The majority of inventions that have stood the test of time in the US in the last century were things that took an activity or pastime that people were doing and made it easier, faster, cheaper or a combination of all of them. This is additive or adaptive thinking.

Often when we think of the great creatives it is easy to imagine that they acted alone, had a single genius idea that came from the skies and they alone figured it out. In reality most of our great inventions and creative acts didn’t happen that way. They happened incrementally through additive thinking.

as we enter into the workplace, others in authority around us may say that they are open to questions but it’s a qualified open-ness to questions. An open-ness to questions about what is, but not necessarily why it is.

It is easy for us to see creativity as a label some people are deserving of and others are not yet we can all be creative in different ways. As a leader I implore you to consider that injecting more creativity and innovation into your company will not come just because you announce it as so.

Our willingness to embrace creative problem solving and experimentation enabled our growth at every level, from raising capital to developing winning technology, to winning customers. Creativity was the key ingredient

At school we were all told the story of Isaac Newton. He sat one day under the shade of an apple tree and at one point the apple fell on his head and he more or less instantly discovered and was able to identify that the moon isn’t falling to the earth and the earth isn’t falling into the sun and in short articulate the theory of gravity that rests with us today. Marvellously convenient, except of course it’s apocryphal – a grain of truth with an awful lot of embellishment.

One of the challenges when we’re working with creativity and concepts that are new is how we source insight. So here are some tips from the McGraff’s for wayfinding in the field of creativity – you just have to get comfy with different ways of generating and using insight in order to benefit from these.

If the critical skills in creativity for leaders are to identify, seek to understand and clearly articulate a problem, then we can harness the collective wisdom of all the experts in our employ to find great solutions – once that is, we know what the problem is.

Creativity is the space that individuals occupy between their personal lives and their lives as employees. Creativity is something that people practice whether in work or outside work. Creativity is the way people notice difference, act curiously, wonder how things could possibly be. And most critically for organisations, creativity happens spontaneously and is never contrived.

Conditions for creativity are very important. For some of us when we feel we’re underachieving in creativity it’s the white room conundrum. We stand in perfect silence with no stimulus and no matters of interest trying to will our brains to kick in a gear and find the creative spark. Like writers block staring at the blank page willing words to appear.

Creativity is a delicate thing, people who propose ideas risk rejection not just of their idea but feeling themselves rejected unless you as the leader set the conditions to foster a counter culture that welcomes learning through experimentation. Something didn’t work as we expected – your choice as a leader to command an enquiry to find the culprit or to look at the pieces, take advantage of some of the shapes that work and recognise every experience is something to learn from.

the mythology that creativity is something some of us are born with and others are not to be perpetuated. It is the first mistaken belief held by a leader about creativity that permeates a whole organisation starting from the top.

Nine in ten leaders say businesses that invest in creativity are likely to increase employee productivity, foster innovation and result in happier and more contented customers. That sounds like an interesting and desirable result to me.

And Adobe’s survey of leaders, parents, students and workers has around 85% of people saying 85% of people saying creativity makes people better. Yet only 5 in 10 people describe themselves as being creative.