Creativity: Components (Flexibility, Fluency, Elaboration, Originality)

Creativity as a Key Competency in Coaching

Creativity emerges as a very convenient and valuable competence within coaching processes.

Its main usefulness lies in the fact that it greatly facilitates the search for alternatives and novel solutions to achieve the proposed objectives.

We can understand creativity as a mental process that helps us to produce original and useful ideas.

Perhaps one of the most favorable aspects of people who cultivate their creativity is their attitude towards difficulties: they tend not to run away from problems, but rather, instead of perceiving them as insurmountable or immovable obstacles, they tend to see them as stimulating challenges that invite exploration and the search for ingenious solutions.

This mindset is critical in coaching, where thinking "outside the box" is often required to overcome roadblocks. Creativity is, in essence, daring to think outside the box.

Component 1: Flexibility

There are four main components that define creativity. The first is flexibility.

This component refers to the ability to transform the mental process used to arrive at a solution to a problem.

It involves being able to interpret the situation differently, abandoning rigid or habitual approaches to explore new perspectives.

A flexible person can easily change angles, consider opposite approaches or adapt mental strategies when the initial ones do not work.

It is the ability to "bend" thinking to fit the demands of the problem.

Component 2: Fluency

The second component is fluency. Fluency is nothing more than the facility to generate a high number of ideas in response to a given stimulus or problem. It is the quantity and speed with which ideas arise.

Generally, ideas flow best when the person is in a balanced state of mind: neither excessively tense about the situation (which can block thinking), nor excessively relaxed (which can diminish the creative impulse).

Finding this optimal point of activation facilitates the generation of abundant options.

Component 3: Elaboration

The third component is elaboration. Once the ideas have been generated (fluency), elaboration refers to the degree of complexity and detail of each idea.

Here, what is important is no longer the quantity, but the level of development and refinement of each individual idea.

A person with a high capacity for elaboration can take a simple idea and expand it, add nuances, consider its implications, and present it in a rich and detailed way.

Component 4: Originality

Finally, the fourth component is originality. Originality refers to how novel, unusual or uncommon the ideas generated are.

The more unique and different they are from the known, the conventional or the usual responses, the greater their originality.

Originality involves breaking with established patterns and proposing genuinely new solutions or perspectives.

Common Traits of Creative People

Generally, people considered creative tend to possess a number of common traits.

These include: great intellectual curiosity, an ability to observe in a differentiated way (noticing details that others overlook), a great ability to combine information in new ways, show empathy, and a tendency toward introversion (needing time alone to process).

In addition, they tend to be relatively free from the conventional constraints and limitations of society, non-conformist (but not necessarily rebellious), independent in their judgment, have a strong capacity for synthesis and analysis, and possess a good capacity for redefinition (seeing new uses or functions in existing objects or ideas).

Summary

Creativity is a very valuable skill, as it greatly facilitates the search for alternatives and novel solutions to problems. Creative people see problems as stimulating challenges that invite exploration.

There are four main components of creativity: Flexibility (the ability to transform the mental process and change focus); Fluency (the ability to generate a large number of ideas).

The other components are Elaboration (degree of complexity and detail of each idea generated) and Originality (novelty, rarity or uniqueness of ideas, breaking established patterns).