Where is Creativity?
While creativity is regarded as a cognitive process, it does not occur in a vacuum. Creativity is both a psychological and a sociological phenomenon. The creative mind is inspired by an environment and it delivers its creative thoughts to the same environment.
It is only when the idea is put into action that it "creates" anything, and until creation occurs, the idea is merely clever, not creative. Therefore, we must consider creativity to be a systematic rather than an individual phenomenon.
The author mentions some time he spent working in the publishing industry. There was no shortage of unsolicited manuscripts, each of which proffered a creative idea, but many were publishable. These were the unstructured ravings of individuals with bizarre and impractical ideas. The authors of these manuscripts believed strongly that they had an important discovery to share with the world, but unless the publishers were impressed their ideas were discarded. And the publishers, in turn, were highly attuned to the kinds of ideas that were appealing to their readers.
Naturally, the rejected authors imagined the existence of a clandestine conspiracy of media professionals who collaborated to prevent their ideas from being published for political reason. The truth is that editors have no agenda but to sell books, so their decisions were driven by their estimation of whether a "creative" idea would be purchased by a significant number of readers.
He specifically mentions a book by a physicist who believed he had discovered how to effect cold fusion in a laboratory. This would indeed be a wondrous and world-changing discovery - but on peer review of the document, there were serious problems and it became clear that the author had never done what he claimed possible - if he had done so, the book would have sold many copies and be on the shelf of every physicist in the world. But he was simply a dreamer, describing what he imagined as if it had in fact been done, and was either an intentional fraud or at least technically incompetent.
There are many people who consider themselves to be creative because they have unconventional ideas - and many more who espouse ideas that are clearly impractical simply because they want the esteem afforded to a person who is genuinely creative. Some of these people even have the knowledge and discipline to pursue their ideas seriously - but again, merely having an idea doesn't create anything and the idea is not creative until it does.
The notion of "a creative person" is highly subjective and is of little interest of value. In order to be validly regarded as creative, a person must produce ideas that give value to the society. Sometimes, it is the single vote of an individual show sees such merit in the idea as to be willing to invest in developing it into a practical application that demonstrates its value. In other instances, where there is no commercial application, the idea must at least be accepted by enough people to have an impact on culture.
Not every unusual idea is creative. The term is used too broadly in casual conversation to demote anything meaningful. The litmus test of whether an idea is creative is whether it creates something that contributes to society.
Moreover it is somewhat dangerous to confer upon an individual the title of "creative" if he has done nothing to earn it. People with unusual ideas, but who lack the discipline to develop them, are a great waste of attention and resources that are better reserved for those who truly merit it.
While the stigmatization of creative individuals in prior centuries caused a great deal of creative ideas to be hidden from public view and lost over the ages, the current celebration of creativity has made the notion appealing to pretenders and fakes, the noise of whom drowns out the relatively quiet voices of the genuine creative.
True creativity is the value of ideas. A bad haircut and poor fashion sense do not substitute for the mental power of creative minds. In fact, the most creative ideas tend to come from very mundane people who do not dress up in the costume of an unconventional person. If you met them at a cocktail party, you would find them awkward and boring.
People who are genuinely creative do not need to pretend to be creative: their ideas stand for themselves. They do not seek approval or acceptance, and tend to shun personal publicity. Their ideas come first and any reward or acclaim is a secondary consequence.
Talent is also to be differentiated from creativity. Talent is the ability to do something very well, which has great value, but it is usually something that has already been defined. A talented basketball player excels in doing what others have taught him to do, but he contributes nothing to the game other than the spectacle of his performance. Another analogy is that of the musician: he plays an instrument very well, but plays the tunes that were written by someone else. He is a performer, not a creator.
Finally, he disambiguates between genius and creativity. A genius may be a very brilliant thinker, but he is not creative if he merely understands and applies the ideas of other people and has none of his own to contribute to the domain of his expertise.
The Systems Model
Creativity creates something. It changes an aspect of culture, and is not merely a thought in the mind of an individual person. So to qualify as creativity, an idea must be delivered to a society. It must be communicated to people in terms they understand and it must change their behavior permanently, replacing previous methods of accomplishing a goal.
MC defines three basic components of creativity:
- Domain - A specific area of knowledge that consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. Mathematics, fine arts, and business are all domains.
