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It's no secret that our current economy and groaning health care system are placing enormous pressure on health care professionals. And with dwindling reimbursements, uncertain legislative wrangling, shifting employee pools, and increasingly diverse and complex patient loads, who has time to be creative?
But creativity is vital to a successful facility or department. The word "creativity" in our culture is often equated to artistic expression or aesthetic qualities. However, creativity is also the ability to adapt to stimulus change.
The science of creativity in people and institutions is a relatively new science. Prior to studies within the past three decades, it was presumed that certain people were endowed with a special creative trait or gene, and everyone else should just follow their lead. Today, creativity is understood to be far more complex and dynamically linked to social, economic, familial and cultural factors.
The hallmarks of creativity include: independence of judgment; tolerance for ambiguity; movement from polarizations and oppositional thinking to complex paradoxical thinking; androgyny (clarity on gender attributes and roles to include assertiveness, goal acquisition, nurturing and tolerance of flexible time concepts); and preference for complexity of outlook, asymmetry over symmetry, and easy movement between order and disorder.1
The same concepts that define creativity are also the ones that cause tension for clinicians on a daily basis. Reconciling issues such as providing quality care in a hurry, being compassionate with firm boundaries, and accepting clinical and financial "could bes" and "maybes" is difficult in a world that demands certainty and security. You can't proclaim certainty of a polytrauma patient's clinical outcome any easier than you can definitively predict next year's funding for continuing education.
Don't be disingenuous by feigning toughness and surety when it doesn't exist. Your associates are too savvy and well connected for rote leadership. So, how do you break free of old patterns, adopt creative characteristics and still keep your job? Consider this point: "In the creative process there is an incessant dialectic and an essential tension between two seemingly opposed dispositional tendencies: the tendency toward structuring and integration and the tendency toward disruption of structure and diffusion of energy and attention."1 Realizing and appreciating this tension of opposites can shift your perspective and crack open your creative insight.
Another important point is realizing that your pursuit of professional creativity involves others. The idea of the lone creative genius is a myth.1-3 Rather, creativity occurs within systems and is a systems effect. Barron describes these systems as creative ecosystems within which "simplicity leads to complexity before a new and more elegant simplicity can be achieved."1
Simplicity is the key that unlocks the blocks to creativity. If you practice cultivating creativity, the system becomes more creative because you're part of the system. According to Peter Senge, director of the center for organizational learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "What is most systemic is most local..that's why personal cultivation is so important."4
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