One of the several approaches to creativity is the proclivity to engange in creative thought. And a rough definition of creative could be “the ability to design something new and useful at the same time“ (J. Peterson).
From an individual perspective, when we say we are creative thinkers it has to be because the ideas we come up with suppose something new and useful at the same time, that we are able to build far away from the average thinking. The thing here is that we need to be sure that the rest of the people are able to understand our proposal. If we are not able to involve them with our approach we will have a hard time, even being the most creative person in the world. How useful can be something if no one else can understand what it is for?
When we are a non creative person what happens is a a threshold issue. If someone shares with us an idea, that will trigger off some others in our minds, but they will be highly associated to the original one, pretty close to the first one.
Now, imagine a group of people. We ask them to think individually, writing down solutions for a problem or building from a first idea tossed to the group. The percentage of non creative people is higher than the creatives. so, in the case of a group, we might end up with similar conclusions, results when gathering all answers. Maybe, some ideas of the list could be disruptive, but those would be the less. But when there is fluency (No judgment, open mindset, …) in a group/team it is highly probable that shared thoughts might sparkle brilliant ideas into others mind. These co-activated ideas will be quite distant from the original ones. The initial individual threshold has now been expanded.
We are not obliged to be creative as individuals (and what it means drives to another post), we just need to get the right partners in the room. Diversity ensures that we have different approaches. Completely outsiders-of-the-box (Creative thinking) bring brilliant and different ideas while non creative ones bring the achievability (Creative achievement) can achieve bringing in to live something new and useful.
We all have ideas, but are they truly different, or just average? What about you, reader? Are you a creative thinker?