Books That Change Lives – The Truth About Creativity

By Patrick Harris

Published by Pearson Education Limited, Great Britain, 2009

Creativity is often associated with artists and musicians, but the author states that everybody is creative, or as Truth nr 1 puts it: “Creativity is yours for the taking”. It is demonstrated that creativity is as much analytical and systematic as it is free-form and improvised. There is a method, structure and rules – in fact 46 truths about creativity are presented in this book. The style of writing is fun, delightful, playful, humorous, and has an element of curiosity that grabs and keeps your attention.

Patrick Harris is described as a creativity guru and author. His speciality areas are creativity, strategy, brands and futures. He founded a consultancy company called Thought Engine and is a former Director of Creativity for Orange (in the UK).

You can start anywhere in this book, each of the 46 chapters are quick to read, engaging, practical, and can stand alone if you wanted to just focus on that element. There are tools and powerful questions to guide the reader to discover their creative abilities. If reading from start to finish, you will find that each section lays a foundation for the following section. At the beginning you are encouraged to increase your creative potential and develop creative characteristics. This is followed by “Putting Creativity to Work” and “Traits of Creative Teams”, finally reaching a crescendo in Creative Success.

The latter half of the book has a strong focus on how to apply the creativity principles in a company or organisation setting. This is certainly valuable and useful information if you are a manager; however these rules are not directly applicable to personal creativity.

As someone that has a strong preference to work with structure and process it was really refreshing to review the same principles at work in the creativity process. I learned a lot from Truth 5, “Give creativity a guide” – every person has guiding principles or core behaviours that allow them to manage day-to-day activities in a coherent manner. These guiding principles provides a “how to guide” for creative work. Applying your guiding principles during creative actions will result in greater consistency, “fit” with your way of doing things and is a much more rewarding way to work. Other great rules I have applied (or will soon) are to

• Test the validity of ideas with a 5 minute business plan –a tool that helps to filter and narrow down a large amount of ideas
• Your creativity budget can be less than £10 – as long as the core ingredients are there: engagement, interaction, flexibility and visibility
• Compare to create – the power of metaphors, especially when you compare things that are unlike
• Embrace nephelococcygia, the technical term for cloud watching ? Looking for things in the clouds are expansive, imaginative and ever changing – similarly a mindset that considers new angles can be very valuable to creative processes

Sunette van Zyl, Graduate of The Diploma in Executive and Life Coaching Course