The next big thing?
When Bruce Nussbaum was one of the most respected journos on ‘Business Week’, he fervently believed that design thinking – ie the intellectual and physical process designers used to create anything from iPads to chairs – could solve many corporate ills and stimulate innovation. Now blogging for the entrepreneurial American magazine ‘Fast Company’, he has a new creed: creative intelligence. He defines this as “the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions”.
The good news, Nussbaum says, is that groups can be taught behaviours that help them “learn how to do the new in an uncertain ambiguous, complex, space” so that “creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius”. This might all sound far-fetched but he is convinced that this approach (which is already being tested, with promising results, in New York’s schools) could help groups develop such 21st century skills as “systems thinking, creative problem-solving, collaboration and time management”. Surely every company, no matter how successful, could sharpen all four of these skills.
