In Creativity Today, I found several things that relate to church work and creativity in churches. I think all of us like the "idea" of being creative organizations and known for our creativity - but very few of us are willing to actually work at it.... So here are some things to think about - Creativity Killers for Churches: (in no particular order)
...allowing only certain people to be creative. Most organizations listen to success. Churches tend to listen to people that have also shown some measure of success - when an idea works, that person becomes the "go to" person. The truth is though, if we only listen to certain people, we miss a whole lot of opportunity. Every idea needs time and voice if we truly want to be creative.
...not scheduling time for creativity. Most of us live in a world where we are one more hour away from death by meeting. I like short meetings, productive meetings. I don't want to chase rabbitts - much less some one's lame ideas... But if we really want to be a creative organization then we have to schedule and allow time in our schedules for creativity to be uncovered. It's more like mining for gold than it is picking up daisy's. Daisy's are everywhere, and need to be appreciated - but gold has to be mined and is a whole heck of a lot more valuable.
...judging initial ideas too harshly - How many of us have been in meetings where a new idea is suggested and the first comment is, "That will never work!" And how many of those comments have we uttered too! Creative ideas are revolutionary. They go against the grain, and therefore they rarely make it past initial, early, negative criticism. If you want to foster creativity, let every idea run. You might be amazed where those goofy ideas take you!
...not dreaming enough. As part of this book, there are exercises to lead groups to become more creative. Chapter five is called diverging and it focuses on how we need to learn to look at our problem or our task (or whatever it is you are trying to do) in new ways. It's sort of like trying to walk in another person's shoes... My favorite divergence technique is called personal analogy. The idea is that you and your team become share empathy with an object associated with the problem. You become something... how does it feel? What does it think? What might it like us to know? - sounds very zen-like but I could see some really cool results coming from a session where we began to ask those kinds of questions...
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