Creative or Engineer?

One thing I discovered late in life was that folk tend to fall into one of two categories, which I term creatives or engineers.

The basic difference is in how they approach life.

A good example would be in the instance where they both had identical bombs to defuse.... the engineer would study the schematic of the bombs design, draw a diagram outlining the wiring circuitry and overall layout, re-examine the schematic and make sure that they were confident they had identified the correct wiring to cut, and..... IF there was sufficent time left on the clock, defuse the bomb.

The creative would look at the bomb, wire cutters in hand and go...."hmmmmm....red or blue?"

Now if you laughed at that, you are probably a creative, if you are 'tutting' you probably qualify for an engineer.

Like many things in Gods creation, God designed fail-safes by putting the control and information in two separate containers.

We see this in marriage as women are loaded with emotive control systems, whereas men are loaded with logic systems.

Individually they are both prone to errors of judgement, when correctly configured together they form a valuable and efficient unit, capable of great things.

Sub section that into creative's and engineers and you have a further complication.

Put two engineers together and you have a perfect household where everything has it's place and is most definitely in it.

Put two creatives together and they will probably have a good chance of finding whatever they need by deducting where they last used it and looking in the pile nearest to that.

But the real bind is that even when correctly configured.... logic with emotion and one creative to the others engineer, it causes grief for both of them, even if the engineer has it worse, because the creative is too busy thinking about something else to worry about why the engineer is fuming in the corner because..... well, who knows, engineers fume, all creatives know that!

Obviously, mismatched can produce the same strict order, or complete chaos, if two creatives or two engineers get married.

Now imagine it in business, where in the 'boring' industries that make all the 'boring' things that make life worth living, the top echelons are normally occupied by engineers.

The creatives are kept in a separate department somewhere, locked away in marketing and design with a lesser chance of corrupting the productive folk who work all day, without a single stray thought interrupting their capacity to produce.....whatever they are working at....with ruthless efficiency.

The creatives meanwhile are brainstorming about how to run a programme to guarantee that they had a better chance of scooping the lottery and never needing to work again in their lives, not that they do anyway, for to a creative thinking up a new bright idea that will enable the world to be different and somehow more amenable, is not actually difficult.

Making that idea come to reality though, needs an engineer.

I have always shared my ideas, and frequently had people say, don't tell people, they will steal the idea, and a few have, and my reply has always remained the same, even when someone has capitalised on my concepts.

I have a thousand ideas a day, if they need to steal one, so be it, for it's the only idea they will ever have.

Engineers are the best to run companies, but normally it's a creative that starts one.

Creatives can have the idea and the enthusiasm and desire to drive a concept from the back of a fag packet in the pub, to the launch of the whatever and the basking in the success, but please don't ask them or expect them to actually make the whotsit, or arrange a distribution chain, or balance the books, for that you need an engineer.

Creative accountants are rather an oxymoron, because if they are creative enough for the average business, then they are probably not good accountants, and vice versa.

But the worse combination to have is one that is relatively balanced, that rare soul who is more or less 50/50 split between creative and engineer.

I'm thinking politicians, creative enough to get ideas off the ground, and worse still engineer enough to force them through to ruination.

So accept the fact that we need both and we need both to work together and realise that it actually only works that way.