Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts: Guiding Creative Engagement and Exploration

The book presents a framework that explains how creators go about creating in contexts where there are too many possibilities to consider them all. The focus is on guidance: guiding conceptions that provide vision, and guiding principles that help stay on track. Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and many other case study examples help bring the points home. The framework can be actionable - use it to help be more creative yourself. However, the focus is mainly on providing a framework with examples.

Jonathan S. Feinstein has shown that broad guiding conceptions and guiding principles function to help generate creativity and guiding projects toward successful completion amidst vastly rich contexts. Guiding conceptions help individuals identify areas of rich creative opportunity and spawn initial seed project ideas, which eventually lead to finding the essential ingredient or idea that brings a project together and makes it work. While guiding conceptions are central to generating broad project ideas, what he refers to as guiding principles become important later in the creative process to guide, evaluate, revise, improve and complete a project. With lots of empirical examples he shows how guiding conceptions and guiding principles provide standards to complete a creative project. He answers the question of how an organization can single out one particularly promising project that would otherwise remain buried beneath unlimited possibilities. This model of the creative process is adaptable to virtually any field of interest, making this book essential reading for management and team leaders focused on identifying and completing successful creative projects astutely and faster. I read the book cover to cover and found that any given page is written in clear easy to understand language.

This book offers a diverse study of creative individuals to show the complexities of the creative process. A great read for scholars or anyone interested in creativity and new ideas.

Outstanding treatise regarding modeling individuality in social and cultural systems