The Definition
You begin by asking,
“What do I understand?”
You aren’t immune to the feelings and perspectives of others, but your starting point is your own insight, your own understanding. You see the world as a series of collisions between competing parts, pieces, and agendas; and you are compelled to figure it all out. For you there’s nothing quite as thrilling as finding a pattern beneath life’s complexities, a core concept that can explain why things play out the way they do, or better yet, predict how things are
going
to play out.
You are a thoughtful person, someone who needs time alone to mull and muse—without this alone time, events pile up on you haphazardly, and your confusion starts to overwhelm you. So you look forward to time by yourself—early in the morning, late at night, long walks—and you use this time to get clear. You are a creative person. What form this creativity takes will depend on your other traits and talents, but whether you write, paint, sing, complete projects, or make presentations, you are drawn toward making things. Each thing you make is a tangible sign that you have made some sense of the world, that you have organized the chaos in some useful way. You look at what you’ve made, you take pleasure in what you now understand, and then you move on to the next creation.
You, at Your Most Powerful
• Your power comes from making sense of things.
• When you look at the world, you can’t help but see beneath the surface to the patterns underneath. You are intrigued by patterns. Patterns help you explain (to yourself, as much as to anyone else) what is going on.
• This is why you like concepts. Concepts are the best explanation for most events. Your world is full of concepts that you’ve derived from your observations of the world.
• You take great pride in your ideas. You are protective of them. They are the best expression of you.
• Your world is thrown off when you don’t understand what is going on. When presented with an unfamiliar situation you need time—time to process, to observe, to ask your questions, to think things through. “Don’t ask me to make snap judgments,” you protest. “Let me gather my thoughts.”
• You don’t like surprises. You don’t like making things up as you go along. When you make things—and you do like to make things—you do it only after you’ve had time to percolate and process.
• You certainly are creative, but you don’t conjure things out of thin air. You break things down into their component elements and this enables you to reconfigure them in new and different ways. Thus you are always watching and observing so that you can identify these elements.
• You aren’t bothered by ambiguity, by gaps in the “data.” Instead you instinctively create theories out of the facts you do have at your disposal, and then you allow your theory to fill in the gaps in the facts. As such, your thinking is inferential rather than deductive.
• You are prone to flashes of insight into a better way of doing things or presenting things. Reflecting back, it’s hard for you to explain quite where these flashes came from, but once you’ve seen them, you cannot get them out of your mind. The need to make them real propels you forward. (Once you’ve seen this flash, you will need a partner to help you work backward to the step-by-step sequence required to make the “flash” real.)
• You are relentless. Though at the outset you will not be rushed, as you think on it and think on it, the patterns emerge, these patterns create theories, the theories spark new insights, and all of a sudden you are being borne along by these pictures in your mind. You take a while to get going, but once you are off and running, you are hard to stop.
How to Describe Yourself (in Interviews, Performance Reviews)
• “I’ve been told I’m a very creative person, always looking for better ways of doing things.”
• “I love theories, concepts. People often come to me when they want someone to explain why things are playing out the way they are.”
• “I ask ‘why?’ a lot. I guess it can get annoying sometimes, but I can’t help it. I’m the kind of person who hates assumptions. I need to get to the bottom of why things are the way they are.”
• “I’m at my best when I’m analyzing what happened and why it happened.”
• “I read a lot—both fiction and nonfiction. Why? Because I like it. And because it keeps my mind full of ideas.”
• “Someone once told me that creativity comes only to the prepared mind, so I read, study, and ask questions so my mind is prepared.”
• “I don’t like rushing into things. I’m not a ready, fire, aim person. I’m more a study, ready, aim, fire, study again person.”
How to Make an Immediate Impact
• It is going to take you a little time to make your full impact felt. Before you feel confident taking action, you need to understand the forces at play and how these forces combine to create patterns. This kind of pattern recognition takes time. You need this time.
Be patient
.
• You can’t force pattern recognition but you can accelerate it. So, no matter what your other job responsibilities,
discipline yourself to uncover the patterns
. Which data will you look to, to reveal what’s really going on? Which outcomes keep repeating? If you see range in performance between one person and another or between one team and another, can you spot the prime mover that is causing this range? Investigate these tell-tale signs to reveal the patterns.
