Theories of Creativity
I'm still exploring creativity (previous posts here and here). The more I learn and consider about the topic, the more I see creativity touching all of our lives everyday.
But what do I mean, really, when I say creativity? There is a lot of work, both academic and practitioner, seeking to define creativity and provide a framework for developing it. This post explores that literature, with a detour on what a theory is in the first place, and finally my perspective on what I find lacking in the current understanding of creativity.
Creativity Defined
I define creativity as 'the act of sharing something novel and meaningful with others.'
As you will see below, including 'novel' in the definition of creativity is not novel. And, various definitions all seem to play around with 'meaningful' - some use 'useful' while others use 'appropriate.'
Where I diverge most from others is the inclusion of 'sharing.' I believe a creator must share the novel idea/output with others for the act of creation to be completed.
The act of sharing is important to me because it links directly to one of the most significant barriers for creativity - the bravery required to put one's ideas out in the world. More on that to come.
Other Definitions of Creativity Today
Teresa Amabile: "Creativity is the production of a novel and appropriate response, product, or solution to an open-ended task." Teresa Amabile is Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, and author of several books on creativity.
Avenues School: "Creativity is the ability to generate new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts, typically leading to original outcomes" (Avenues is a new independent K12 school founded by an impressive set of educational leaders.)
Julia Cameron: "It is my belief and my experience as a teacher that all of us are healthy enough to practice creativity...it is our human birthright and something we can do gently and collectively. Creativity is like breathing - pointers may help, but we do the process ourselves." (Not a direct definition, but Julia's The Artist's Way is such an influential book, I wanted to include her voice here)
Robert Sternberg: "Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)" Robert Sternberg is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, and author of several books on creativity.
Both practitioners and researchers have long noted that creativity is both individual to a person, and variable over time, even for a specific person on a constant task. From, Professor Amabile's In Pursuit of Everyday Creativity:
"we found that day-by-day psychological experience – emotions, perceptions, and motivations – significantly influences creative performance as indicated by supervisor ratings, peer ratings, and quasi-behavioral measures of creative thought; creativity is higher when emotions and perceptions are more positive, and when intrinsic motivation is stronger."
Existing Theories of Creativity
Beyond defining, if we want to understand creativity in order to influence the amount of creativity produced by any one individual, we need a theory of creativity.
A useful theory will explain observed behavior, and predict what will happen. While researchers have put forward a number of theories of creativity, the theory that most resonates with me is called the componential theory of creativity, developed by Teresa Amabile. She determines that creativity is a function of forces both internal to a person and external. Specifically,
Four inside forces:
- domain-relevant skills (expertise in the relevant domain or domains)
- creativity-relevant processes (cognitive and personality processes conducive to novel thinking),
- task motivation (specifically, the intrinsic motivation to engage in the activity out of interest, enjoyment, or a personal sense of challenge)
One outside force:
- the social environment
Amabile's model seems reasonable to me, and I utilize it as my working understanding of how creativity works.
I appreciate how this definition understands creativity as a domain specific endeavor. A person's skills, motivation and social environment relate to a specific creative task, not a general statement on their creativity as a human. JK Rowling is a wonderful novelist, but that says little about her ability to create pottery.
What I find lacking in this theory is a way to relate the relative importance of each of these forces, both as a static measure, and more importantly, as a changing force that can be increased or decreased over time through investment.
In other words, if we believe:
(Task specific) Creativity = Skills x Processes x Motivation x Environment
Are there multipliers to each of those four inputs such that one or several are more important than others?
One could easily argue skills would weigh more heavily than others - haven't we all known someone who was just 'gifted' the moment they picked up a brush, violin or basketball? Or, is motivation the most important, as the tireless creator putting in ten-thousand hours of study in their craft compounds her learning over years and years? The Beatles in Hamburg come to mind here.
Also, which of these four factors is easiest to change? Where can a young person invest to improve their chances of improving as a creator. If we believe, as I do, more creativity in your life and career with associate positively with happiness and income, understanding this better is an important micro and macro question for our society as a whole.
