Provide educational materials on the creative process. When people are hired, give them a book on personal creativity. Purchase and circulate reading materials on creativity; you might even consider selecting one book per year that the company buys for each person and gives as a gift. Some readings on the creative process that we recommend are:

• Creativity in Business by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers

• Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams

• The Art of the Problem by Russell Ackoff

• Lateral Thinking by Edward deBono

• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Richard Van Oech

We are also indebted to Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, first for being such outstanding teachers, and second, for allowing us to quote extensively from their book Creativity in Business and from transcripts of class visitors.

Myers as an artist and musician who had consulted with businesses through the Myers Institute for Creative Studies; Ray as a social psychologist and business professor who started bringing creativity into classes in the early sixties. We had each repeatedly observed that without the involvement of some very deep personal sources of creativity, idea-generating techniques used alone could produce confusion - or at best, short-term gains. As with the proverbial Chinese meal, an hour later and you’re hungry again.

Organizational development specialist Don Prentice makes clear the link between listening and creativity:

The only thing that I can come up with is that the real source of creativity is truth. The truth is endlessly creative. The problem with that is I don’t know what the truth is. Even less do I know what your truth is. What’s creative? It’s that truth. So how do I put this idea of creativity into practice? All I know is you listen to what’s going on at the moment, and you follow the truth of what’s going on in that moment - that’s how you do it. The essence of creativity is to listen.

Appendix

“But I also have to give some credit to a class called Organizational Behavior—mostly because they made us read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and by Spencer Johnson.