• When you feel ready, pick an area where you have confidence that you’ve decoded the patterns that matter, and then
use your understanding of these patterns to present to your colleagues a better way of doing things
. What you’re doing here is trying to make your understanding useful as quickly as possible. There’s pressure in this, of course—will you be able to refine your thinking so that it is clear and actionable?—but you’re the kind of person who will feel this as positive pressure, even fun pressure. Your ideas won’t necessarily be accepted right away, but your reputation for thoughtfulness will have begun.
• If your initial idea is rejected, find another place or situation where your first key concept can also be applied.
What’s powerful about an understanding is that it is transferable from situation to situation
.
• As any Creator must, it is your responsibility to
figure out what your raw material is
. A Creator has to work with something and get good at working with something. So what is your “something”? Is it words or data or deals or is it something tangible—food, color, or metals?
• And whatever it is,
do you know whether, within your chosen “something,” you are a novelty-loving Creator or a depth-loving Creator
? Neither is better, but you will undoubtedly find yourself pulled more toward one than the other. If novelty, then you will want to cultivate the reputation for learning agility—“Throw me in and I’ll spot the patterns quickly.” If depth, then take it upon yourself to show off your expertise in your subject—learn the jargon; retrieve the latest writings, research, works; and resist the intriguing temptations of other subjects, other “somethings.”
• Always produce
. Of course you feel driven to produce, to create something, but your production, your output, is also the raw material for future creations. Your output will show you (and others) what sense you’ve made, the patterns you’ve discovered and rearranged, and when you (and others) see this output, it will jolt your thinking and give you impetus for new patterns, new arrangements. A Creator must always externalize—“put out there”—the patterns he or she sees.
• In the same vein, get to know your audience
. Who are you producing for, and have you set up your world so that you are constantly hearing their unadulterated response to your output? Response doesn’t necessarily mean praise— though it might. It means simply their reaction. Their reaction will be grist for your creative mill. “Which bit exactly are they reacting to?” you will ask yourself. You won’t always agree with or even credit their reaction, but it will nonetheless give you meaty raw material to work with.
• Read
. Stay current on new trends, research, or practices within your chosen “something.” You’ve got to know who the latest Creators are and what new sense they are making of the world.
How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level
• Take time to muse
. You need time alone to let your mind live with the things you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, so it can settle into some sort of shape. This thinking time is vital to your well-being—without it, you feel confused and on edge. It is also vital to your performance—it is the ground from which will spring new insights and discoveries. Take it very seriously. You need it. Others don’t, and they won’t quite understand why you do. So build it into your schedule and stick to it religiously. It doesn’t have to be so frequent that it interferes with your daily work. It just has to be predictable—you are comforted knowing that thinking time is coming.
• As a Creator you will have to
figure out how to “own” your creations
. At one extreme, this might mean working only in fields where you are allowed to own the intellectual property you create, such as journalism or entertainment. Or you might work for a large organization only if they allow you to write papers under your name or file for patents under your name. If neither of these is a possibility for you, still you will need to figure out a way to “sign” your work.
• Create a forum for safe experimentation
, a place where you can share new, as yet fragile, patterns of understanding. It could be a cross-industry group of like-minded thinkers. It could be an informal Skunk Works within your own organization. Wherever it is, it should be comprised of people who question you and challenge you with no agenda other than helping you to strengthen (or break) the sense you’ve made. This group will become your testing ground.
• Stick your neck out
. What is your highest-leverage “creation,” the one with the greatest exposure and risk, yet the greatest potential upside? In other words, what is your home run?
• Seek out the “enemy camp
.” Deliberately forge a relationship with people who see things very differently from you. They may discredit the sense you make. They may even disparage your work. And you may still disagree with them. But by exposing yourself to them, you will prevent yourself from becoming complacent.
• In this enemy camp,
look for evidence that contradicts what you’ve come to believe
. Faced with this, you will either become more articulate in explaining your point of view or you will discredit the contradictory evidence or you will expand your view to incorporate this evidence. Each of these is, in its own way, a positive outcome.
What to Watch Out For
• While you are studying your world and figuring out the patterns, you still have to be doing. The world will not wait for you to figure it all out. Nor will your colleagues. Nor will your customers. So,
whatever patterns you’re looking for, you’re going to have to figure them out in the world, as you’re doing
.
• Others can become discouraged or disillusioned by ideas that don’t quite work. It will be up to you to
show them that the experiment itself will have value, regardless of the outcome
. Before you present your idea, discipline yourself to describe in detail what could be learned even from the worst-case scenario outcome.