Creating Leadership Breakthroughs » The Eight Creative Talents and Carl Jung

The Eight Creative Talents and Carl Jung

The Eight Creative Talents bring together Lynne's well-grounded theory of creativity with the research on personality differences by Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung (1888-1961) in order to help leaders understand how to be more creative, effective and productive. Jung believed that everyone is creative and that creativity is one of the primary instincts and motivating forces of life. He also believed that each of the talents is equally valuable and equally creative.

  Creativity is one of the primary instincts and motivating forces of life.  

Here are some key points about the eight creative talents and Carl Jung:

• Producing creative results has a lot to do with finding data and information, generating alternatives, and deciding on a solution. Jung defined these differences as personality types, and they have an impact on a leader's creativity, leadership style, and vision of the future.
• Jung's framework (the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® is also based on Jung's work) can help leaders define their creative style or "talents" and then figure out how to be more consistent and purposeful in producing creative results.
• In the best of all possible worlds, leaders would use the Adventurer or the Navigator data-collecting talents to find the historical and current facts around a problem. Leaders would use their Explorer or the Visionary data-collecting talents to find hidden possibilities and generate options for the future.
• Leaders would then use the Pilot and the Inventor decision-making talents to logically organize, analyze, and make decisions about the challenge. They would use the Diplomat and Poet decision-making talents to determine the context and importance of the solution and how stakeholders would be impacted.
• Jung believed that his model was not cast in stone. The Breakthrough Creativity Profile, like other instruments designed to measure personality, doesn't necessarily capture the full richness of a leader's life. Family or work pressures, for example, force many of us to operate out of a substitute personality, and assessment tools may not capture this situation.
• Therefore, leaders should not label themselves or others, but use this information to grow. Jung believed that his model was like "a compass, a practical way to orient ourselves, psychologically, as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude."