Creativity

I found this excerpt from Kerry Patterson's newsletter quite interesting (especially given the Wilber quote on paradigms I shared yesterday.)

Thirty years ago, I took a class with a group of doctoral students who reviewed and reported on the latest findings in organizational behavior. During each class period one of us would explain the current research surrounding topics such as motivation, cognitive dissonance, and so forth. Our entire grade was based on the ninety-minute report we shared with our classmates and the professor, who couldn’t wait to rip the presentation apart. As you might imagine, each session was a tense and lively experience.

For the last day of class, David Anderson was scheduled to report on the topic of creativity. I was looking forward to his presentation because I figured: creativity—it has to be fun, right? David stood up, smiled wryly and said something like the following...

[More below]

“Creativity is an elusive topic. Researchers can’t agree that creativity even exists. No two people define it in the same way. And since people are at odds as to what creativity is, there is no shared dependent measure that a group of scholars has routinely studied and then written about in refereed journals. Ergo: creativity doesn’t even qualify as an academic topic.

“That also means that we don’t have independent measures. You can’t study what causes creativity, stimulates creativity, or even what kills creativity if you don’t know what creativity is. And once again, we don’t know what creativity is. Oh yes, one final comment, a lot of people talk about creativity, but it’s mostly a bunch of bunk.”

Then, to everyone’s surprise, David sat down.

David was right. Creativity is an elusive, often discussed but rarely studied topic. And yes, there is a lot of stuff out there aimed at making us more creative; but most of it, as David suggested decades ago, is far more cute and clever than it is insightful or helpful. For instance, we’re routinely told that in order to be creative we need to “ask the right question.” Which leads me to wonder, who is currently committed to asking the wrong question?

This particular advice is from the “think-outside-the box” genre. Apparently we’re all currently thinking inside the box and well, it’s stifling us. This concept actually grew out of the “our paradigm is screwed up” movement which argues that we don’t merely need to think outside the box, we need to embrace a whole new paradigm—no small task in light of the fact that (1) most of us don’t actually know what a paradigm is and (2) we’re even less aware of how to extract ourselves from one.

(As a reminder, Wilber's take on paradigms goes like this:

Put simply, a theory is a map of a territory, while a paradigm is a practice that brings forth a territory in the first place. The paradigm or social practice itself is called an "exemplar" or "injunction," and the theory is called, well, the theory. The point is that knowledge revolutions are generally combinations of new paradigm-practices that bring forth a new phenomenological territory plus new theories and maps that attempt to offer some sort of abstract or contoured guidance to the new territories thus disclosed and brought forth.)