Four Questions On Creativity

Wonder if you could be successful starting a new company?  Or, writing a best seller?  

These are all creative acts.  I've been studying what successful creators and academic research have to say about what it takes to create something novel and appropriate.

In one sense, the questions above are unanswerable.  They are about the future, and the future is uncertain.  

But, surely they aren't a complete mystery. I know for certain, for example, that my chances of starting a new company successfully are higher than being a principal dancer in the New York Ballet.  

So we have some intuition before we embark on a creative act.  How can we develop that intuition better? Can we codify it in a set of questions that provide accurate guidance, regardless of the specific creative field?

My search is for a generalizable toolkit that helps young adults access and improve their creative potential.  A product/book/service/community that enables individuals to improve their creative capacity, regardless of their specific interest.

A Place To Start

Creativity is domain specific.  No one is a 'creative person' in the general sense.  A great painter may not be capable of novel writing.  So, the first step is focusing on a specific creative act.   Think of a creative act: anything that requires a novel and appropriate personal contribution to set your work apart from others.

Then, there are four areas of questions.

Am I motivated?

A desire to work on this problem is essential.  We used to believe that the strongest motivation was intrinsic motivation  - something inside you that compels you to this work, regardless of the social or economic rewards.  Do you find this work interesting in and of itself?  

More recently, researchers have concluded that healthy extrinsic motivators, including rewards or prizes, improve creativity potential.  If you are motivated by attaining a public goal or accolade, that can be useful.  However, the benefit is reduced when the external motivation is proximate and specific, such as a homework assignment for a grade, or a parent paying a child to practice violin.  

In considering motivation, a key word to watch out for is 'should.'  I should do this because it will be good for me later.  That is different than 'I want to do this work', or 'I am excited to do this work because it interests me and I will get positive social rewards from it if successful.'

We don't know why different people are motivated by different tasks. Everyone is unique, with their own chemistry, social environment and influences.  It follows that no one can tell you if or when you are truly motivated by something.  There is no signpost that goes up, or indicator a parent, friend or Doctor could look at to tell you 'this is it.'  

The best researcher in this area, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes the state of flow one gets when they are absorbed in a task in which they are highly motivated (and appropriately skilled, which is below).  This is perhaps the internal best indicator to look for. What activity interests you to the degree that the world drops off and time flows?

Knowing whether you are motivated or not can be complicated, especially when young. External pressures and expectations conflate desire with your inner voice.  I'm still working on how to think about. My sense right now is that tools that support honest self-reflection (Daily pages from the Artist's Way, journaling more generally, time diaries, close friend feedback, etc) can help nurture self-awareness in this area.

Do I have the skills?

Motivation alone will not lead to great work.  Creativity builds upon and extends previous contributions in the field. It often combines disparate ideas, sometimes from outside of the traditional idea space entirely,  to develop a new work.

You need to have domain specific skills to develop something new.  A great example of this comes from the visual arts.  Without looking below, can you name the artist of this portrait? (h/t Bill Gurley in his excellent talk on designing a career: Running Down a Dream):

This is the first public work Pablo Picasso, from 1896.  The artist who went on to paint Guernica, and to create Cubism, developed initially as master painter in classical style.  

The point here is not that you need to be celebrated as world class in your field prior to creating something new.  But, you do need to acquire the skills needed to make your unique contribution.

Sufficient skills can take years to acquire (the 10,000 hours made famous by Malcolm Gladwell).  Or, they can come more naturally (Mozart publishing his first symphony at age 8).   Whether through deliberate practice, or natural abilities, developing and assessing your domain specific skills is a prerequisite for creative work.

Am I in the right environment?

While motivation and skills are internal questions, researchers have also found a relationship between one's external environment and the ability to create.  

The external environment includes factors that serve as obstacles or stimulants for motivation, and skill enhancement.  In work environments, we might call this the culture of the organization.  From Teresa Amabile,

"Research in organizational settings has revealed a number of work environment factors that can block creativity, such as norms of harshly criticizing new ideas; political problems within the organization; an emphasis on the status quo; a conservative, low-risk attitude among top management; and excessive time pressure." (Working Paper, 2012)

More generally, the social environment includes the norms, expectations and resources found in your community.  Do you have teachers and mentors that model productive work for you?   Where are you supported in your quest to create new work?  

A popular conception of environment is the 'scene' around you.  Think here for Bob Dylan moving from Minnesota to Greenwich Village to develop his craft.  Contrary to popular myth, exceptional creative work doesn't develop from the lone genius.  It comes from the mixing of ideas from like-minded peers pushing each other forward. (Matt Ridley's How Innovation Works has great data on this).

Are you developing alongside a community of similarly oriented peers, sharing ideas and pushing each other's growth forward?  Or, isolated in an field unlike anyone around you?  Do you have mentors supporting you?

Do I have the right processes?

"I only write when inspiration strikes me.  Fortunately it strikes me every morning at 9:30 sharp.” -    Somerset Maugham (as quoted anyway)

Somerset Maugham, evidently, had a set of regular writing practices to get his work done.  Other creators will procrastinate through the day then write in the middle of the night.  

Steven Pressfield's terrific War of Art describes in detail the many ways of battling the Resistance, the forces that aim to delay, block, and impair our ability to develop something new.  The War of Art, like the Artists' Journey, provides strategies to improve creative capacity, but the essential takeaway is: Do the work.

Are you doing the work needed to develop your skill?   In addition to War of Art, there are a wide number of advice books that fit in this area.  In fact, most books marketed around 'creativity' are about improving work processes:  divergent thinking exercises, the art of brainstorming, etc.  These are all processes to improve your creativity.

Creativity-relevant processes also include your cognitive style and personality type.  Are you independent?  Typically risk-taking? Or, more conservative? Do you have a tolerance for ambiguity, or a desire for order?  Since creativity is task specific, think about when in your life you are more risk-taking, and when you are more risk-avoiding.

How To Answer These Questions

Together, these four components define your creative potential.

Importantly, researchers also believe that creativity operates along an continuous spectrum.  There aren't segmented buckets of 'creatives' and 'non-creatives' in any task, there is continuous line of progression.  Investing in any one of these four areas will improve your creative potential in a direct and continuous manner.

Knowing the questions provides us a framework for assessing creative potential, but how does one answer these?  How do you know where you stand?  

Two ways to think about this, depending on the stakes involved. If this is an important bet, one with irreversible long term consequences, researchers use the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT).  

Essentially, this process is to just ask a bunch of independent experts.  Studies have shown independent assessments (each expert ranks creativity of projects without knowledge of the ranking of others) from independent observers provide reliable and consistent rankings.  

If you really want to check your creative potential in a field, set up an experiment where you do a short assignment alongside a dozen or so peers, then have outside observers rank the randomized, anonymous work and see how the experts judge your contribution.    

For most people in most situations, however, honest self-assessment should work.  Look hard at the questions, and develop your own view.  Create a scorecard, say 1-5 points for each area.  How motivated are you by this work? Is it a 5?  Or a 1?

One of my first experiments in developing creative studies is developing this type of self assessment. I believe a tool for general use, calibrated through repeated testing, would provide a helpful entry point for learning.  Here's an early draft.

Perhaps the self-assessment tool will be a gateway to develop a more robust plan of work for improving creative capacity more generally.  At the least, if I can get people to try it, then I will get feedback on the novelty and appropriateness of this new idea.  For my own creative journey, that's a great place to start.

Feedback and input on the tool and creativity studies more generally always welcome at rory@earthrise.dev