1. A Multi-disciplinary Perspective on Decision-making and Creativity:
Using the Diversity of Truth-seeking and Sense-making to Advantage in Organizational Contexts
Wayne Smith, Ph.D.
Department of Management
CSU Northridge
Updated: Friday, January 18, 2019

2. 12 – Individual Creativity

3. Characteristics of Highly-Creative Individuals
Our Existence (i.e., humanistic approaches)
Imagination
Idealization
Consummation
The Aesthetic
Modes of Creativity (i.e. applied methods)
Physical Separation
Divine Inspiration
Nature of the Creative Process
Aesthetic Creativity (in the Art)
Creative Practice
Affective Failure and Renewal
Miscellaneous

4. Imagination Quantity of ideas Quality of ideas
“Envisage an alternate disposition”
Pre-occupation with the “possibles” and the “impossibles”
Glimpse into worlds beyond finite limits
Makes assertions that are inconsistent with the evidence

5. Idealization Ethics It needs to be “something more than taste”
Integration of the cognitive and the affective
“Envisage a future, ideal state”
i.e., the best of the imaginative alternatives
“A state of realities”
Balance competing compassions
“Wondrous strive towards perfection”
i.e., “it’s the journey, not the destination”

6. Consummation Analogy to sexual reproduction (coitus)
“Make something new”
Breathing “new life” into…
a person, organization, product, or process
Incorporating qualitative aspects to complement quantitative calculus
Beneficent power
The ability to “make a difference for the good”
i.e., “psychological efficacy”
Have a meaningful existence
Individuals have “highly interwoven feelings”
-i.e., our sense “combine” in ways we can’t fully understand or comprehend

7. The Aesthetic The “affective” Having an experience
i.e., can’t chiefly be learned through self-education
Art, Literature, Music, Theater, Cinema (but we could think of other variations in contemporary life)
The “muse” at a museum
A palpable but tacit experience
i.e., you “feel it” but cannot “describe it”
Not ultimately subject to analysis, especially reductive analysis
The ultimate dichotomy between “art” of “science”
An “alternate path to the unknown”
This is “scientific truth” and (just as importantly) “aesthetic truth”
This is, in the end, enduring value without the confines of labels

8. Physical Separation
Beethoven
Deaf

9. Divine Inspiration
Mozart
No drafts

10. Affective Failure and Renewal
(tbd)

11. Creativity in Science and Technology
(tbd)

12. Miscellaneous Illusions of the Brain Spirituality and Creativity
How are the soul, spirit, mind, and consciousness related?
Can a hammer have a headache? Can a hammer have anxiety?
Is consciousness constituted by the brain? (i.e., is it the same thing?)
Spirituality and Creativity
Should we emulate spirituality?
“Physicalism”
“Dualism”
Matter v. Mind
Emotions are merely a part of someone thinking about something (a part of a physical process)
Or is it the other way around?
Affective Attachment
Appraisal v. Bestowal

13. Sources
Singer, I. (2001), Feeling and Imagination: The Vibrant Flux of Our Existence, Rowman and Littlefield.
Singer, I. (2011), The Modes of Creativity, MIT Press.