Lexicon: Creativity
As we say here in Brazil, let’s not put the oxen in front of the cart. For us to understand each other, we have to speak the same “language” and have a similar comprehension of things. Though each person has its own interpretation (and that is marvelous), what I intend here in this Lexicon series is to expose what I currently think about the main concepts addressed in this blog. Just so that everyone knows what I’m meaning when I use certain words. As you may have noticed, I will deal here with creativity, innovation, and design; so I will try to contextualize the first of them throughout this text.
It is good to say from start that none of these concepts are absolute or permanent. Along years and decades, all of them changed, adapted, and were combined into new forms. And they still do, simply because there is no absolute definition. Creativity can mean one thing to a startup and other to a painter. The intention here is not to exclude these nuances or put one above the other, but to try and give a more general panorama that hopefully embraces most of them and their intersections. All disclaimers said, shall we begin?
Creativity
We talk about creativity and creation constantly, and have been talking for a long time. Even Plato talked about something like creativity in the 4th century BC (though not using this term). We talk about it so often, carelessly, and in different contexts that it became hard to give a signification without saying “uh… well… creativity is… uh… to create something”. Not very precise, isn’t it?
Among many possible modern attempts to define creativity, the one that I bring at heart is from Theresa M. Amabile in her 1997 work “Motivating Creativity in Organizations: on doing what you love and loving what you do”. And here I quote:
“At its heart, creativity is simply the production of novel, appropriate ideas in any realm of human activity, from science, to the arts, to education, to business, to everyday life. The ideas must be novel — different from what’s been done before — but they can’t be simply bizarre; they must be appropriate to the problem or opportunity presented. “
In this definition what we can first notice is that creativity is not only to produce new ideas, but also useful ones. This is important as is the most common misconception that I see about it: that creativity is to diverge, have several ideas, the more the merrier. Well… partially yes. But it is much more than that. Especially in organizational scenarios, to ideate so “freely” and excessively is almost counterproductive. Of course is important to explore possibilities, and this mind-wandering is beneficial in certain doses, but to forget about the constraints and go too far away makes little sense. Novelty is important, but it has its limits.
New-new, or half-new?
But lets start by exploring the newness part. What is something new? It has to be new to everyone, or is it limited? To address that, let me bring another researcher on creativity called Margaret A. Boden. She talks in her book “Dimensions of Creativity” about two different creativities: a psychological (P-creativity) and a historical (H-creativity). In the first, an idea is considered new if the person who had it could not have had it before. It is a much more individual concept that is based on one mind having an idea. H-creativity is broader (and much more uncommon), in which an idea is P-creative not only for that person, but to each and every one else in human history. Tough one.
Naturally these two concepts are extremes of a scale, and most idea generations fall into intermediate values of this spectrum. For instance, when someone takes a working business concept from a country and adapt it successfully to another one such as Brazil, this idea is in fact new and creative to the Brazilian context, but it is clearly not an H-creativity. It would be much more like creating a way to adapt and implement an idea; one that could not yet be conceived and/or developed in Brazil.
A last important thing to mention here is this could not part. It is only possible to create something on a specific historical-socioeconomic context because they were based on several other previous creations. The idea of marvelous godly personalized creation-in-a-garage-of-my-house simply disregards all previous and necessary developments that allowed that person to have such great and radical innovative ideas. We obviously have to recognize such efforts, but we should not be naïve and overlook where such innovative people stood when they made their creations. Or do you think they could have had such awesome insights in any other context?
An ode to usefulness
Back to the concept, when we add the appropriateness factor into the math things get new contours. For me, appropriate ideas imply in a situation or a context in which they are useful or solve a problem. There is no absolute appropriateness. Things are advantageous in certain scenarios, and make no sense in others. An idea may be marvelous in a context and absolutely horrid in others. For example, what if we develop an app to help small farmers in poor countries to sell their products? Wouldn’t it be great? But wait… farmers in some underprivileged inland areas, especially older ones in socioeconomic vulnerability, do not have smartphones. They don’t even have internet. Wait, not even electricity! It doesn’t matter how good an idea seems; if it does not pass the reality-check it has no utility and does not solve the problem at all.
So creativity is not only to diverge, but also to check if what we done makes sense. There is an overall progression to things:
- Define what we are trying to accomplish (a problem, an intention, an objective)
- Acquire knowledge, information, repertoire
- Create per se, have ideas, diverge
- See if promising ideas are somehow fit, until stablishing the best ones to be better explored (converge)
That said, whenever I talk about creativity here, you reader should have in mind that I am not restricted to the divergence phenomena. It is only one part of the creative body. Creativity is seen here as an iterative (and sometimes even random) process along the points above. The fitting part is actually what divides simple ideas from a creation. There is a heuristic process. At least a minimal structure is required to create; a creative process. Creativity is not godly, not unwilling, not a type of madness frenzy, and definitely not a birth-right.
Au contraire my friend, creativity is a learnable skill that can and should be developed by everyone. When we break with the pure-divergence paradigm, we start perceiving other important parts of the creative process such as control, analysis, and synthesis. Maybe you are not the best free-ideator (what can be bypassed using some techniques), but to be good at converging to appropriate solutions is as important as that to achieve goals. This highlights the importance of creating in groups, specially for organization contexts. Not everyone can be good at everything, but having complementary profiles at the team makes the whirls turn way better.
Creativity for me, for you, for everyone
Going back to Amabile’s quote, such creativity concept is not limited only to organizational scenarios, but goes through to any realm of human activity. I find it astonishingly beautiful to see that this simple definition can be so broad. Of course there are particularities in artistic or business creativity, but they all have these two factors in common: it has to be new and it has to be useful. These words have different connotations depending on the area and what you are trying to achieve, but I believe they are always present.
Let’s see, maybe it is more obvious to perceive them in organizational scenarios. An internal or external need was identified by a company. So there comes the design team to try and fulfill the demand. This configures an objective for the design effort, which the team will have explore creatively in order to solve. For that, a new idea will have to emerge, one that was not yet thought or put to practice by the organization. This idea will only be executed or actually created if it resolves the original objective. There we go: novel and appropriate.
But let’s look at a different scenario, such as a dance choreographer. One with a very artistic profile. Well, he/she will create some new work that will most likely not be exactly equal to any other. It will have different composition, musicality, intentions, interpretation, and many other factors. Even if the choreography is never dances on stage or class, it will most likely be a result from a feeling, a though, an intention, something that needs to come out. If the dance helps her/him to accomplish that, won’t the objective be fulfilled? There goes the usefulness in this case: satisfy the choreographer’s soul.
I know this last example is much more subtle, but newness and utility are there. Appropriateness should never be restricted to market or (even worst) to profit. There are many many other angles that we can approach this simple word. Whenever we try to create something, we must always have the objectives in mind. They give us the contours and the goals. If not we may end up roaming randomly and feel that we wasted our time at the end. Wasted because we were searching for something, but we didn’t even know what it was. When creating these posts, I always start with my objectives. It is much easier for me to know if I finished the text: go back and see if I fulfilled them. I guess I did.