- Field - A group of people who are the gatekeepers and validate ideas that are disseminated to the general public. Some have formal titles or roles, others do not, but all possess influence over what ideas are adopted or rejected
- Person - An individual who delivers an idea to the field that governs a domain. This is the inventor, discoverer, or originator of an idea that changes the knowledge and behavior of others.
And this: a creative person delivers a new idea to the field; the field determines whether it should be adopted; and if it is adopted it changes the domain. Only when all parts of the process are completed does the idea fully qualify as "creative."
It is also worth noting that creativity is not an attribute of an individual, but an idea. An it is not sufficient for the idea to be different or clever: it must create a change in the culture. There is no such thing as a "creative person" except as the originator of one or more creative ideas.
MC also suggests that a person cannot be creative in a domain in which he has no knowledge. One must understand how a system works in order to propose something meaningful. The observations of an ignorant person may inspire creativity in others, but are not themselves creative.
It also follows that creativity must exist within a domain. It is not possible to be creative without context, nor can creativity exist in an isolated action. Creativity is validated in practice, so a person cannot be "a creative thinker" without delivering ideas in a specific domain that are adopted by others. This also explains that a person tends to have creative ideas in a limited number of domains but is not creative in general.
He also objects to the notion of a creative idea that is "ahead of its time" because in those instances the idea does not create anything. To be creative, change must take place in a culture, and if the culture rejects the idea, it creates nothing. Unless an idea effects a change in culture it is not creative, merely unusual.
It is true that a person's ideas may seem brilliant in a given time or culture, but will be rejected in others because society saw no value in it. Many thinkers and artists are unappreciated in their own time and culture only to be "discovered" in a different place or time. Should this occur, then the idea becomes creative. But in many instances, the notion of being "ahead of its time" is merely a slave for the ego of an undisciplined and unproductive individual.
Anyone who works in a corporation is likely to be well aware that the most original and unusual ideas are rejected by the field and fail to create anything. To be creative, the idea must be supported and funded by management, and given that management often seeks a quick return on a small investment with minimal risk, the unusual ideas that require significant time and investment stand little chance in competing for budget dollars against less original ideas.
For this reason most creative ideas are rejected by institutions, both corporate and nonprofit, and their originators must either quit being original and develop ideas that will be supported or leave the established organization in search of a patron, such as a venture capitalist, who will give them the resources to pursue an unusual and risky idea.
Creativity in the Renaissance
Between the years 1400-1425 there as a great explosion of creativity in Florence. This period was that golden years of the Italian Renaissance, during which time ideas that would be influential for centuries were introduced to European culture.
If we consider the fallacy that creativity is an attribute of a person, it might seem that this time was a statistical anomaly in which many creative people happened by random chance to be born in the same place, but this is unproven and highly implausible.
It is much more probable that the ancient Green and Roman methods of painting and sculpture were rediscovered in a time and place in which society was receptive to them and would fund their production. These ideas solved problems that the techniques of the time could not. They were not invented but merely rediscovered in a place and time that recognized the value that had been hidden or disregarded for centuries during the Dark Ages.
It was not merely the rediscovery of these ideas, but public interest that made the Renaissance possible - for if the public and patrons saw no value then the Renaissance would not have occurred. And if the public had seen value in them sooner, then the Renaissance would have occurred sooner.
It is also significant that Florence experience and explosion of wealth to fund the arts. With out this, no one could afford to pay for the time and labor to create luxuries like statues and paintings, and the artists would have instead been farmers or smiths or practitioners of some craft that society valued enough to pay them to undertake.
Because of the sudden wealth, certain families of Florence set to make their city "the new Athens" as a demonstration of the power they had acquired. They commissioned artists, sculptors, and architects to transform their environment, and this demand backed by funding caused the arts to flourish.
It is also important to note that the wealthy patrons did not give money to anyone who claimed to be an artist. They had a goal of creating a certain impression and were very concerned about how they would be perceived by society. They did not wish to create a lavish and ridiculous waste, but instead guided the artists to work within the constraints of the existing domain of Greco-Roman styles.
Artists would digress from the strict rules of the ancient world, but within boundaries: break he right rules and be hailed as a creative genius, but break the wrong ones and the work would never be funded - moreover your credibility as an "artist" would be damaged in a way that significantly decreased the potential that any future ideas would be given any consideration at all.
The Medici and Pazzi families and the guild of merchant bankers earned reputations of power and excellent taste by being selective, commissioning works that would impress rather than be ridiculed in the society of their time. The artists they selected became masters and their work has been admired for centuries. Those whom they rejected have been forgotten by time. The difference between master and pariah was not assessed on having unusual ideas, but acceptable ones that were a little different than what was generally recognized by the domain.
