Creativity: an Academic Discipline
The NY Times posted this article today, must be true then, eh?
IT BOTHERS MATTHEW LAHUE and it surely bothers you: enter a public restroom and the stall lock is broken. Fortunately, Mr. Lahue has a solution. It’s called the Bathroom Bodyguard. Standing before his Buffalo State College classmates and professor, Cyndi Burnett, Mr. Lahue displayed a device he concocted from a large washer, metal ring, wall hook, rubber bands and Lincoln Log. Slide the ring in the crack and twist. The door stays shut. Plus, the device fits in a jacket pocket.
The world may be full of problems, but students presenting projects for Introduction to Creative Studies have uncovered a bunch you probably haven’t thought of. Elie Fortune, a freshman, revealed his Sneaks ’n Geeks app to identify the brand of killer sneakers you spot on the street. Jason Cathcart, a senior, sported a bulky martial arts uniform with sparring pads he had sewn in. No more forgetting them at home.
“I don’t expect them to be the next Steve Jobs or invent the flying car,” Dr. Burnett says. “But I do want them to be more effective and resourceful problem solvers.” Her hope, she says, is that her course has made them more creative.
Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill. Pin it on pushback against standardized tests and standardized thinking, or on the need for ingenuity in a fluid landscape.
“The reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,” says Gerard J. Puccio, chairman of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, which has the nation’s oldest creative studies program, having offered courses in it since 1967.
“That is why you are seeing more attention to creativity at universities,” he says. “The marketplace is demanding it.”
Critical thinking has long been regarded as the essential skill for success, but it’s not enough, says Dr. Puccio. Creativity moves beyond mere synthesis and evaluation and is, he says, “the higher order skill.” This has not been a sudden development. Nearly 20 years ago “creating” replaced “evaluation” at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. In 2010 “creativity” was the factor most crucial for success found in an I.B.M. survey of 1,500 chief executives in 33 industries. These days “creative” is the most used buzzword in LinkedIn profiles two years running.
Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity.
Jim Lahue
Creative studies is popping up on course lists and as a credential. Buffalo State, part of the State University of New York, plans a Ph.D. and already offers a master’s degree and undergraduate minor. Saybrook University in San Francisco has a master’s and certificate, and added a specialization to its psychology Ph.D. in 2011. Drexel University in Philadelphia has a three-year-old online master’s. St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, N.C., has added a minor. And creative studies offerings, sometimes with a transdisciplinary bent, are new options in business, education, digital media, humanities, arts, science and engineering programs across the country.
Suddenly, says Russell G. Carpenter, program coordinator for a new minor in applied creative thinking at Eastern Kentucky University, “there is a larger conversation happening on campus: ‘Where does creativity fit into the E.K.U. student experience?’ ” Dr. Carpenter says 40 students from a broad array of fields, including nursing and justice and safety, have enrolled in the minor — a number he expects to double as more sections are added to introductory classes. Justice and safety? Students want tools to help them solve public safety problems and deal with community issues, Dr. Carpenter explains, and a credential to take to market.
The credential’s worth is apparent to Mr. Lahue, a communication major who believes that a minor in the field carries a message. “It says: ‘This person is not a drone. They can use this skill set and apply themselves in other parts of the job.’ ”
On-demand inventiveness is not as outrageous as it sounds. Sure, some people are naturally more imaginative than others. What’s igniting campuses, though, is the conviction that everyone is creative, and can learn to be more so.
Just about every pedagogical toolbox taps similar strategies, employing divergent thinking (generating multiple ideas) and convergent thinking (finding what works).The real genius, of course, is in the how.
Dr. Puccio developed an approach that he and partners market as FourSight and sell to schools, businesses and individuals. The method, which is used in Buffalo State classrooms, has four steps: clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing. People tend to gravitate to particular steps, suggesting their primary thinking style. Clarifying — asking the right question — is critical because people often misstate or misperceive a problem. “If you don’t have the right frame for the situation, it’s difficult to come up with a breakthrough,” Dr. Puccio says. Ideating is brainstorming and calls for getting rid of your inner naysayer to let your imagination fly. Developing is building out a solution, and maybe finding that it doesn’t work and having to start over. Implementing calls for convincing others that your idea has value.
Jack V. Matson, an environmental engineer and a lead instructor of “Creativity, Innovation and Change,” a MOOC that drew 120,000 in September, teaches a freshman seminar course at Penn State that he calls “Failure 101.” That’s because, he says, “the frequency and intensity of failures is an implicit principle of the course. Getting into a creative mind-set involves a lot of trial and error.”
