MANAGEMENT & CREATIVITY

When managers and educators acquire an understanding of the brain’s functions, they will be immensely enriched in their ability to boost performance in all areas of activity.

The brain has two halves, or hemispheres, in the middle and upper regions, with each half (Right and Left modes) having its own distinct specialities. These can be termed L-mode and R-mode areas of specialisation.

Essentially, L-mode is verbal and nominal, that is, it likes to use words to name things. Equally so, there is a preference for numbers, a sense of time, and for the sequential, logical, ordering of things, people and events.

L-mode loves to involve itself in analysis, taking things apart and reducing them to pieces so that they can be scrutinised carefully in order to gain understanding. In essence, L-mode is predominantly verbal, temporal, symbolic, analytic, logical, digital, rational and abstract. It also focuses on the past and the future.

In contrast, R-mode uses pattern and imagery to understand the world. Rather than lines, the spatial arrangement of things is preferred in this mode, whereby, instead of taking things apart, R-mode puts things together to see larger patterns. It is abysmal at time-keeping. Yet it is intuitive, unwittingly arriving at conclusions.

Interestingly, R-mode sees how unrelated things are similar, and it enjoys analogy and metaphor. It also focuses on the present, the now!

One of the most important and fascinating skills of R-mode is the ability to see things or situations as a whole and yet pay attention to detail.

The secret of unleashing our creative genius is to consciously know about, and to use, both modes of brain operation in our various activities.

Today, there are Four Driving Forces that challenge our creative brains; they determine the outcomes of management creative effort:

1) Public policy - who plays and competes in the marketspaces; whether the G8 (or the G10, with India and China added), can successfully address issues such as global warming, globalisation, geopolitical tensions, clean fresh water, sanitation and disease, pollution and wastage, and the escalating energy and food costs.

2) Technological innovation at three levels:

- the unabated enhancements in price/performance benefits in digital hardware and new techniques for designing, building and delivering software.

- the continually morphing architectures that help to organise these hardware and software building blocks.

- the advance into new domains of these components and architectures (e.g., the mobile Internet, smart objects, bioinformatics, telematics, neuroscience, genetics, robotics, and surveillance and security systems).

3) Demographic Dynamics - such as multicultural corporations, refugee movements, aging populations, and declining birth rates around the globe.

4) Culture Consciousness - especially the emergence of global youth cultures, the growth of the creative class, and the growing importance of religion (and ideologies) around the world.

[Excerpted from the 'Catalysing Creativity' edition of The Braindancer Series of bookazines by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]