On the first day of 2019, LinkedIn published an article titled Why Creativity is the World's Most Important Skill. Now, five years later, LinkedIn has published another article titled “Adaptability is His 2024 Skill.”
So has creativity replaced adaptability as the most important skill at work? What does this mean? What's the difference? Why should I care? Or should we?
Answer: Not exactly. Everything and nothing. Almost nothing. You know what? Yes, you should.
World Creativity and Innovation Week is back. It begins on April 15th, Leonardo da Vinci's birthday, and ends on April 21st, World Day of Creativity and Innovation, the day before International Mother Earth Day. Both are United Nations Days.
A United Nations webpage declares the importance of creativity for a sustainable future. And founder Marcy Segal also chose this day to connect creativity to making a difference in something bigger.
she said: “People have a natural ability to generate new ideas, make new decisions, take new actions, and achieve new results in order to make the world a better place and establish their place in the world. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew how to utilize our abilities? “Wouldn’t the world be a better place too? ”
That's certainly true. But what we do primarily through creativity is also great. It makes your life more functional by overcoming thousands of daily problems, from thinking about what to wear when you wake up in the morning to planning tomorrow's work schedule before going to bed. That's it.
There are hundreds of definitions of creativity, but it boils down to solving problems at home, in the art world, and in business.
I like to simplify things with my own definitions. Creativity is thinking differently than yourself.
Thinking differently than others is a good start. But it won't help you solve problems when you're stuck. When you get stuck in your thinking, it's you who gets in the way of solving the problem. It's unlikely that the location you're thinking of is the one that will best solve your problem. That's why I'm stuck.
It's like trying to be nice to your partner during an argument. Don't change others, change yourself. If you change your mindset to address the challenges you want to accomplish, it will be easier to solve them. Get new ideas. And innovate. Innovation is about doing things differently. To get there, we usually try to change our thinking first. That won't work. This requires adaptability. Changing our thinking begins with changing our being. Adaptability is about being different and changing your very nature, at least momentarily.
Identity is the source of ideas. You can only have ideas that you will come up with. To think differently, you need to be different. Therefore, adapting is the first step in the problem-solving process.
Research shows that we have new thoughts every time we wake up. Adapting first makes your thinking more efficient. We can slow down and focus. You'll think less and act more efficiently.
In a sense, adapting is reinventing yourself. And before we can innovate anything outside of ourselves, we must first innovate ourselves.
Adapt to create. Create to innovate. After innovation, we adapt to new realities. I call this “innovation.” When done properly, it spirals upward and produces breakthrough results. If you do it wrong, you'll end up with burnout.
This is why well-adjusted people make decisions 2.5 times faster and are half as likely to have mental health problems. This is why adaptive companies can improve employee retention by 50%, improve customer retention by 70%, increase innovation success by 30%, and reduce bankruptcies by 300%.
However, more than two-thirds of companies have low adaptability. And a similar number of employees say they are not adaptable. what's happening?
We are born with the ability to adapt. As children, we can be anything. Adapting is not only easy, it's our birthright. That's not it?
In my first Mail & Guardian article (during World Creativity and Innovation Week two years ago), I pointed out that celebrating creativity requires celebrating ourselves. We should because we are creative machines.
But that same machine of creativity is also a machine of judgment and choice. And as we “grow up” we become clearer and stricter about the “self” we are creating. We increasingly let our notions of who we are get in the way. We forget that we created ourselves in the first place.
We adapt to and become dependent on this persona. Then it starts to feel more and more difficult to adapt. It becomes even more difficult when working with other people, such as your company, team, or family. It's even harder when you're competing. This is one explanation why we fight with each other. Both parties refuse to adapt to the situation.
Perhaps adaptability as a concept came a little late to the party. Joseph Schumpeter introduced the importance of innovation in his theory of economic development in 1911. JP Guilford made creativity a hot topic at the 1950 American Psychological Association meeting. But somehow we overlooked adaptability until Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in 1970. Toffler writes: Technology was changing so fast that people were starting to suffer from what he called future shock, a disease he called burnout.
His solution was adaptability, the ability to quickly unlearn and relearn. He called this change the biggest change since mammals crawled out of the ocean. Humans have always survived by imitating past successes, which was actually a bit stupid. Darwin showed us already a century ago that adaptability is an essential truth of evolution. Somehow we never got this in our lifetime.
But now it does. Therefore, humans began to focus on continuous adaptation. The amazing thing is that Future Shock was released 20 years before the internet was public, and 30-40 years before Facebook, X, or Insta. In Toffler's time, the world's information was doubling every year. Now it's more than twice a day.
To help us, the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) (21st Century IQ) is now available that can measure the adaptability and motivation of individuals and teams, recommend improvements, and set goals. . It's easier to approach than other creativity tests I've come across, perhaps because the adaptability is purer and more essential.
I use this assessment as a core starting point for transformational training because, as Peter Drucker said, “what gets measured gets better.” And AQ has become very easy to measure.
So why should we care about adaptability? We need to embrace our human skills to adapt, create, and innovate. And do it in the right order and with intention.
Imagine a world where all humans are highly adaptable. What will happen to the war? What will happen to the statistics on domestic abuse and homicide? What will happen in your life? What about work or relationships?
What these three words have in common is that it starts with you.
I encourage you to become more aware of who you are each time you face a problem or conflict. Why not practice changing yourself to produce more productive thoughts and more effective actions, to produce better results, and, as Segal said, to make the world better as a whole? And your world too.
You decide whether you want to be more productive, more generous, more successful, or happier.
The best part is that you can adapt again today. So don't be afraid. Make your own choice and adapt to it.
Michael Lee is an advisory board member for World Creativity and Innovation Week/Day and a creativity contributor for Radio 702.