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and verified his creative solution, he was done with that problem except to reflect on
the outcome and process.
Figure 11.8 The Creative Decision-Making Process

How Do You Know If Your Decision-Making Process Is Creative?
Researchers focus on three factors to evaluate the level of creativity in the
decision-making process. Fluency refers to the number of ideas a person is able to
generate. Flexibility refers to how different the ideas are from one another. If you are
able to generate several distinct solutions to a problem, your decision-making process
is high on flexibility. Originality refers to an idea’s uniqueness. You might say that
Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, is a pretty creative person. His decision-
making process shows at least two elements of creativity. We do not exactly know
how many ideas he had over the course of his career, but his ideas are fairly different
from one another. After teaching math in Africa with the Peace Corps, Hastings was
accepted at Stanford University, where he earned a master’s degree in computer
science. Soon after starting work at a software company, he invented a successful

debugging tool, which led to his founding the computer troubleshooting company
Pure Software in 1991. After a merger and the subsequent sale of the resulting
company in 1997, Hastings founded Netflix, which revolutionized the DVD rental
business through online rentals with no late fees. In 2007, Hastings was elected to
Microsoft’s board of directors. As you can see, his ideas are high in originality and
flexibility. [10]
Figure 11.9 Dimensions of Creativity

Some experts have proposed that creativity occurs as an interaction among
three factors: (1) people’s personality traits (openness to experience, risk taking), (2)
their attributes (expertise, imagination, motivation), and (3) the context
(encouragement from others, time pressure, and physical structures). [11] For example,

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