Future Focused Skills: How to develop creativity skills

Continuing our series looking at future focused skills, today we give some tips on developing your creativity. 

This is a skill that is very much in demand in the workplace, and one that will help solve the big problems we face as a global society (such as climate change and data privacy). 

 

Creativity 

 

What it is 

Someone with creative skills is able to think laterally and identify potential everywhere. They can drive business innovation by producing novel and useful ideas. This skill is supported by an ability to engage in unconventional or divergent thinking. 

 

Otherwise known as  

• Innovative  
• Fresh thinker  
• Originality  
• Visionary  
• Open to new ideas 

 

Tasks to seek out 

Activities that require divergent thinking, such as the generation of many ideas are good opportunities to practice, for example: 

• Brainstorming. 

• Problem-finding (efforts to identify, define, and represent a problem in a given space). 

Creativity is also involved in the design of new ideas, products, or solutions. 

 

Ways to practice the skills within these tasks 

• Brainstorm ideas for how to make your school more sustainable. You might use specific strategies, such as identifying and reversing assumptions, to generate ideas. Once you’ve generated your ideas, consider the range of the ideas – are they pretty similar or do they represent many different categories of idea? Are any really new or novel? 

• Design something new, like a piece of jewellery, or a remote control car that runs on solar energy. To help you be more creative, consider introducing constraints, such as having to use a certain material. 

After practicing this skill, ask for immediate feedback from teachers or peers so that you can build on your performance and improve next time.  

 

In our next post in the series, we will tackle how to develop communication skills.