This example should clearly illustrate the systemic nature of creativity: it is not the act of a solitary mind, but a person who exists within a culture. The creator is supported by a patron, but the patron considers whether society will accept the idea based on the rules of the existing system.
Domains of Knowledge and Action
Every species of animal seems to be innately provided with certain ideas of what things mean and how to react. In lesser species, there are instincts that cause certain external conditions to trigger a behavioral response.
It is argued that man has instincts - but the majority of his behavior is based on more arbitrary associations between stimulus and response that are learned and discovered. Compared to other animals, we are born weak, but are the most powerful creature on earth by virtue of our ability to analyze and understand rather than acting automatically.
Our knowledge and behavior originate outside of our bodies and minds - we act buy intent rather than instinct. We observe, analyze, experience, and learn to interpret external signals and choose how to react, including whether to act at all.
The knowledge we gain from the environment is categorized into domains. In terms of basic survival, we categorize things into threats and opportunities. We further categorize opportunities in regard to the need they serve (to provide food, shelter, etc.) and then even further categorize and specialize (the knowledge of providing food is divided into hunting, fishing, herding, and farming; farming is divided into the knowledge of certain techniques of plants; and so on).
Our ability to divide and categorize knowledge is what makes us powerful and flexible, and makes our collective capacity for knowledge practically infinite: there is nothing that we encounter and nothing that we do that cannot be schematized against a massive categorization system. And within a society, this gives us the ability to specialize: the farmer who knows a great deal about how to raise a specific species of avocadoes can support himself by doing that task alone, and doing it better than any non-specialist can.
For most people, domains are the way they make a living. Everyone has certain common survival skills for tasks they must perform for themselves, but in the professional world they tend to specialize in a very specific domain such as medicine or plumbing, and then they find a profession that makes this specialized knowledge available to others, in an indirect exchange for their own services.
(EN: This is perhaps overemphasizing the practical and professional. People tend to have one profession, but many hobbies and interests in which they develop skill that is not used in exchange. In fact, many scholars and inventors had "day jobs" that they did to earn a living but pursued their main interest after hours.)
It must be stressed that the limits of memory and attention mean that no-one can be an expert in all things - they may develop some skill and do multiple things reasonably well, but a generalist tends to have shallow knowledge and limited ability when compared to a specialist. That is, a person is competent in many areas but can only develop expertise in a few areas because of the time and attention it requires to gain mastery of a domain of knowledge.
Domains facilitate creativity by focusing the mind of a very specific set of information and rules. Taken to extremes, adherence to traditional knowledge can hinder creativity if an individual adopts the mindset that things must conform to what is already known - but it is not generally the case that individuals become obsessive about following the well-worn path, and are usually on the lookout to extend knowledge and find a better way than tradition dictates.
Creativity within a domain depends on three qualities of knowledge: its structure, centralization, and accessibility. This explains why some people and organizations excel while others flounder. The better the structure, centralization, and accessibility of knowledge, the easier it is to discover connections that would otherwise be hidden.
Discovery of the new requires understanding of the old. It is rare that an ignorant person may stumble upon a discovery, and more often that he will "discover" something that is already known to the field. A highly structured field such as mathematics makes it easy to learn the rules quickly and leap to the cutting edge within a few years, whereas an unstructured field such as philosophy, with masses of information and few formal rules, requires decades to get oriented and begin producing original ideas.
This is also the reason that very young students of chemistry and physics are able to make profound discoveries whereas students of psychology generally do not. The structure of knowledge is so looks that they cannot make significant progress, and if they should then there are no rules by which their ideas can be quickly proven to a skeptical establishment.
An analogy to leisure pursuits: very young children can easily become brilliant at chess, because there are very stringent rules and a finite number of choices. Learning the "right" or "best" move is simply a matter of memorization or consideration of a finite set of options. Poker, meanwhile, remains a game at which more mature individuals have the advantage because it deals with many subtle nuances of interacting with other human beings. In this game the cards matter less than the people, and success requires being able to deceive others while detecting their deception. This involves a level of experience with human psychology that few young people develop.
In the present day, the more structured domains of knowledge are given greater attention simply because they more quickly enable a person to produce valuable ideas. And because there are formal rules and central control, these ideas can be "owned" and protected, and sold for money. There is more financial profit in the field of pharmacology than in the field of philosophy because pharmacology creates a "thing" that can be possessed and defended.
