Creativity is the ability to take innovative, new, or imaginative ideas and turn them into reality. It's funny that one line definition causes more confusion than any other trait that I bring up during professional or personal conversation. 
When I ask someone whether creativity is an important skill there is a long pause usually followed by some disagreement of whether creativity even is a skill. For most people it represents in inherit trait that you are either born with or you are not. In my experience, the majority of people I have questioned about this thought at best creativity was something you had when you were a child but as you aged it ceased to be something that had much use as an adult.
Creativity is now gaining more exposure as a valued skill set that can make someone successful. Attributes of creativity that have a positive influence is having expansive curiosity. Curiosity is not just about wondering how things work but also includes a drive to better understand why things work the way they do. It is a small perception tweak that helps how someone approaches a problem. In many cases understanding the "why" things work the way they do is an introduction to challenge the norm and opening the door for "thinking outside the box" or questioning the constraints placed upon a process or idea.
Within the realm of classical psychology research, there are more than one type of creativity and in fact have identified three main types of creativity: exploratory, transformational, and combinational.
Exploratory creativity is what most people think of when considering creativity. It is the process of generating new never before expressed ideas about a predefined or known space. The key in the above sentence is predefined/known environment. This means that the problem space has been established and defined. The goal of exploratory creativity is to find novel and useful ideas within the known context. In layman's terms, this type of creativity is where the "next big thing" comes from that disrupts the market and how we perceive a space.
Transformational creativity is defined by what is happening outside of the conceptual space. This type of creativity transforms the environment of where the solution will be located. An easy way to think about transformational creativity is when you challenge what you know about the problem space not about what you know of the problem. The challenge for transformational creativity is that there is no end-state. There are so many variables within an environment that modifying one may just change the prioritization of change elements but the underlying environment is relatively intact. This can lead to frustration as no matter how many changes you make to the problem space, you never really seem to solve the issue you began with; at best all you have done is gain a deeper understanding of the contextual world. An example of transformational creativity would be the painter Pablo Picasso during his Cubism period. Rather than focusing on painting realistic interpretations, Picasso looked at the world differently and painted in angles and squares to represent what he was seeing but also how the work of art changes depending on the angle it is being viewed.
Combinational creativity is the notion of making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas. This is the creativity that most people use on an everyday basis in their lives and the one that provides the best value proposition of becoming more innovative in how you approach problems. Combinational creativity is a skill like any other that can be strengthened through practice and advanced by learning. A good analogy for this type of creativity is a box of Legos. Your environment dictates that blocks all conform to some type of square solid. There are different sizes of blocks but as a general rule they are all in some form of rectangular shape. Combinational creativity is looking at this box of Lego bricks and building something unique. It could be a house, it could be a car, it could be a unicorn. You have taken known shapes and made something unfamiliar from them.
This is just a brief example of the kinds of creativity we each possess. With this brief introduction I hope that you stop to ponder how creativity works in your own life and how you can manipulate your thoughts to come up with unique and novel solutions that expand your horizons and in the process make you more curious about the world around you and how it can be changed to allow you to become the best version of yourself.
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