The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”
Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.
Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn’t designed for impulsive expression – that’s called talking out of turn. Instead, it’s all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.
- Jonah Lehrer, Classroom Creativity via The Frontal Cortex
(via Alex Tabarrok)
(via joegle)
(via joegle)
Are Creative People More Dishonest? - Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge
Steve Jobs was theoretically channeling Picasso when he said ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal,’ but he may have been onto something. It turns out that creatives are more likely to cheat, according to new research by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely:
Francesca Gino
Carmen Nobel via HBS Working Knowledge
Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?
There certainly is, according to an article in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest,” the authors report that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, they show that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.
It’s a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking.
“In any organization, especially in contexts that are global and very competitive, there is so much focus on trying to be innovative and creative,” says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. “But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they’re doing is not morally wrong. So, Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior. Specifically, we decided to explore the idea that enhancing the motivation to think outside the box can drive individuals toward more dishonest decisions when facing ethical dilemmas.”
[…]
Overall, the researchers learned, the higher the creativity required for the job, the higher the level of self-reported dishonesty.
Then, through a series of experimental studies, the researchers tested—and largely proved—the theory that creative people are more likely to exhibit unethical behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.
[…]
“These were simple studies, but they were powerful in showing that our ability to justify things is significantly greater if we are in a creative mindset or when we are creative people,” Gino says.
That said, Gino is quick to add that she and Ariely are not suggesting that companies put the kibosh on innovation in order to keep dishonesty at bay.
“We’re not saying that creativity is bad,” Gino says. “But we are saying that it can lead to problems. And so the question from a manager’s perspective is: How do you get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad outcomes?”
While “The Dark Side of Creativity” doesn’t answer that question directly, Gino hopes that the research will remind innovative organizations not to give short shrift to ethics.
“As a manager, if you’re highlighting the importance of being creative and innovative, it’s important to make sure that you’re stressing the presence of ethics, too,” Gino says. “Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior.”
Perhaps the creatives’ world view involves a relaxation of the ‘principles’ that constrain people with other perspectives? What is they are inseparable? I don’t think you can chase away the devils of creativity without losing the angels, as well.
60% of CEOs think creativity is the most important characteristic of leadership.
The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
- Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color
I try to take walks everyday, to let the world wash over me and wipe out work thoughts for a while.
The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
- Brian Eno, cited by Eric Tamm in Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound Of Color
I try to take walks everyday, to let the world wash over me and wipe out work thoughts for a while.
Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What's Next? | Co.Design
Bruce Nussbaum hits the eject button on Design Thinking, saying that this movement — which arose from agencies trying to reach past the narrow confines of product or brand-related design and into the real guts of business — has petered out, it’s goals unmet.
Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.
Yet, the contributions of Design Thinking to the field of design and to society at large are immense. By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society. We face huge forces of disruption, the rise and fall of generations, the spread of social media technologies, the urbanization of the planet, the rise and fall of nations, global warming, and overpopulation. Together these forces are eroding our economic, social, and political systems in a once-in-a-century kind of way. Design Thinking made design system-conscious at a key moment in time.
So, the approach has failed to revolutionize business, but midwifed a wider scope in the minds of designers, leading them to think at a larger scale and about how the smaller is embedded in the larger.
Creativity is still hard, and hard specifically to systematize. Turning it around, I’d add that creativity is naturally averse to systems other than the messy cycle of trying things, and picking out what works for further experimentation. Process can’t smooth out the wrinkles in the fabric of the universe, or on the inside of our minds.
Read Helen Waters’ excellent piece, which should be titled Design Thinking Won’t Save You, for more on this.
Nussbaum is off on a tangent with another head-twisting term; Creative Quotient, based on the I.Q. model. Yawn. I won’t buy the book.
Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger. “The executives who’ve been there a long time, they grew up in Box 1,” he says. “You need voices in the room that aren’t vested in the past.
Creativity Increased By Multitasking
I love stories that debunk conventional wisdom, especially cobwebby corporate wish fulfillment. In this case, a wholesale frontal assault on creativity training:
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Forget Brainstorming
Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together. In fact, according to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commercially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: it’s “garbage.” Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.
Bronson and Merryman do go on to make some concrete recommendations and observations:
- Physical activity loosens up creativity muscles.
- Throw away the suggestion box: it’s demotivating.
- Don’t watch TV.
- ‘Do something only you would come up with — that none of your friends and family’ — and co-workers — ‘would come up with.’ - Mark Runco
But the one I found most compelling is that multitasking seems to support creativity:
Take a break.
Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately. This corroborates surveys showing that professors who set papers aside to incubate ultimately publish more papers. Similarly, preeminent mathematicians usually work on more than one proof at a time.
Perhaps my bias toward multitasking is based on the nature of the work I do, and that I think is central to most professionals: it’s creative work. So putting something down when you have come to a halt, and turning your mind to something else for a while actually increases our capacity for creative thought.
Again, proof that we aren’t chairs, we are people.
- A Bettery Way to Ask People to Be Creative [Management] (lifehacker.com)
- The Creativity Crisis (newsweek.com)
- Asking Questions (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
- Getting All A’s But Flunking Life - IQ Scores Climb As Creativity Sinks (eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com)
- American Creativity in Decline (ideas.blogs.nytimes.com)
Creativity = Runs With Scissors
One of the reasons that I have argued against people that denounce multitasking and the roving side of human intelligence is my deep suspicion that the wellsprings of creativity is involved. Recent studies of brainscans suggest that creativity is indeed linked to the receptors that filter and direct thought. The more creative people are, the more likely they are to be uninhibited about making connections that others do not. Somewhat like schizophrenics, it turns out:
Michelle Roberts, Creative minds ‘mimic schizophrenia’
Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain’s dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” said Professor Ullen.
Mark Millard UK psychologistHe believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.
UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.
“Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes. Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.”
My sense is that those more given to filtering and controlling their thoughts cab get real benefits from that, and so when they are confronted by the more creative folks among us their natural response is to try to get them to stay focused, to stop making so many wisecracks, and get down to business. We are the ones that ran with scissors in art class, bursting with ideas.
However, creatives can’t control the D2 receptors in their heads, and so all the fervent efforts to single track the world just don’t work, or at least, not for very long. Before you know it, even despite our best intentions, we are looking out the window at the clouds, considering the world through very different eyes.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
