of agile innovation is collaborating with stakeholders or those that benefit from what you deliver. Collaborate closely with them because this helps you build a shared understanding of the problem. From this, you’ll gain a higher likelihood of success and ensure met needs.

The second essential ingredient is focusing on high-impact innovations. Focusing on impact helps ensure the value of impact delivered. The team needs to be on the same page in this process. The third ingredient is a culture of continuous experiments. Continuous experiments help organizations learn fast and make decisions that lead to sustainable results.

In 2020, we had Stefan Thomke from Harvard Business School on the show, and he wrote an excellent book on this topic. The fourth ingredient is self-organizing teams. These teams are responsible and accountable for their work. They don’t have to wait for permission to take action, which speeds up decision-making and execution. Define and agree on the problem statement, and let the team execute.

The fifth essential ingredient is a cross-disciplinary team. Teams with diverse backgrounds and skillsets are unique and powerful. The sixth ingredient is the right innovation agility metrics. These are not just usual innovation metrics such as the 3M metric used to ensure that new product revenue grows. An agile-specific metric would be something like how many things are in your innovation queue. Stick with a few metrics, and don’t go overboard with them.

The seventh essential ingredient of agile innovation is short iterative ideation, testing, prototyping, and repeat cycles. This is done in a structured way. Keep aggressive schedules with planned progress towards the execution. Remember that if you run into a wall and something is simply not working, stop. Be willing to kill the project and move on to the next.