Creativity is not One Ability, but a Whole Cluster of Abilities

Creativity is not one ability, but a whole cluster of abilities. The most important ones are:

Ideational fluency: It measures a person's ability to come up with a number of solutions to a given problem.

Flexibility: The ability to provide a large variety of solutions, to respond to a problem from a variety of viewpoints, and to use a variety of approaches in problem solving.

Originality: The ability to come up with unusual but appropriate responses.

Ability to sense problems: The ability to notice the unexplained, the unsatisfactory, or the incogruent.

Ability to grasp the causes:It is the ability to go to the roots of a phenomenon by unravelling its causes, and equality, to visualise its consequences.

Ability to elaborate: It is the difference between a legend (that people talk of) and Shakespeare's drama on it. The ability to elaborate is indispensable to putting a creative idea to work.

Ability to restructure problems: The ability to go behind the surface features of a problem, and see what the "real" problem is.

Pradip Khandwalla

Fourth Eye: Excellence Through Creativity
A.H. Wheeler, Allahabad, 1984