His favorite assignments? Construct a résumé based on things that didn’t work out and find the meaning and influence these have had on your choices. Or build the tallest structure you can with 20 Popsicle sticks. The secret to the assignment is to destroy the sticks and reimagine their use. “As soon as someone in the class starts breaking the sticks,” he says, “it changes everything.”
Dr. Matson also asks students to “find some cultural norms to break,” like doing cartwheels while entering the library. The point: “Examine what in the culture is preventing you from creating something new or different. And what is it like to look like a fool because a lot of things won’t work out and you will look foolish? So how do you handle that?”
It’s a lesson that has been basic to the ventures of Brad Keywell, a Groupon founder and a student of Dr. Matson’s at the University of Michigan. “I am an absolute evangelist about the value of failure as part of creativity,” says Mr. Keywell, noting that Groupon took off after the failure of ThePoint.com, where people were to organize for collective action but instead organized discount group purchases. Dr. Matson taught him not just to be willing to fail but that failure is a critical avenue to a successful end. Because academics run from failure, Mr. Keywell says, universities are “way too often shapers of formulaic minds,” and encourage students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.
Bonnie Cramond, director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia, is another believer in taking bold risks, which she calls a competitive necessity. Her center added an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in creativity and innovation this year. “The new people who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” she says. When ideas from different fields collide, Dr. Cramond says, fresh ones are generated. She cites an undergraduate class that teams engineering and art students to, say, reimagine the use of public spaces. Basic creativity tools used at the Torrance Center include thinking by analogy, looking for and making patterns, playing, literally, to encourage ideas, and learning to abstract problems to their essence.
In Dr. Burnett’s Introduction to Creative Studies survey course, students explore definitions of creativity, characteristics of creative people and strategies to enhance their own creativity.These include rephrasing problems as questions, learning not to instinctively shoot down a new idea (first find three positives), and categorizing problems as needing a solution that requires either action, planning or invention. A key objective is to get students to look around with fresh eyes and be curious. The inventive process, she says, starts with “How might you…”
Dr. Burnett is an energetic instructor with a sense of humor — she tested Mr. Cathcart’s martial arts padding with kung fu whacks. Near the end of last semester, she dumped Post-it pads (the department uses 400 a semester) onto a classroom desk with instructions: On pale yellow ones, jot down what you learned; on rainbow colored pads, share how you will use this learning. She then sent students off in groups with orders that were a litany of brainstorming basics: “Defer judgment! Strive for quantity! Wild and unusual! Build on others’ ideas!”
As students scribbled and stuck, the takeaways were more than academic. “I will be optimistic,” read one. “I will look at tasks differently,” said another. And, “I can generate more ideas.”
Asked to elaborate, students talked about confidence and adaptability. “A lot of people can’t deal with things they don’t know and they panic. I can deal with that more now,” said Rony Parmar, a computer information systems major with Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones circling his neck.
Mr. Cathcart added that, given tasks, “you think of other ways of solving the problem.” For example, he streamlined the check-in and reshelving of DVDs at the library branch where he works.
The view of creativity as a practical skill that can be learned and applied in daily life is a 180-degree flip from the thinking that it requires a little magic: Throw yourself into a challenge, step back — pause — wait for brilliance to spout.
The point of creative studies, says Roger L. Firestien, a Buffalo State professor and author of several books on creativity, is to learn techniques “to make creativity happen instead of waiting for it to bubble up. A muse doesn’t have to hit you.”
Laura Pappano is writer in residence at Wellesley Center for Women at Wellesley College and author of several books, including “Inside School Turnarounds.”
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Personal Note: My studies in creativity began at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in 1977, when friends and family alike said, can’t you study something real? It’s been a great journey helping people generate new ideas, make new decisions and take new actions. Still is.
Marci Segal, MS, Freeing Leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures
Creativity and the Brain: Research and Insights
See on Scoop.it – Creativity and Learning Insights
Creativity and the Brain – “We were born to create! In fact, before we were born, we, with the help of our mothers, exerted a significant amount of energy in creating neural connections among neurons (the brain’s major brain cells). These connections created a complex brain system, with some of the most interesting connections happening in our frontal cortex – the big protrusion at the front of our head. This part of the brain is quite distinct from other animals and often described as being responsible for many of the incredible abilities that we tend to consider “humanly”, including our creativity.”