Toward a Theory of Creative Growth
What could a theory of creative growth look like?
I'm not an academic, so my first thought is to turn to theories I admire and use today. Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Innovation and Jobs to Be Done theories are fundamental to my view of the world. I return to them in many business decisions, and the application of his theories to everyday life in "How Will You Measure Your Life" is one of the most influential books on my life.
I am also reading Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, by David Warsh (wonderful read, highly recommend). The book documents the development of a new theory of economic growth, exploring how a new model of understanding spreads within an academic field. Here is Warsh describing Paul Romer's approach to developing a theory:
"The evidence of the senses is where the theorist must begin, moving then to verbal description, to theorizing, and up to formal math in a steadily ascending arc of ever greater generality - and then back down again from high abstraction to verbal formulation and the evidence of the real world."
What Romer did was move knowledge from exogeneous to endogenous in economic growth theory. Prior to Romer (and others in the New Growth Theory movement), the equation for economic growth had been:
Economic Growth = Capital x Labor x Technology
Romer added a new variable, Knowledge, so that we now view economic growth as a function not only of the amount of capital, labor and technology in a society, but also the total knowledge we have to use those three other inputs. As Romer has said, the 'set of instructions' we can all use to make more valuable things with the given set of inputs we have.
Romer won a Nobel prize for his work, which has changed how we understand economic growth and the knowledge economy.
I see a bridge between the debates from economists in the 80s and 90s as documented in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations and where the academic community is in understanding creativity today.
We have a plausible model for understanding creativity, but is it a valuable theory today? The equation of Skills x Processes x Motivation x Environment seems intuitive, but it provides little in the understanding of how to cultivate more creativity at the individual, organizational or societal level.
More foundationally, are we able to measure variables in order to observe and model inputs and outputs with the precision needed to improve our understanding of creativity? How well does our current model do in explaining observed behavior and predicting the future?
I don't know the answers to these questions. Professor Amabile and many other researchers have done considerable work here, and I will better understand what has already been explored.
It does seem increasingly important to invest in this area as technology continues to advance, displacing more and more human labor that is not creative in nature. If we don't have answers to the above, how can efficiently invest resources in improving the creative potential of learners globally?
Post-Script
I'd like to leave the essay as it is, but couldn't stop thinking about. What might a missing variable for creativity look like?
Analogizing Romer's Knowledge variable, which improved the productive capacity of all other variables in the economic growth equation, it seems to me the current theory of creativity is missing a measure of bravery.
Bravery is needed to produce something novel and meaningful, and to share it with someone. It takes significant courage to make the leap into a creative action, especially as we get older and our professional and personal identities solidify.
Bravery is neither a domain-relevant skill, nor a creativity-relevant process, nor a component of motivation. It is something internal to a person, not part of their social environment.
Bravery can be developed. Like those other inputs to creativity, one can improve in one's confidence to share novel ideas with others. Experiences that allow for small initial steps, warmly met with either encouragement or useful feedback, and the scaffolding to build on early successes would seem to improve one's bravery.
One could argue bravery is a sub-component of creative processes. Indeed, Professor Amabile writes:
Creativity-relevant processes (originally called creativity-relevant skills) include a cognitive style and personality characteristics that are conducive to independence, risk-taking, and taking new perspectives on problems, as well as a disciplined work style and skills in generating ideas. These cognitive processes include the ability to use wide, flexible categories for synthesizing information and the ability to break out of perceptual and performance “scripts.” The personality processes include self-discipline and a tolerance for ambiguity." (from Working Paper, 2012)
That description feels overly broad to me. Developing bravery and establishing creative practices appear distinct to me: Each variable could move independently from the other quite easily, and I imagine change in either would have a different interaction with the other variables for creative capacity overall.
What would a a research agenda look like to determine if bravery is a separate and distinct variable in the componential theory of creativity? And, how has the theory overall been validated from real world observations and predictions?
I'm going to keep looking into this, and hope my own work in the classroom may be a helpful place to start.