The art of inspiration

Liz Hall 01 January 2004 

Employers are turning to the arts to cultivate creativity in their managers.

Employers are turning to the arts to cultivate creativity in their managers.

To survive, companies need their managers to be like children: creative, innovative and prepared to take risks. Creativity is inherent in all of us, according to training and development guru Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. But by the time most of us reach adulthood, it is put on the backburner or safely limited to leisure time.

"We all start life being highly creative then others pour scorn on creativity and we start to learn to shut it off. By the time we get into the workplace, most people's creativity is hugely stifled," says Liz Willis, co-founder director of personal development consultancy Springboard.

A growing number of employers are turning to the arts - music, drama, visual art, fashion - in a bid to unleash this inherent creativity in their managers. Ideas and creativity are the business in most of today«s key industries, points out Robinson, now a senior adviser at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, US, and companies need managers who can innovate, roll with the changes they face, communicate and change direction as quickly as the landscape around them.

Robinson, former professor of education at Warwick University, blames the UK education system for bringing up adults who have lost touch with, or never discovered, their own creative abilities. Kanes Rajah, director for the University of Greenwich Business School«s Centre for Entrepreneurship agrees.

"Our education system encourages convergent thinking, with rights and wrongs, whereas companies need managers to think divergently, exploring many solutions before settling for one," says Rajah.

more at:

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2004/01/01/22038/the-art-of-inspiration.html