Creativity Expert Exchange @ Buffalo State, What a treat! What a trigger for ethics

It’s great to go to a conference hosted by the International Center for Studies in Creativity. These are folks who know what it takes to enliven, engage, and encourage creativity and creative thinking.

The event is a home-coming for me because the ICSC is my alma mater, and as well as extending a welcome to alumni and other creativity experts, it also provided tremendous refreshment in thought and connection making.

Here’s what I learned and relearned at this year’s Creativity Expert Exchange (CEE).

• The spread of ICSC’s discipline is extending into China in a variety of ways
• Online collaborative environments for teaching creativity-thinking related courses is working
• Frameworks for using technology to teach students about creativity is being explored
• Educational cultures at schools are being transformed so that students and teachers leverage creativity thinking to deepen learning and vary learning experiences
• People are curious to know what people do with a degree in creativity
• Research is being conducted to see if there’s anything behind the assertion that undergraduate students who take creative studies courses are more likely to graduate than are those who do not
• Modeling how children explore and learn provides adults with insights into expanding expectations and understanding of the creativity process overall
• ICSC students, faculty and alum are producing meaningful products in creative process, experience and knowledge for students, parents and teachers that are showing remarkable positive effect
• We are leaving linear thinking behind and moving forward with relational learning and decision-making
• Interpersonal ‘frequencies’ that is, the energy patterns of people, can influence the nature of their interactions and decisions
• It’s great to be in an environment in which people know that questions are welcome, new ideas are welcome, and feedback for actions is the norm

One topic  which wasn’t on the agenda, though was discussed during meals and breaks was that of professional ethics in the creativity field.  One morning I woke up with this upsetting bumper sticker image in my brain, “Just because I am a creativity professional doesn’t mean I’m ethical.”  I kind of wish it were true though – that creativity professionals could be trusted for their practice.

Events such as these where creativity professionals gather trigger my wonder about the growth of the creativity field

• what can people expect from creativity professionals, experts, and practitioners?
• is it important to have a consistent understanding of their roles, responsibilities, scope, behaviors and deliverables?

Do you think it’s important?  Do you feel that every creativity professional should share the same basic knowledge and fundamental practice?  Accountants, for example, all know about balance sheets; engineers, about the laws of physics, teachers know about pedagogy. Regardless of the school one attends, there are certain ‘professional’ standard courses people take in their own discipline.  I’m not sure if that exists in the creativity field, do you?

• What do you suppose all creativity professionals would know of they all shared a disciplinary core?
• What assumptions do you suppose they all might operate from?
• What do you suppose their motto or code might be?

An Emerging Ethic for Cheating and Lying?

At the end of Dan Ariely’s talk last night at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, there was enough time for three questions from the audience, so I asked one. Dan spent the hour prior highlighting research from his book The (Honest ) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves. He cited studies and entertained with stories that showed

• ways in which people cheat
• under what conditions people lie
• what motivates people to rationalize their cheating and lying as good behaviour.

During the Q&A I asked, “Is it true that everybody cheats and everybody lies?”

“Yes,” was Dan’s response. “And in the future, we’ll be seeing more lying and cheating than we do now.”

Dan ended his talk saying we are all too good, that we don’t cheat enough. He suggested we should cheat more often because there are many opportunities to do so. This sentiment  puzzles me. Is his support for a cheating lifestyle or approach aligned with challenging assumptions so as to question the rules, and then break them (i.e. cheat) for the sake of innovation?

Later, he was signing books, I asked:

“What relationship do you know about between creativity and dishonesty?”  He laughed.  “Creative people cheat MORE,” he said.  “There’s an entire chapter in my book on that.  Cheating is about storytelling, weaving a tale others can follow about the reasons why a person cheated. Creative people are very good at that.”

Today’s Questions

• What’s your take?  Is creativity related to cheating and lying?  If yes, how so?
• Is it helpful or hurtful to consider creativity and innovation subsets of cheating?
• If cheating and lying are on the rise, as Ariely says, then what do you suppose will be put in place as we adapt?  What new products and services might emerge?
  

Marci Segal, Freeing leaders’ thinking so they can create new futures

Related creativityland posts

• Ethics and creativity.  Related?
• Is there a link between creativity and dishonesty?

Related articles

• An easy trick to reduce cheating
• Dan Ariely on Wall St Fraud and the Psychology of a Cheater [VIDEO]
• When Good People Work for Bad Companies
• Dan Ariely: Our buggy moral code
• Unveiling the Real Evil Genius

Ethics and creativity. Related?

