Still, there's nothing occult or mystical about creativity. It's an innate human capacity, available to all healthy human beings. It is a neurological process, which, though it is yet to be fully understood or explained in scientific, technical terms, can be harnessed and nurtured. As elusive as it may seem, it's a skill which is available to all fully engaged, normal people.

The Creative Cauldron
Creative acts happen in a particular, well-defined state of mind. This has been simply demonstrated by hooking the brain to an electro-encephalograph and monitoring electrical impulses during a subject's creative activity. As it turns out, the human brain's electromagnetic frequency can be broken into four kinds of wave patterns: beta, alpha, theta, and delta. The beta state, the brain's highest brain frequency, is where we spend the vast majority of our conscious time: the average waking state. It involves the cacophony of multiple stimuli and is least conducive to creativity. Alpha, by contrast, is the twilight between full consciousness and sleep, the golden hour, the most fertile state for the brain. Interestingly, it is the state of mind where children exist up to the ages of seven or eight. This, in part, explains why children are so prone to fantasy and play, free-association and intuition. Theta and delta are the lowest frequency levels where some extraordinarily creative people and some religious luminaries, including the Dalai Lama, have been found to exist in a conscious level. Theta and delta for most people is the brain frequency we emit during the most healthful sleep time of our lives—and aren't of interest to us here. It's the alpha state an organization wants to cultivate, if it hopes to encourage widespread creativity.

People whose consciousness is in an alpha state are, almost inevitably, more creative, more imaginative. It isn't something reserved for the lucky few. A vast amount of literature describes how people find their own instinctive ways to get into an alpha state other than sleep. It takes practice.

Creative Collaboration
The simple fact remains that an alpha-like state of mind is essential for the creative process to happen and nothing disrupts it like the classic management techniques that have worked for so many centuries: bullying command-and-control, motivation through fear. You'll get obedience. You'll get uniform productivity in familiar ways. But you won't get the kind of daily, hourly inventiveness so vital to success now. It requires a congenial, supporting environment.

On the other hand, creativity shouldn't be babied. As fragile as it is, creativity is inexhaustible. The more you use it, the stronger and more plentiful it gets. Of all the resources available in excess now, creativity is the most abundant. And it emerges only through hard work. It requires the confidence to reach deep within oneself, assured that going through the creative process is the only path to a distinctive, unique and differentiating solution. If you've defined the problem, and done all the work toward understanding the needs, with collaborative creativity, the moment will arrive when the solution will occur. It can't be forced. But it does show up, very often to the prepared mind, the one who has gone through the discipline of preparing for it.

One can and must set high aspirations for output—and hold it to firm measures of its effectiveness. Focus creativity to solve highly specific problems. Managers who understand and respect creative power, how to manage it, how to harness it to produce results, will become leaders, and their organizations winning enterprises by standing out against a competitive environment that commoditizes everything but the most differentiated products and service.

Because organizational creativity requires collaboration, the ability to function in creative mind states, which involves the need to take risks and accept rejection, the creative environment becomes critical in optimizing productive creative output. That environment must have:

• A clear set of goals and aspirations which are measurable.
• A supportive culture which provides clear and complete information to the creative person/team.
• An encouraging environment which allows for risk taking, some inevitable failure and rejection.
• A reward system both financial and emotional which is tied to measurable results.

Now we have entire industries totally dependent on continuous innovation: blue chips like Intel, Microsoft, Xerox, IBM, and the pharmaceutical companies, which spend individually in the billions on research and development. In academic medical centers, clinical innovation is de rigueur. More than that, every business in tomorrow's world will have to think of innovation and differentiation as the staple of their business or else their jobs will go to India, China, and then Ghana, or Zaire. Anywhere but here. Creativity must be embraced by all schools, from primary to graduate, all businesses, and even government. Creativity is serious business.