What would you prefer to be, systematic or creative?
“Never confuse motion with action.” —Ernest Hemingway
“I am a creative person, I need the freedom to innovate.” A comment from a developer caught my attention. We were talking about working in a systematic way, and following certain development guidelines and processes.
Sometimes there is a conflict between innovation and processes. Processes are considered to be bounded, whereas creativity is boundless.
“I understand.” I was trying to explain. “However for the innovation to be useful to business, it must follow some guidelines.”
“Discovery of a light bulb is often taken as the best example of innovation. Right? Do you know the story of this invention? A lot of experiments were done in a very systematic way, a lot of observations were documented meticulously before a really useful light bulb went into production.”
If they had failed to keep a track of the thousands of changes they made to fix the problems, they would be still trying to invent it :)”
Can we define innovation as a systematic expression of creativity, to harness its power for business outcomes?
Are you creative? Or Systematic? Or both?