Thanks to Linda Salna for this link. Great stuff. Especially as World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15-21 is just around the corner.
See on www.canc.ca
read moreDoes Brainstorming for Innovation Work? Maybe not… when you consider personality style
“Fresh ideas come when your brain is relaxed and engaged in something other than the particular problem you’re embroiled in… This is the polar opposite of what happens in brainstorming sessions. Long showers, soaks in a tub, long walks, or doing chores are frequently when those “synapses” that find alternative solutions to a problem in new ways all hit together so that the big idea can spring.” This from an article in Fastcompany called Why Innovation By Brainstorming Doesn’t Work by Debra Kay.
I wonder about the situations Kay sites with regard to introversion and extraversion. Introversion describes being inside our minds, when are quiet or reflecting or inwardly wondering; extraversion describes interacting with others and/or the world outside, possibly through talking or engaging with others. From a Myers Briggs Type Indicator® perspective, we all access these attitudes, inner and outer. We feel more energized using one more so than the other: the one that energizes is referred to as our preference.
I wonder if the quality of insight that comes from introverting varies much from those that arrive from the extraverting for people with preferences for extraversion than for people with preferences for introversion. Do people make meaningful and different kinds of connections in the inner world than they do in the outer one? Is it possible that the creation of new ideas is influenced by personality style preferences?
Is it possible that the one-size fits all approach to generating new ideas is archaic? Is it possible that people of the different personality preferences need distinct rules of behaviour be a their best to generate new ideas and make new decisions? I think so, and will be writing more about this as I review the Creativity and Personality Type: Tools for Understanding and Appreciating the Many Voices of Creativity, and converge on new thinking since writing it in 2001 in preparation for the pre-conference session with Danielle Poirier Getting Unstuck at the Association for Psychological Type International conference this July in Miami.
Ask: I could use your help. Please let me know your thoughts, feelings, inklings and experiences of personality style differences in generating new ideas and making new decisions; together we can create something wonderfully beneficial and useful. Even though I’ve led innovation training, creativity thinking and team building sessions for years, including designing corporate meetings that take into account the personality style differences I am still curious to know what doesn’t work for you when it comes to working with creating new ideas for innovation?
Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership; Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.
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Sweating Your Way to Creativity
Creativity: The ability to bring together disparate ideas in new and useful combinations.
You like? I read it in a review of Christopher Bergland’s The Athlete’s Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss
Albert Einstein said of the theory of relativity, “I thought of it while riding my bicycle.” Anyone who exercises regularly knows that your thinking process changes when you are walking, jogging, biking, swimming, riding the elliptical trainer, etc. New ideas tend to bubble up and crystallize when you are inside the aerobic zone. You are able to connect the dots and problem solve with a cognitive flexibility that you don’t have when you are sitting at your desk. This is a universal phenomenon, but one that neuroscientists are just beginning to understand.
Aerobic exercise clears the cobwebs from your mind and gives you access to insights that are out of reach when you are sedentary. On the complete flip side, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (when we are dreaming) is probably the most creative state of mind we experience daily. Keith Richards came up with the song ‘Satisfaction‘ in his sleep. There are thousands of anecdotes of creative greats having eureka moments when they dream. Each of us knows from first-hand experience how our imagination streams unrelated ideas together when we dream. Regular exercise and sleeping well go hand-in-hand. Regular exercise allows you to sleep deeper and dream better. The more regularly you exercise, the better you will sleep and the more of a creative powerhouse you will become.
I can verify his statements, countless new combinations of ideas occur when I’m bike riding, hiking, even walking. I also find the morning shower a haven for new thinking too, do you?
I like his definition of creativity – and am going to start using it. Makes sense.
Marci Segal, MS, Creativity and Change Leadership: Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.
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read moreThe Science of Creativity in 2013 – repost from BigThink
Sam McNerny’s BigThink blogpost is bolded for your reading ease. I appreciate the cursory overview and insights into what might be the future for the field. Would be great to hear from others about their predictions of where the study of creativity and methods used to evoke new ideas, new decisions and spur new actions might go. Wondering if this blogpost could be used as a test of competence for creativity professionals. Your impression?
