Tips for trainers using the Eight Creative Talents

My experiences working with the Eight Creative Talents have resulted in several learnings that I would like to share with those of you who are also using the Eight Creative Talents in your work. This section will now be an ongoing part of the Practical Innovator Newsletter so those of you who might like to share your experiences are welcome to send comments or questions to me at Lynne@breakthroughcreativity.com.

Some of the most frequent questions in workshops are how the eight creative talents relate to the MBTI® and why there can be differences between the results of the MBTI® and the talents. There are three issues here that need to be addressed to answer these questions:

1.	Both the Eight Creative Talents and the MBTI® are based on the work of Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung. However, the Eight Creative Talents are not the MBTI® all over again! A lot of individuals and teams may know their "type," but not be clear on what they need to do with that information to be more creative. The Eight Creative Talents bring together a well-grounded theory of creativity with Jung's research on personality differences with the goal of helping everyone understand how to be more creative, effective and productive. In addition, the Breakthrough Creativity Profile is the only personality instrument (that I know of anyway!) to identify different creativity styles based on an inclusive definition of creativity.
2.	The eight creative talent model is based on the belief, well founded in the Jungian literature, that we have all eight talents, Jung called them preferences, within us. However, over time most individuals tend to develop a favorite dominant and favorite auxiliary talent. Yet, all the other talents remain available to us. The first step in the creative journey is identifying favorite talents, then developing them as strengths, while recognizing they may create barriers to full effectiveness and creativity. Once individuals are comfortable with their favorite talents and are using their dominant and auxiliary to balance each other, they then want to be sure they are tapping into the other talents when they are appropriately called for. For example, strong project managers may be using their organizing and leading strengths to their fullest potential as someone with prefers Pilot and Visionary talents, but the team may be lacking a certain sense of fun and adventure or the ability to be more flexible in the face of crises. That's the time to tap into the Adventurer talent and use it for more improvisation, experimentation, and good times.
3.	As for differences between MBTI® results and those from the Breakthrough Creativity Profile (BCP), there are many reasons. The primary reason is that the MBTI® looks at preferences for certain functions (sensing, intuiting, feeling and thinking), while the BCP focuses on behavior. How someone behaves in a particular job or situation may in fact be quite different from how they would really prefer to be. In addition, education, upbringing, job situation, and other factors in life can all impact how freely individuals are able to use their true preferences. For those of you involved in coaching, a very powerful learning can occur in comparing the two sets of results and in exploring the differences. I plan to explore this issue further in upcoming editions of this newsletter.

One further note:   The September 12, 2004, Boston Globe article titled "Against Types" raised a frequent criticism against the MBTI® and other personality tests: the tendency of individuals and organizations to use these instruments, designed for personal awareness and growth, to stereotype and label one another. It is important to remember that Jung developed his framework not to label people, or as he said "not to put them in drawers," but to help them be more effective, productive and creative. Because of this unfortunate misunderstanding, I find it much more effective to prefer to the talents as something individuals have, not something they are. So instead of using the term "Harmonizers" (or "Pilots" or "Explorers", etc.) which would lump all those with a preferred Harmonizer (extraverted feeling) talent into what some perceive as a pigeonhole, I find it much more appropriate to say, "when you are using your Harmonizer talent." This change will be reflected in the next edition of the book Breakthrough Creativity: Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents.

«« Return to Articles index