Appendix A

TEST OF CREATIVITY

A Self-Assessment Exercise

The left side of your brain handles analytical thinking: logical, rational, linear, numerical, precise. Many aspects of your job call for analytical thinking: planning a project, preparing a budget, learning a procedure, solving a problem, studying alternatives, and making decisions.

The right side of your brain handles creative thinking: expansive, visionary, intuitive, spatial, artistic. Whenever you come up with new ideas or create products, procedures, forms, programs, or plans that are new (or, at least, have never been generated by you before), you are drawing on the right side of your brain.

This self-assessment exercise will help you to get a quick measure of your creativity. There are fifteen questions. Each is timed. We suggest you get a kitchen timer or alarm clock or wristwatch, since you are likely to become absorbed in the exercises and forget to keep track of the time. Alternative: get a friend to be your timekeeper.

On each exercise, read the instructions. Then immediately start the clock.

1. Five Minutes In the space below (and on a separate sheet of paper if you need more space), list all the words you can think of that begin with the letter c. Start timing now.

2. The local soft drink bottling company has a fleet of trucks whose drivers make daily deliveries at the same supermarkets, drug stores, and beverage distributors. That is, the drivers visit all outlets on the routes every day.

This July, the company noticed a higher than normal absenteeism on Fridays and Mondays. The drivers call in sick. This has meant that the route supervisors have had to drive the routes themselves. Since many drivers have exceeded their allowable sick days, the company is docking the drivers (i.e., not paying them) for absent days. But this has not reduced the absenteeism.

(a) Three Minutes In the space below, list all the reasonable explanations you can think of as to why the drivers are calling in sick on Mondays and Fridays. Start timing now.

(b) Three Minutes Assuming the explanations you just listed are valid, use the space below to list all the possible actions the bottling company might take to correct the problem. Start timing now.

3. Three Minutes A friend of yours manufactures peanut butter and other peanut products. Peanut shells are a by-product, and your friend has been carting them to the dump for use as landfill; they are, of course, biodegradable.

You’re convinced that the shells will have some commercial value if ways can be found to use them and not merely bury them. In the space below, list all the possible uses that you feel should be explored for their practicality. Start timing now.

4. Three Minutes Many fruits find their names used in figures of speech. For example, we refer to an unreliable automobile as a “lemon,” or the boss or lead performer as the “top banana.” In the space below, list all the figures of speech you can think of that include the name of a fruit. Start timing now.

5. Three Minutes It’s scrabble time. Here are your seven letters. In the space below, see how many words you can assemble by using some of these letters (and no other letters). A letter may be used only once in each word. Start timing now.

NXEYOTI

Fifteen Minutes Complete as many of these assignments as you possibly can. Don’t spend too much time on any that stump you. Move on to another. You can always return to an item if a new strategy or fresh insight comes to you. The exercise continues on the next page. Start timing now.