Fields of Accomplishment
A "field" consists of the practitioners within a domain of knowledge, particularly those who consider new ideas and determine whether they are worthwhile to practical application.
In some instances, a field is very well defined. In the domain of petroleum refining, there are a relatively small number of companies that manage these operations, and within these companies there are very few individuals who are the key decision makers that determine whether an innovation is adopted.
In other instances, a field is not very well defined at all. In the domain of culinary arts, there are millions of cooks and chefs who prepare food for their customers, and while certain luminaries exist each chef manages the menu of his own restaurant and can accept or reject any idea on the basis of various reasons, not the least of which is whether the technique or preparation will be acceptable to his customers - who themselves are quite vague and fickle in the ideas they will accept.
The author switches to the domain of publishing, which falls somewhere in the middle. There are perhaps a few dozen major publishers in the market, and perhaps a few smaller ones, and within each there are one or more "acquisitions editors" who review submissions and determine whether they will be published, largely based on their sales projections for a different kind of book.
There are often quite a large number of people who wish to submit their ideas to the public. For example, the US census shows that 500,000 people list their profession as "artist" - and this does not consider the number of dilettantes who consider themselves to be artists even though they merely dabble and earn their living by other means.
If each of the self-proclaimed professional artists created only one new work of art per year, and the owners of museums and galleries indiscriminately put all of them on display, there would be far too much "art" for the public to have time to pay attention. So the field must answer the question: how much of this is worthwhile, and how much of it will be remembered ten years from now?
As a result, there is only a very minute fraction of creative ideas that are ever made available to the vulture, and the field selects which candidates among millions of ideas are to be brought to anyone's attention.
(EN: The democratization of art via the Internet has been somewhat interesting, in that any artist can open an online gallery or publish a book through a vanity press. Yet this has not in most instances displaced the necessity of a field - the general public still turn to the field of publishers and critics to help them find things that are worthwhile.)
Cultures tend to change very slowly. If they were to change quickly they would lose their identity as a culture. So if all ideas were automatically assimilated than cultures would collapse in the chaos,. The human mind has limited attention and people have limited time. We cannot read over 100,000 books each year even if we had the leisure to do nothing but read. We need the field to filter them.
In this sense, the field provides a filtering service to the culture. Because people cannot possibly invest the time to consider every new idea, the field makes this decision. A publisher generally takes very little time to investigate a new book-the first chapter or so is read by a clear who then passes on more promising candidates to an acquisition editor, who reads a few manuscripts a day to determine which merit further consideration.
(EN: I also find it a bit ironic that people who object to there being a field that "censors" what the public is allowed to see often reject the selections made by others in the established industry, but then they suggest what other items people should know about. And so their action is not an attempt not to abolish censorship, but to become the censors.)
And so, a creative person must first convince the field that his new idea is worthy of attention. And this is where most people who have ideas fail: they are passive and expect that the experts will seek out and recognize their work, whereas the experts are very busy with the ideas that are most aggressively promoted. There are few domains so hungry for new ideas that they will invest the time and resources scouring the earth for new ideas. This means that the originator of an idea bears responsibility for introducing it to the field, who in turn have the responsibility of introducing it to the public.
Fields vary greatly in their breadth and scope. The broader the field, the more ideas must be filtered; the narrower, the fewer. A new idea in the realm of petroleum refining must be to the liking of perhaps twenty experts. A new idea in consumer fashion must be evaluated by the customers themselves in order to be adopted. It also stands to note that far fewer people are ambitious about introducing ideas for petroleum refining than are interested in designing fashion apparel.
Another characteristic that differs among fields is their formality. There is very little procedure for writing a new poem, but a tremendous amount ford developing a new medicine. Therefore creative are strongly discouraged to engage in pharmaceutical research and very few medicines survive the rigorous process even to be considered for manufacture.
Fields also vary greatly in the level in which they interact with the creators. There was once an open dialog between artist and their patrons, and the patron provided a great deal of guidance for the artists to coach them in developing a work that would be acceptable. The independent artist has a lot more freedom to explore ideas and pursue his original vision, but at the risk that no-one will recognize his work or provide him the resources to accomplish a major project.
The same is true of practical pursuits. The research and development departments in major corporations have very clear orders from the managers who control their funding as to what kind of ideas they will be permitted to pursue. An independent inventor, working on projects in a private laboratory, has the freedom to do whatever he wants, but no certainty of ever being paid for his work.
