EVALUATE YOUR PERSONAL CREATIVITY WITH THE CQ GRID

What follows is a simple grid called 'The Creativity Quotient (CQ) Grid', developed by Dilip Mukerjea, to help you to evaluate your level of personal creativity.


You can evaluate yourself by entering scores on the CQ Grid. Ratings should be given for the following categories:

CURIOSITY: How curious are you about things, information, people, and life in general?

FLEXIBILITY: Are you able to see beyond the routine? Can you manipulate ideas?

RESOURCEFULNESS: When you are in a jam, do you seek out or create, opportunities for solutions?

CHALLENGING: Do you blindly accept the status quo, or are you able to challenge assumptions?

TRENDSPOTTING: How well do you actively monitor change in your field as well as in life?

PROACTIVITY: Are you able to initiate action or do you tend to wait for directives?

OPENNESS: Are you receptive to ideas and alert to creative opportunities?

SELF-BELIEF: How strong is your self belief when it comes to being creative?

VISION/GOALS: Do you have a clear-cut set of goals, and a definite vision to guide you?

INTUITION: How good are your powers of intuition?

SIMPLIFYING: Are you able to see the big picture and to eliminate clutter from complexity?

RISK-TAKING: How willing are you about pursuing your ideas to completion, even when the odds are stacked against you?

The CQ Grid above has each sector subdivided into ten parts. Moving clockwise, as indicated by the arrow, mark off your personal rating for each category from the twelve shown and then join up all the evaluated scores, e.g. for ‘Curiosity’, mark yourself on the scale to the right of the word, and so on.

You will get a radial shape of your CQ Grid. The perfect shape is a circle.

Areas where you have scored low will be nearer the centre, and vice versa for the high scores.

You can then determine the areas where you need to improve, and those where you are already proficient.

If you wish, you could add up your scores for the twelve categories, divide the total by 12 and multiply this by 10. This will give you your average score as a percentage. For example, if your total score is 96, your average score is 96/12 x 10 = 80%.

[Excerpted from Dilip Mukerjea's book, 'Brain Symphony: Brain-blazing Practical Techniques in Creativity for Immediate Application'. All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]