Creativity

Creative profile

The creative profile is a tool for understanding and assessing individual preferences within the creative process. It shows how strongly a person prefers to clarify a problem, put forward ideas, develop those ideas and put them into practice. The profile brings out the mental processes that creativity and innovation require.

By identifying strengths and weaknesses at each stage of the creative process, the creativity profile helps individuals and teams understand how they naturally approach problem solving and idea generation.

We are all innovators at heart. Every day we find solutions to problems we have never met before, take on challenges without precedent, pursue new opportunities and explore new possibilities. To do that, we draw on our creativity, a unique mix of vision and curiosity, realism and imagination, analysis and action.

We are all naturally creative, and each of us expresses it differently. Collaboration can therefore be a challenge or an opportunity, depending on the training you have had on the subject and your awareness of how varied creativity is.

To meet this double challenge, showing that everyone is creative in their own way and making collaboration easier between people with different creativity profiles, I use the Foursight® method, which helps you identify your creative thinking style and understand how each person naturally approaches a challenge. Knowing these thinking preferences gives you the key to making the most of individual differences. It is the way to release each person’s potential to generate ideas, work together on solutions and achieve genuine breakthroughs.

With this approach, employees, teams and organisations can identify their preferences in problem solving and creative thinking. Understanding their own creative style, and being able to use it alongside teammates with different profiles, allows the group to reach further in boldness, imagination, inventiveness and speed of experimentation than its members could reach individually.

The 4 preferences of the creative profile

Every creative profile is built from a combination of 4 preferences

Clarification

Clarifiers prefer to take the time to understand a challenge or a problem properly before they start looking for ideas, solutions or actions. They move carefully, making sure they have pinned down the real issue. They enjoy detail, so they research, investigate and dig for the information that will help them get to the heart of the problem. Clarifiers can sometimes fall victim to analysis paralysis.

Ideation

Ideators like generating broad concepts and ideas. Visionaries at heart, they are most comfortable when they grasp the big picture and can stretch their imagination. Ideators are drawn to abstract, wide-ranging problems and care less about the detail. They are flexible thinkers who can see many possible solutions to the same situation. They love a proliferation of ideas, and they can jump from one idea to the next without always bringing them to life.

Development

Developers like to spend time analysing potential solutions, breaking them down and examining their strengths and their weaknesses. They enjoy turning a raw idea into a finely crafted solution, thinking through the steps needed to put it in place. In their eagerness to analyse, compare and assess competing solutions, Developers can find themselves stuck in the search for the perfect answer.

Implementation

Implementers work constantly to put ideas into practice. They draw the most energy from making ideas real and delivering tangible results. Implementers like getting things done and are constantly focused on rolling out the next idea. In their eagerness to finish the job, Implementers can become impatient and rush into action too quickly.

Using the curiosity profile

Better collaboration within the team

Using the creativity profile strengthens collaboration between teammates by revealing the thinking preferences of each member. Once the natural role of each member is known, whether clarifier, ideator, developer or implementer, teams can organise themselves far more strategically. Clarifiers can concentrate on defining the problems, ideators on generating solutions, developers on analysing the options and implementers on putting the ideas into practice. Sharing out the work according to thinking preferences maximises the productivity and the satisfaction of every member of the team.

Training and professional development

Understanding your creativity profile is essential for professional development. It lets everyone understand their strengths and their weaknesses more clearly in the process of creativity and innovation. By knowing their natural preferences, they can identify the areas where they may need reinforcement or further development. An ideator, for example, might work on building their clarification or implementation skills. This awareness can lead to targeted training and personal development efforts, which strengthens the overall effectiveness of the individual in their role.

Optimising the innovation process

The curiosity profile is used to optimise the innovation process by assigning the right people to the right stages of that process. By aligning tasks with the thinking preferences of employees, teams can lift both efficiency and employee satisfaction. Handing idea generation to the ideators, for example, can produce a richer and more varied flow of creative options. By handing the analysis of solutions to the developers, organisations can make sure that ideas are examined thoroughly and critically. This approach optimises the innovation process by drawing on the appetites of each individual.

Building teams

Using the curiosity profile can help organisations build balanced and complementary teams. Once they know the thinking profiles of team members, managers or innovation project leaders can make sure that every aspect of the creative and innovative process is covered. This approach builds teams that are diverse in the way they think, which is essential for stimulating creativity and innovation. It also helps avoid the imbalances that could overload some stages of the process while leaving others neglected.

Leadership development

Leaders who understand their own creativity profile, along with those of their team, are better placed to lead effectively. By understanding their natural preferences and recognising those of their team members, leaders can adapt their communication style and their leadership approach to maximise effectiveness, team satisfaction and individual engagement. They can also understand more clearly how different team members see problems, generate ideas, analyse solutions and move into action.

This understanding lets managers create a working environment where every thinking style is valued and put to use, which strengthens the effectiveness and the cohesion of the team.