Creatively Selling in Today’s Marketplace….it can be your cup of Tea is the topic of a meeting I attended today facilitated by Karen A. Galvin, Founder and President of Vision Enterprises. This is not the first time I have seen the ‘director’ in action. The approach Karen’s organization takes with training is unique – using elements of theater to demonstrate the good and not so good behaviors in individuals, teams and organizations.
Karen took our group through a couple of exercises today. Before doing our breakout groups, she shared some startling news. We are not as creative as we may think. Actually, we might be creative, we just don’t use it. The statistics she shared were: at the age of 5, the average child is using 90% of their creative mind and by the time we reach 17, the percentage drops to 10%. The more sobering fact is at age 30, we are only using 2% of our creative juices.
I set out to find this study to no avail, though I did find other organizations who reported similar, but more dramatic drop offs in the percentages. Age and Creativity, a post at CreatingMinds reports at age 5, the percentage is 80 and drops off by age 12 to 2%. Which ever is more accurate, the trends are disturbing.
Karen touches on how we allow life’s influences sap our creative instincts. In Do We Get Less Creative As We Age? by Stephen Shapiro, he believes there are two factors which inhibit our ability to be creative as adults. He shares the story of his own micro study; tasking younger and older groups in a challenge and subsequent conclusions.
The silver lining is that we do have control over how creative we want to be. If we are mindful of how structure, peer and organizational pressures and judgments can play an adverse role in being creative, it might be time to make selective choices to bend the rules. If we expect individuals and groups to think not out of the box, but with a new box, as Karen shares in her closing, we might just make a difference.
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