Science Week - Celebrating Creativity and Innovation - theme announcement (Photo credit: Discover Science & Engineering)
The Science of Creativity in 2013: Looking Back to Look Forward
In 1950, the American psychologist Joy P. Guilford delivered a lecture to the American Psychological Association (APA) calling for a scientific focus on creativity. Psychology knew little about creativity at the time. Years earlier, during WWII, the Air Force commissioned Guilford, then a psychologist at USC, to identify pilots who would respond to emergencies with original insights to save themselves and the plane. IQ was a popular measurement but it did not capture the type of thinking that generated novel solutions to urgent predicaments. Studying pilots led Guilford to a few insights he shared with his colleagues at the APA in 1950. First, creativity is not equivalent to intelligence. Second, divergent thinking is central to the concept of creativity. Third, we can develop tests to measure divergent thinking skills. Guilford’s remarks encouraged questions the academy is still having today: What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence? How do we measure creativity? And what, exactly, is creativity?
Unfortunately, Guilford’s ideas did not give rise to widespread research in creativity. Psychologists neglected the domain throughout the second half of the 20th century with notable exceptions including Dean Keith Simonton, Howard Gardner, Teresa Amabile and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was a fringe subject because no one saw any practical applications; acquiring grant money was therefore difficult.
The 21st century is witnessing a renaissance in creativity in both the lab and the pages of popular books and magazines. “Creativity is a topic at many conferences and many grad students are getting excited about the subject,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. “2012 was a good year for creativity research, journals devoted to creativity published a lot of great work and other fields weighed in.”
The most newsworthy research came from cognitive psychologists researching creativity “boosters”. Jennifer Wiley’s lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that a certain dose of alcohol helped participants solve tricky word problems. Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks demonstrated that undergrads were better at solving insight-based problems when they tested during their least optimal time. This means that night owls did better in the morning while morning larks did better in the afternoon. Counter-intuitive findings like these scattered psychology journals and made for catchy headlines in the press.
The neuroscience of creativity is flourishing. In 2008 the journal PNAS published a paper by researchers from the University of Michigan demonstrating that participants who played a difficult working memory game known as the n-BACK task scored higher on tests of a fundamental cognitive ability known as fluid intelligence: the capacity to solve new problems, to make insights and see connections independent of previous knowledge. In other words, the task made people smarter. Oshin Vartanian, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, explained that a lot of researchers are excited about this finding. “The 2008 paper has had a profound effect on how creativity researchers think about creativity. Now scientists are working on replicating the results and figuring out if intelligence gained from the n-BACK task transfers to other domains.” The hope is that “cognitive training” will help children and adults boost creative output. “The application of this research is probably the most exciting idea in the cognitive science and neuroscience of creativity,” says Vartanian.
Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between thinking about two concepts or consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, is also a popular topic in the neuroscience world. Darya Zabelina, a graduate student at Northwestern University who studies creativity informed me that, “a lot of people are studying cognitive flexibility from a lot of different perspectives. It will be one of the topics researchers will continue to focus on in 2013.”
Paul Silvia is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina who researches creativity and aesthetics, among other topics. According to Silvia, “film and creativity is going to become popular; maybe music and creativity as well.” He is currently working on a paper co-authored with Emily Nusbaum that looks at unusual aesthetic states such as awe, the chills, and crying.
Countless popular psychology books that either focused on or mentioned creativity were published in 2012. Susan Cain lambasted brainstorming and “GroupThink” in her bestseller and introvert manifesto Quiet. Drawing on a wide body of robust research she reminded our hyper social world that working alone is usually better than working in groups in terms of productivity and creativity. Dan Ariely’s book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty contains a chapter on the relationship between dishonesty and creativity – honesty might not be good for creativity. The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg made some important suggestions for creativity: if you’re in a rut, try changing your routine. The elephant in the room is Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: The Science of Creativity, which the public gobbled up. Scientists in the field rightly expressed concerns about how Lehrer portrayed and interpreted some of the science but they are also happy that good science writers are attracted to the field. Unfortunately, Lehrer got pegged for plagiarizing and inventing Bob Dylan quotes. Kaufman said it best: “When people started doubting the veracity of that book, they started doubting the veracity of the science.”