On the other side, there is also a difference in the degree to which the field communicates with the culture. The success of the field in filtering the new ideas is measured by whether the ideas they approve are actually adopted by the culture. While the field has tremendous power as a filter, this power derives from the cultural acceptance.
In the arts, a movie critic who routinely praises films that people do not enjoy seeing will not for long remain employed as a critic. In the commercial world, a company that selects for production ideas that the public is unwilling to purchase does not remain for long in business. Ultimately, the field has no intrinsic power to control tastes, and must cater to the culture they serve.
Sometimes, fields control a domain without being competent in it, but this tends to be a temporary situation. A wealthy patron with poor taste in art can fund the most abominable creations, an executive can reject profitable ideas and allocate budget to bad ones. But in time, such individuals tend to exhaust their resources and discredit themselves by making bad choices. They can waste fortunes and create a nuisance to all involved in the meantime.
The Contributions of a Person
Finally, the author considers the contribution of an individual who has come up with an original idea. There is a great deal of study into the qualities of creative people by those who wish to become creative themselves - but there seems to be no single characteristic nor a consistent combination of qualitues that is reliable in determining whether a person will be able to produce creative ideas.
Consider actuarial science:" actuaries analyze vast amounts of data to identify the characteristics of accident-prone drivers, and seek to identify the qualities that are most closely linked to the likelihood that a given person will be the cause of an automobile accident. But their predictions are very inaccurate: a person who possesses every quality of a "bad driver" may never cause an accident whereas another person who has none of those qualities might cause several.
In determining whether an accident will occur, there are also many variables external to a person. Road conditions, traffic, weather, vehicle maintenance, and the like may be even more influential than any personal quality of the driver. Likewise, there are no characteristics that are guaranteed to make a person creative, and their environment is also a significant influence.
The notion of "luck" is spoken of by many people who have been successful as creators. They had the right idea at the right time and found the right audience to deliver it to the culture. They can control the quality of their ideas, but these external forces are beyond their control.
The ability to come up with a good idea is often secondary to the tenacity in promoting it. It requires skill at persuasion and connections to the field, but even then the environmental factors must be supportive. A person can be brilliant, tenacious, and persuasive but cannot force their ideas on an unresponsive field.
Amateurs like to dismiss the success of others as being a matter of luck - but while being in the right place at the right time is critical, you have to have something valuable to offer when the opportunity arises. The field is never hungry for bad ideas, no matter the timing, but is more receptive at some times than others to ideas that have genuine potential.
(EN: A phrase that sticks in my mind is that "luck is the coincidence of preparedness and opportunity" - which seems to be essentially what the author is suggesting here.)
Internalizing the System
A person who wishes to make a contribution to a system must understand that system. It must be reproduced within his mind so that he is well acquainted with the rules of procedures so that he may evaluate whether his own idea is at all worthwhile. If he does not know the selection criteria, he will waste a great deal of time and effort pursing ideas that are doomed to rejection.
Particularly in the present day, when so much progress has been made, there is a requirement of study and discipline to acquaint oneself with the things that have already been discovered. A writer who pays no attention to what is being published takes the risk that his idea has already been done by someone else, or that it is too far removed from the ideas readers are willing to purchase. An inventor who pays no attention to the field may "invent" something that already exists, and generally is not as well suited to the task as existing solutions.
Excerpts from interview consider three important factors:
- You must have a tremendous amount of knowledge to draw upon because creativity is effected by making connections between things and identifying gaps in the existing knowledge. The more you know, the more connections you can make and the more gaps you can notice
- You must have a high level of interest and discipline to be creative. Having an unusual or unconventional idea is easy, but it takes a lot of hard work to develop it into a qualified idea that will be accepted as creative. Recall Einstein's formula of "one percent inspiration and 99%perspriation" - many people who want to be regarded as creative simply lack the discipline and motivation to sweat out an idea.
- You must have internal filters to recognize that many of your inspirations have no merit to devote your time and resources to the pursuit of those that do. Not every inspiration is a good idea, and there are many false starts on the way to discovering something worthwhile.
Admittedly, the last two are in conflict - to be devoted to pursuing good ideas but quick to abandon bad ones requires the ability to discriminate between good and bad. Often, it takes developing an idea to some degree to determine whether it should be kept or abandoned - and this is where knowledge of the domain is helpful in determining the difference.