23 - What Is Creativity?
"Creativity" is mistaken for being exclusively the demesne of the artistic - a work of art is creative, a financial decision is not. But this is a mistake in the understanding of the term. Creativity can be considered as the opposite of conventionalism: to follow a course that is not typical, traditional, or part of established procedures is to be creative.
It's also noted that "new ideas come from old ones" and that "creativity does not happen in a vacuum." Our imagination must be seeded in the known in order to explore the unknown in a meaningful way. And while it is possible to engage in pure creativity, there is little value in generating ideas that have no practical application.
Critical thinking benefits from creativity be considering a broader array of options than conventional practices provide. Creativity benefits from critical thinking in the application of a sound process of reason to validate the usefulness of a creative idea before pursuing it.
Critical thinking is often accused of killing off new ideas before they are fully developed - but this is a behavior or tendency that is not part of the critical thinking process, and is contrary to good decision making, which requires ideas to be given serious consideration and should not perfunctorily dismiss any option.
Another misperception is that creative thinking is the demesne of people who have a natural proclivity for unconventional thinking or a high IQ. There is some statistical proof that people with an above-average IQ tend to have more creative thoughts, but this tends to level out beyond the level of 120 - which is to say an intelligent person is more likely to be creative than an average person, but a genius (140) or super genius (160) is not significantly more likely to be creative. Nor does it mean that people below 120 are incapable of being creative, merely that they are less often creative.
On the other hand, it is also a mistake to suggest that creative thinking is a substitute for knowledge: you need to understand things in order to invent beyond them. People who have little knowledge, or knowledge of diverse fields, are often able to come up with more ideas than experts, but the experts tend to come up with fewer ideas that are more practicable.
The Creativity Cycle
The consideration of creative thought has not defined a singular process model for how to think creatively, or how to teach people to think creatively. It largely remains a mystery, in which we look to the behavior of people who seem to succeed at providing a large number of practical ideas, and find little consistency. Various practices and procedures can be used to stimulate creative thought, though the author suggests that many involve a procedure of four steps or phases.
Step 1: Preparation
Begin by gathering information about the problem - this is often done by reading and research, which may be informal (reading to broaden one's horizons) or formal (compiling a database of information).
This is different to the research done once options are identified, as evaluating options is more focused on specific topics, whereas gaining knowledge to spawn creativity is broader because inspiration may come from remote sources.
Step 2: Exploration
The second phase switches from gathering information to consider the information that has been collected. The aim of exploration is to contextualize information, to structure it and to make connections among seemingly disparate pieces of information.
The author suggests that this is most effective in isolation - to seek a place of quiet reflection avoiding all distractions in order to ruminate.
He also suggests recording ideas as they occur, even though they are half-baked and may later be rejected, they may have value.
Also, this process might identify gaps in knowledge where further research is required.
Step 3: Incubation
The incubation interval is one of inactivity, stepping back from the process and going on to other things. Essentially, it is waiting for inspiration to strike - which may seem passive and unproductive, but moments of epiphany very often occur when people are doing other things and not trying to think about a problem - consider Archimedes had his "eureka" moment when he stopped intentionally pondering a problem and took a bath.
Sudden inspiration has been attributed to supernatural forces or the workings of the subconscious mind, which thwart serious attempts to identify the causes of this phenomenon, but it is so often mentioned that it should not be ignored. To "clear your mind" and "start fresh" is conventional advice for creative thinking.
Step 4: Verification
Once we have brainstormed a list of promising ideas, they need to be checked to determine whether they are worthwhile - that is, germane to the problem and likely to effect a solution. It's particularly important to develop multiple ideas (our first solution is seldom the best) and to evaluate each of them rather than stopping when one looks promising.
Creative Failures
When a creative idea is successful, it draws a great deal of attention, and when a person is successful multiple times, the gain the aura of an infallible genius. This overlooks the reality that many successful people ailed many times before they succeeded, often learning from their mistakes.
(EN: The opposite also holds true, particularly in competitive endeavors, that a failure often gets attention, and that people develop the aura of being hapless, and there arises a general contempt for creativity. This is what leads many organizations to stick to the tried-and-true approaches and regard unconventional ideas with suspicion.)
Some reasons creative processes fail are listed:
- Lack of Knowledge. Ideas come out of the blue, with no grounding in reality, and uninformed by past experience.
- Flawed Concepts: There is something fundamentally wrong with the initial idea.
- Poor Process: The idea was not sufficiently examined prior to being accepted or implemented.
- Complacency: The idea was too quickly abandoned because it requires more effort to explore than other options
- Sabotage: The idea is sabotaged simply because it was new or unconventional, by those who prefer to avoid change