Given that the relationship between the science of creativity and the media will continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how the media’s portrayal of creativity affects the research. Starting with Gladwell’s Blink or Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, the public began to expect counter-intuitive results from cognitive science. Now we live in an era where readers of science books on human nature expect clever psychological studies to explain every nook and cranny of our complex nature. This trend is good because it gets otherwise uninterested lay readers excited about cognitive science; Thinking Fast and Slow, Incognito, and others were bestsellers. However, the popularity of these books may create a bad system of incentives for researchers, in which researchers are motivated to publish results just to create a stir at the expense of sound research techniques and less provocative but more important research. (There’s nothing wrong with provocative results of course. Done properly, counter-intuitive findings are vital to any field because they force us to think differently.)*
I’d like to see more researchers active online in the future. My educated guess is that only about one percent of cognitive scientists (professors, grad students, etc.) are blogging or tweeting. This is a problem for three reasons. First, the Internet is an excellent medium for spreading information, including research papers. Consider a project by Melissa Terras, the Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. She put 26 of her articles originally published in refereed journals online for free via UCL’s Open Access Repository. She wrote blog posts and used Twitter to promote them. It helped. “Most of my papers, before I blogged and tweeted them, had one to two downloads, even if they had been in the repository for months (or years, in some cases). Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were on average seventy downloads of my papers.”
Second, pseudoscience, “neurobabble,” and folk psychology flourish on the Internet. We need more experts to set the record straight. “The hard part,” Silvia told me, “is many professors aren’t good at doing that. It’s just not natural for us to ‘grab’ the public.” Not everyone is Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but it’s counterproductive for scientists to trench themselves in the academy. I hope creativity researchers will continue to make a larger online presence in 2013. We need them to keep writers like me honest.
Third, we need researchers to help promote the science of creativity to a wider audience. “I know a lot of really careful, good researchers in the field of the neuroscience of creativity, but no one is talking about them,” Kaufman tells me. “These thoughtful researchers should think about writing for the popular sphere and writers should pay attention to them more. There is so much exciting stuff going on in the field of creativity that most popular books don’t address.”
I’m optimistic about next year. Creativity researchers will continue to produce great research and improve our understanding of creativity as well as methods to measure it. In the spirit of Ken Robinson’s celebrated TED talk (now with over 13 million hits) we should broaden our conception of creativity; it is diverse and anyone can tap into it, even adults. Science writers will continue to write about creativity and the general public will continue to enjoy reading about it. Let’s strengthen the relationship between the academy and the journalism world, keeping in mind how we can use social media to promote the science of creativity and correct misconceptions about it (i.e., that people either are or not ‘creative’). This is important for education, where creativity research is especially useful, although it has implications for every industry.
It’s unclear where, exactly, the science of creativity will go next year, but the most interesting discoveries surely await us.
Full disclosure, Scott is also my colleague at The Creativity Post.
* This paragraph reiterates a point I made in collaboration with Dave Nussbaum, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, on a previous post.
Marci Segal, MS, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures.
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read moreAdobe survey: Creativity is important for career success – repost from Smartplanet
Could creativity be the key to performing well at work? Yes, according to a recent online survey commissioned by software maker Adobe. The study found that 78% of college-educated, full-time salaried American adults 25 and older believe that “creativity is important” to their current career. A whopping 85% of the 1,000 survey participants agree that “creative thinking is critical for problem solving” in their jobs. However, 32% don’t feel comfortable “thinking creatively” at work.
As far as what “creativity” means, exactly, most of the respondents believe the term is defined as the “ability to plan new, creative ideas” (33%) and thinking “out of the box” (33%). Only 3% equate creativity with “brainstorming to solve problems” and another 3% believe creativity is synonymous with an “unorthodox approach.”
There’s a generation gap in terms of how to further define “creative thinking.” Younger Americans associate creativity with the ability to present their thoughts with images and graphics than older U.S. workers. Thirteen percent of respondents between 25-44 believe creative thinking is about “expressing oneself visually” while a mere 2 % of those 45 and up agree.
Yet when asked what personality traits are most important for a successful career, while creativity ranked among the top three, it came in third, with 20% of respondents choosing it, behind “personability” (21%) and the classic qualifier of success, “intelligence” (24%). In other words, it’s still important to be smart and likable, in that order.
Given that creativity is considered a vital quality for thriving in the workplace, how can it be cultivated? The survey found that 71% of respondents believe that “creativity” should be taught as a course.
The concept of more creative classrooms and workplaces certainly seems promising, and could encourage more innovative thinking across industries. But in our era of quick criticism (online and off), it’s only inevitable that skeptics might soon wonder if teaching creativity will also hinder it if lessons on how to be creative are rigid in any way. Of course, how one reacts depends on how one defines creativity: as a business practice, a skill, or a personality trait. The recent Adobe survey suggests that as it is understood today, “creativity” may be all of the above.
