Creativity should become a major part of each of our lives, with it brings innovation as well. Individually it helps us in to thinking of new ways and as a group it foster entrepreneurship which is emergent thinking. (Moorman & Halloran,2006; Sutton, 2001)
Creativity can be hindered in many way, but it’s most dangerous when it is for the individual himself/herself as the following factors describe why?
1. You make premature judgments
2. Have rigid thinking
3. Impaired ability to think of alternatives
These three are emphasized based on:
1. Fear
2. Uncertainty of the future
3. Low self efficacy
4. Conformity
If this happens to anybody it can only mean one thing- the brain has stopped functioning! Ironically this is what I observed as being a student. Being students mean that you have all the time you want to study and sometimes in the game of achieving our superordinate goals whether its success for the future for the long term or for grades in the short term; some of us become deeply process oriented and catch ourselves doing one task too many times.
Creativity means that you should view problems as spring board for new ideas, and in doing so it can be strengthened by another advise that is when faced with uncertainity, the only way out is to choose at random and be committed to it whole heatedly even if its for the good or the bad. (Moorman & Halloran,2006;Thompson, 2003) Creativity obviously gets stifled when there is a lot of elements working against it e.g senior managers harsh criticism, unrealistic workload ,limited time or simply when you reward those who succeed and punish those who fail to provide success in being creative.
I learned that one way of coming out of the rigid thinking is to do something ridiculous not based on practical judgements, its ought to get you loose and most of all helps you to become fresh when you return back to studying. For a graphic designer or people from the arts they are people who like to be free, initially they might conform but not for long. They are natural sense maker as some are natural entrepreneurs like Michael Dell. Although engineering or management people might consider the creative people as being weird, like wise the creative people would view the engineering or management people as weird.
Reference
Wall, S.J. (2005) “The Protean Organization: Learning to Love
Sutton, R. (2001). The Weird Rules of Creativity. Harvard Business Review, September

Thompson, L. (2003) Improving the creativity of organizational work groups. Academy
Management Executive, 17(1);