Higher tolerance to uncertainty
According to TrainingZone, creativity is defined as exploration of the unknown. It involves pursuing ideas and thoughts that have no strictly defined rules and which the given individual has not yet explored. This is why creative employees' tolerance of uncertainty is higher: for them, walking on thin ice is a daily experience, which is why taking certain risks will not throw them off balance.
Creativity and the comfort zone
In order for someone to be creative, they must be able to step outside their comfort zone. Behaving in a creative and thoughtful way is impossible from within one's previous experience and time-proven practice: creative individuals have to sacrifice part of their comfort and status quo to explore new ideas. Anyone wanting to achieve something that nobody has achieved before must take a certain risk because it is quite possible that the idea will only lead to a dead end. For this reason, creativity and tolerance of risk are always interconnected.
Keeping risk taking and creativity within limits
Unfortunately, extremely creative and innovative individuals often do not realise the extent of the risks they are taking: they do not take into account the possible consequences of failure and they put all their money on one horse.
The task of the employer or manager, therefore, is to enable employees to be creative while at the same time making them follow certain rules when taking risks:
- Risk distribution. Never bet everything on one horse; distribute "investments" and risks among more projects so that the potential failure of some of them will not prove fatal.
- Risk analysis. Though creative individuals would like to skip any detailed analysis and just follow their gut rather than reason, it is important that before undertaking any major new project they consider, write down and analyse all the risks connected with it.
- Having a plan B. The last, and maybe the most important rule is to have a plan B. If necessary, plan also C, D, E, all the way to Z. The employee must go through all the apocalyptic scenarios that could occur and come up with an emergency plan for each of the alternatives so that, should things turn out badly, all the risks will have the minimum possible negative impact.
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