By Reena Jana | November 15, 2012, 8:06 PM PST
Aside 1:
Watched Faking the Grade on CBC doc zone and am thinking about adopting the new ethic. Rather than completely freshly write my blog, why not repost others’? Saves time in the long run…and gets to the same end of sharing the info, right? The article was written by Reena, the highlights however are mine.
From the documentary’s description
“It is estimated that at least 70 per cent of university students cheated at some point during their high school years. Many continue to do it (and few get caught) once they move on to post-secondary education. And research shows those who cheat in school go on to cheat in life. Those cheaters are everywhere, because ours is a culture where honesty has been de-valued and a win-at-any-costs strategy is encouraged.”
Aside 2:
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read moreCreativity – how valuable is it? Adobe releases Global Study of Creativity – from Venture Beat
Adobe study reveals massive creativity gaps, but not in gender or age
Whether you’re able to be creative or not has little to do with how old you are or whether you’re female or male, but it might depend heavily on where you live, how your boss treats you, and how you were educated.
According to a mammoth survey conducted by Adobe (and strategically released at that company’s CS6 launch event), there are significant gaps in creativity, but those gaps might not be where you expect to find them.
The study reveals some interesting statistics. Around 80 percent of respondents said they thought creativity is “critical to economic growth.” More than 60 percent of them also said creativity is important to society.
However, just 25 percent of respondents said they are currently living up to their creative potential.
What enables those lucky 25 percent to live up to their potential and be creative? For the 5,000 adults around the world in Adobe’s survey, age and gender have almost nothing to do with it. Rather, it all comes down to environmental factors: location, education, and work.
Japan and the U.S. are the first- and second-most creative countries, respectively, among a global audience. While Japanese in the survey didn’t see themselves as particularly creative, they earned high marks from their peers in other countries.
Americans, on the other hand, said they felt highly creative, but the country was ranked second-best globally.
Our biggest barrier to creativity might be at work. In the survey, 75 percent of respondents said they have been experiencing more and more pressure from superiors to be productive rather than creative in the workplace, even though their jobs require at least some measure of creativity. This kind of bottom line-focused emphasis on producing rather than creating leads to — no surprise — less creativity at work. Respondents said they spend around 25 percent of their workday being creative, mostly due to lack of time.
Another major factor in creativity is education: not whether you had a “good” or “expensive” or “public” education, but whether you were encouraged to develop your creativity starting at an early age and continuing throughout your school years.
Around the globe, more than half of Adobe’s respondents said creativity is being stamped out rather than nourished by the education system.
“One of the myths of creativity is that very few people are really creative,” said education and creativity specialist Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D., in a release around the survey.
“The truth is that everyone has great capacities but not everyone develops them. One of the problems is that too often our educational systems don’t enable students to develop their natural creative powers. Instead, they promote uniformity and standardization. The result is that we’re draining people of their creative possibilities and, as this study reveals, producing a workforce that’s conditioned to prioritize conformity over creativity.”
Finally, access to creativity-boosting tools can be important to expressing your creative urges. In Adobe’s survey, 40 percent of respondents said they do not have the tools they need to be creative. These tools are seen as the single most important key to expressing one’s creativity (by 65 percent of all respondents and 76 percent of U.S. respondents).
Of course, an emphasis on tools for creativity is what you’d expect from a company like Adobe. Nevertheless, having access to these kinds of tools can, in fact, make all the difference to a budding artist, designer, or filmmaker. Kinda makes you wish, at least for those young/broke creatives’ sakes, that Adobe products were less prohibitively expensive, doesn’t it?
The Adobe State of Create survey was conducted by research firm StrategyOne among a group of 5,000 adults, 1,000 each in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan. The firm conducted the survey between March 30 to April 9, 2012.
Related articles
- Adobe study reveals massive creativity gaps, but not in gender or age (venturebeat.com)
- Drawing Creativity Out of Employees (blogs.wsj.com)
- Views on creativity throughout the world. (thejunta.wordpress.com)
Physical Act of Creativity. Moving helps. Research.
PHOTO BY MR. BONES
Highlights from new research on body movement and creativity
- Divergent thinking goals are: to generate many different kinds of ideas, to generate many ideas and to generate brand new ideas (there are tools for these).
