What's Your Creativity Type?

Creativity is defined as the cognitive ability that helps us experience new, original, flexible and organized behaviors that are directed toward searching, detecting and finding a solution to any problem.

Creativity is a skill that is in high demand in professional circles. This is because it can be hard to find those who have developed the ability to create unique and clever products. Companies look for original and innovative people who can help the company advance and can create advantages for the business regarding their direct competition. These are the types of people who contribute to that intangible “edge” of successful businesses.

However, creativity can also be a fountain of enigmas. Why are some people more creative than others? Are there people who don’t have any creativity at all? The truth is, everyone has at least a little bit of creativity inside of them, even if they haven’t found it yet.

What are the characteristics of creative thinking?

Creative minds are characterized by a series of elements. Let’s take a look:

Fluidity

This is the ability to generate a considerable amount of ideas or answers to thoughts that are already established. Usually, we only end up with one or two ideas that go along with a thought and these are conditioned by what we have seen or heard in the past. A creative mind is capable of coming up with many ideas or solutions.

Flexibility

This is the ability to increase our number of alternatives. We are able to generate more options. When we need to give a response to a question, a creative mind has many options, sometimes even too many! The hardest part is selecting the best one.

Originality

This is based on coming up with new ideas, visualizing problems in a different way, and suggesting new solutions. The ideas that appear are inventive; something that has either never been thought of before or offers up a new perspective to an existing solution.

Elaboration

This deals with adding elements, details or ideas to what already exists and modifying some of the attributes. It’s the ability to tweak an idea that already exists and refresh it.

Types of creativity

There is no such thing as a “standard” type of creativity. We can possess many different types of creativity such as those we are going to discuss below. Also, if we want to develop our own potential “creator,” we can do this by focusing ourselves on one type at a time or working on all at once. Of course, the second way would be more complete and would most likely give us a more rounded understanding of ourselves.

1. Mimetic Creativity

This type of creativity is focused on copying, imitating or reproducing something exactly as it is. It’s a type of basic creativity and not very elaborate. Even animals are capable of developing this kind of creativity.

2. Analogous Creativity

Analogies allow us to resolve more complex problems. They serve for transferring information that we understand, and we can control the objective of resolving new challenges. Analogies definitely give birth to new ideas.

3. Bisociative Creativity

This type of creativity is found when our rational thoughts connect with our intuitive thoughts. It’s when we have those “Eureka!” moments or insights. Bisociative creativity allows us to connect an idea that is familiar to us with another idea that isn’t. It helps us to create a entirely different concept.

4. Narrative Creativity

This type of creativity lies in the ability to create stories. Stories normally follow a coherent pattern; they relate and unite characters, actions, descriptions, plots and the narration of the story. We then are able to very simply reconstruct these stories and create something new which helps us think in different ways.

5. Intuitive Creativity

In this sense, intuition has to do with the ability to receive ideas and form them into our own minds without needing any external help from other images. In this way, emptying our minds or removing our automatic systems of reasoning prepares the best terrain to foster our intuitive creativity.

In the practical sense, we can do many things to achieve this state such as meditation, yoga or any other type of activity that allows us to enter a conscious state where we have emptied our minds and have relaxed ourselves. In this way, we are creating a fluid, conscious state that allows ideas to very easily enter our minds.

Besides these types listed above, creativity is constantly going through a process that consists of two even smaller processes: the revision and exploration processes. These are the problems that we come across and the answers that we find to solve them. We have that “Eureka!” moment (as a creative solution) and, finally, put our idea to work to see whether or not it effectively solves our problem.

In addition to these processes, we also need certain resources that will help us down our “creative path:” intelligence, knowledge, motivation and personality. Without these elements, we would find it very difficult to be creative.