One of the 24 character strengths
Finding new ways to do things. Not only artistic ones — this is about reaching for an approach nobody in the room has tried yet.
Creativity is the strength of reaching for an approach nobody in the room has tried yet. Very little of it is artistic.
The word does a lot of damage here. It sends people looking for a paintbrush. Far more often the strength is a way of routing around a problem: a spreadsheet built sideways, a rota that settles two arguments at once, a sentence that finally makes a difficult thing sayable.
What it needs is a willingness for the first idea to be wrong. Somebody who leads here produces several answers where one was asked for, and is not embarrassed by the ones that do not work, because those were never meant to be the answer.
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96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentThe printer is broken and the meeting is in an hour. One person is still describing the problem. Another has already asked whether anyone needs paper at all.
The good version of a thing can lose to the interesting version. Somebody who leads here can rebuild a process that was working, then discover the rebuild solved a problem nobody had. And a room that wanted a decision does not always want three options.
The misreading is that this is a talent somebody either got or did not. What it looks like from inside is much more ordinary: a habit of not accepting the first shape a problem arrives in. That habit produces a great deal of nonsense on the way to the good idea, and the nonsense is part of the method.
Both are pulled toward the unfamiliar. Curiosity wants to find out; Creativity wants to make something that was not there. One collects, the other builds.
Both are ways of handling a hard question. Creativity generates the options; Judgment weighs them. They work best in the same room and frequently irritate each other.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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