- Greater success occurs in divergent thinking when two hands are used (as in the phrase, on the other hand…)
- Convergent thinking means to analyze the relationship between two or more ideas to create a new solution.
- Walking in a flexible pattern improves how well the convergence is done
further reading: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/full-frontal-psychology/the-physical-act-of-creativity.html
Related articles
- Creativity: Left Brain + Right Brain = WHOLE Brain (customerthink.com)
- Qualities of Creative Individuals – care to do a self-assessment? (creativityland.ca)
- How Creative Ideas Take Shape (psychologytoday.com)
- New Insights on the Creative Brain (psychologytoday.com)
- Creativity Can Keep You Healthy (everydayhealth.com)
What's the big deal about creativity?
Let’s face it, people use their creativity everyday, even you. You create mash-ups, make new decisions, use your imagination, combine existing elements into new patterns and relationships and more, and not necessarily because you want to.
As conditions continue to change more rapidly than ever you adapt, we all adapt. For example with the growth of smart phone usage, businesses are directing efforts to create new ways to keep in touch with their markets.
So what’s the big deal about creativity? Everybody uses it everyday, and has ever since we had brains large enough to process new thinking and generate ideas. It’s nothing new.
What is new in creativity is the focus and underbelly of creative efforts.
Focus: In the recent past, we looked for ideas to streamline, create greater efficiencies, and do what we did, only better. Now, we are looking for ideas that, in addition to our heritage, move things forward and embrace the technologies that only began to emerge a few years ago, to create new futures. (See thelightsinthetunnel.com for a scenario for where it all might be going. Also, you might want to take a look at What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly and You are not a Gadget by Jason Lanier for an alternative, push back view.)
Underbelly: It’s a dizzying path, so, another new focus is how people feel. New research is pointing to the importance of emotion on people being able to generate new ideas and new decisions.
Why creativity is important in business has been cited by the IBM study of CEO’s last summer and in Newsweek’s coverage as well. There’s no need to convince anyone of the need to promote competence in using skills to develop their natural creative capacity (or inventive capacity as businesses refer to it, preferring to stay away from using the ‘creativity’ word) for innovation to occur.
How to move forward with your creativity
- Believe everyone can generate new ideas and make new decisions
- Acknowledge that different people use different approaches for both
- Support an environment that appreciates and leverages the different strengths people bring to the table
- Learn structures and systems that positively channel create freedom
Shameless self-promotion
The work I’m doing with clients these days supports those four points above. When I enter a room, a lecture hall, or an auditorium I already know everyone present is creative, whether they acknowledge it or not. When I tweet or update my Facebook status the same holds. It’s amazing, rewarding and inspiring to experience the resulting lifted spirits and people’s concrete new actions and directions. Cracking open new thinking to create new futures; turbo-charging the power of creative imagination to make a difference.
read moreHow to Overcome Three Threats to Creativity – from Teresa Amabile
Teresa Amabile from Harvard Business School is one of my favourite creativity researchers ever since her 1982 book, The Social Psychology of Creativity was published.She introduced the intrinsic theory of motivation for creativity – that creativity is supported more when a person does something he or she likes for the sake of the activity, not so 
much by the promise of the reward. I’ve been following her work ever since.
So has Dan Pink. His book Drive reports extensively on her research over time and uses it to support his three key concepts for today’s managers – to interact with their reports granting them autonomy, providing tools to accomplish mastery, seeded in purpose.
Creativity is important work because without it, innovation would not exist.
In a new Harvard Business Review blog, Dr. Amabile describes and gives advice for ways to overcome three threats to creativity in business and organizations
Threats to business creativity
- An endangered education system with limited scope in coursework of the basic subjects.
- People don’t get to do what they love at work; they get to do what has to be done.
- Performance pressures to grow, produce more quickly and with limited resources.
To keep and nurture creativity in the world work of work, Amabile suggests
- Develop new habits to look outside what you already know for fresh ideas and new thinking
- Encourage exploration and reflection so people can find new ways, easier and more productive ones, to accomplish objectives; allow them to dream the best future and then take steps to realize it.
- Allow people time to pursue their passions, make goals challenging, establish collective norms for behaviour, give people time to think and provide resources to empower their dreams.
What would that look like at your place, eh? New ideas, new decisions need space and time and they need a soft place to land.
Related Articles
- The Three Threats to Creativity (blogs.hbr.org)
- Award Your Own Genius Grants (blogs.hbr.org)
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