A study recently released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reports  rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour – cutting off motorists, lying in a negotiation and cheating to win a prize – than are their less wealthy counterparts. Researchers also found  those who considered themselves ‘upper class’ were more likely to take valued items of others, and see greed and self interests as good pursuits.

Of course the findings are not universal, that is not ALL wealthy people share these traits, and not all of those who are relatively impoverished are ethical.  Still it makes me wonder about the ethics of creativity and creativity professionals.

Some people think of creativity, that is, making new decisions that are novel and relevant (as well as the incumbent new ideas generated to solve a challenge or recognize/seize/create an opportunity) as cheating.  Cheating because the novel decision does not play by existing rules. Do you think that is one reason some people are reluctant to use creative thinking?

The International Center for Studies in Creativity is hosting the Creativity Expert Exchange May 14-16 in Buffalo, NY.  I submitted a proposal to lead a session on creativity professionals’ conduct, competencies and ethics, so this newly released research triggered further thinking. I believe its time for us to have important conversations and ask important questions, such as:

• Do creativity professionals play by rules? If yes, what are they and where do they come from?  What happens if a creativity professional breaks the rules, and cheats, for example.  What then?

• Is it the responsibility of creativity professionals to make sure their clients act ethically?  What role do facilitators play in the outcome and execution of the new ideas and new decisions they help to surface and create?

• What competencies do creativity professionals need to have?  How do they prove it?

Related articles

• Upper classes ‘more likely to lie and cheat’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Rich more likely to take candy from babies (leggotunglei808.wordpress.com)
• Wealthy more likely to lie, cheat: study (business.financialpost.com)
• Is there a link between creativity and dishonesty? (creativityland.ca)

Should Creativity Professionals have basic competencies?

And if yes, then what would they be? Accountants have professional competencies, as do coaches and economists.  Politicians?

Since the 1950’s with the beginning of the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, NY and Alex Osborn’s coining of the phrase ‘brainstorming’ people have learned and used creative thinking tools and techniques to spark fresh thinking for practical purposes.

There are people who hang out shingles as Creativity Professionals to help people and organizations get new ideas and make new decisions.  Creativity Professionals, however, are all over the map in terms of depth of knowledge and experience.

Creativity presents a moral dilemma. True?

Is creativity the right thing for everyone? It depends on how you look at it. I’ve heard Teresa Amabile, of Harvard University state creativity itself is amoral, its morality rests in the people who use it.

Mark Runco, a respected creativity researcher and executive director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia also says that creativity is amoral. He writes

“…moral action is sometimes defined as “doing the right thing,” but “right” assumes a value system, and that means that the action is consistent with existing values. Doing the right thing might therefore preclude creativity, given that creativity requires originality. It may be novelty, uniqueness, unusualness, or rarity, but in some way all creativity requires originality. One complication, then, is that too often moral action is tied to the status quo, while creative action is contrarian or at least highly unusual” ( The Continuous Nature of Moral Creativity, in Morality, Ethics and Gifted Minds, Springer, 2009. p.107).

Interesting notion.  Is it possible that when we encourage people to use their creativity, say, during World Creativity and Innovation Week April 15 – 21, to make the world a better place and make their place in the world better too, without causing harm, that it rubs some people the wrong way because they perceive doing so is immoral?

From my early college years as cultural/social anthropology major, I learned about how values are different from group to group: what’s important and treasured in one culture or society, may be perceived as taboo in another, an example might be arranged marriages. Perhaps there are taboos associated with creativity that we haven’t fully explored.

At the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, many years ago, I was interested in knowing how creativity was regarded in different cultures and spoke to as many people as I could from nations around the world.  One continuing sentiment in particular stuck in my mind (okay, it’s a small sample, still…).

A woman from Greece let me know that people aren’t creative, it’s God who is, and that all creativity comes from him. A man from Egypt said the same thing. Their comments opened my eyes to consider what we might be challenging when encouraging people to access their creative capacities. (Cultural relativism is a great perspective to maintain when asking people questions.)

In business, energy for innovation is okay; energy for creativity, not-so much. Taboo? Innovation maintains the status quo by using systems, structures, measures and thinking directed to support a positive economic outcome.  Creativity, on the other hand, speaks to the human spirit, and giving free reign to the unlimited imaginative potential, without necessarily bringing it back to the bottom line.

And yet, business metrics are changing. Instead of one bottom line, profit, there are now three:  profit, people and planet.  We’ll certainly need the power of creative imagination to dream up ways business will be more relevant in months and years to come.

Bottom line: How to include people in the process of creating the new future who may believe that using creativity is immoral?