and creativity are often distinguished from one another, with creativity representing the landmark insights and innovation representing merely the application of creative insights to contemporary challenges. Whether it is the expansion of the color palette and the use of perspective in visual arts; variations in meter and rhyme in poetry; dropping the barrier for the audience in theater; the representation of statistical data in multiple dimensions; or the conception of time and space as relative, these remarkably creative endeavors are, when pedants argue about the term, merely innovative. We find this distinction and its implied hierarchy to be useless. There is innovation in every creative enterprise.
If we accept the premise that creativity is vital for the future of our families and of the planet, then recognizing the creative spirit in all of us is cause for deep reflection on our responsibility to apply our creative gifts to the challenges before us. We believe that creativity is within the grasp of all of us—every student, colleague, neighbor, and friend. This universalist approach is not meant to make people feel good, but to challenge them. Every time we defer to the Big C version of creativity, we let ourselves off the hook by employing a false logic that says if you didn’t write the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, or U.S. Constitution, you can’t improve democracy in creative ways; if you didn’t demonstrate for women’s suffrage, you can’t make a creative contribution to women’s rights; if you didn’t write a symphony or invent the twelve-tone scale, you can’t sing your child a creative lullaby. We are all responsible for and capable of innovating to extend and improve on ideas to create solutions.
The Artistic Personality
The popular Myers-Briggs personality test claims the ability to sort people into sixteen distinct personality types and is used throughout the business, government, education, and nonprofit communities to profile potential candidates and employees. Despite widespread adoption, this theory of personality has never been tested and proved scientifically (Burnett, 2013), and the scientific literature on the test challenges the essential elements of any test—reliability (consistency of results) and validity (testing what we think we are testing; Eveleth, 2013).
Worse still is the commonly cited left- and right-brain dynamic. This is the staple of many so-called “brain research” seminars that are, unfortunately, about neither the brain nor research. But the story of the left-right brain dichotomy is so pervasive that it holds a place in the pantheon of folk wisdom. People who are “right brained” are supposedly impulsive, emotional, and also more creative, and those who are “left brained” are more rational, logical, and realistic. Or is it the other way around? The story has been retold so many times with breathless enthusiasm that it is difficult to keep track. It doesn’t matter, because the theory does not stand up to scrutiny.
There are several problems with this model, not least of which is that it has been thoroughly debunked (Iezzi, 2015). While it is true that some control of speech is localized in the right hemisphere, the brain is a much more complicated machine than the hemispheric theory suggests. The left and right portions of our brains don’t operate in isolation, but instead work together to form our thoughts and ideas. For instance, when examined in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device, our right brain lights up when noticing the general shape of an object, whereas the left portion of our brain is focused on assessing the details of the object. Between the two, we automatically recognize the difference between an orange and our neighbor Frank.
As with many myths, the idea contains a kernel of truth. The left side of our cerebral cortex controls the right side of our body and vice versa. But that is where science stops and mythology begins. Those people who favor one side over the other, as in left-handedness versus right-handedness, are also distinguished by certain aptitudes, according to the theory. But hand preference is not an indication of favoring one side of the brain versus the other (Kosslyn & Miller, 2013). Indeed there have been some very interesting evolutionary theories that seek to explain the phenomenon of hand preference, but none of them show any correlation with hemisphere preference (Faurie & Raymond, 2005).
Another example of analysis linking brain function with personality is the five-factor model of personality (Digman, 1990), which measures five attributes: (1) openness to experience, (2) conscientiousness, (3) extraversion, (4) agreeableness, and (5) neuroticism. When creative capacity has been tested against these five factors, only openness to experience showed any correlation to creativity (Sawyer, 2012). The results of these tests show that the ability to be creative is not limited to any set of predefined personality types or characteristics.
Even age should not be considered a limiting factor for the development of creativity, despite the common assertion that young children are creative but adolescents and adults have lost their creative impulses due to poor schooling. While it is true that the human brain does lose some plasticity once we pass the age of twenty-five, the benefits of the experience and expertise we earn as we grow older often counteract these effects. A cross-cultural study from the University of Arkansas considered 420 literary creators culled from history of Western, Near Eastern, and Asian literatures, and while they found that poets started writing at an earlier age than prose writers, the researchers found no correlations between imaginative and informative output as the population aged (Simonton, 1975). For every Galileo and Jack Kerouac, who produced some of their most startling work at an early age, there are examples like William Shakespeare, who produced what are widely acknowledged as some of his greatest works late in his career; Claude Monet, who picked up his craft late in life and whose distinctive style was influenced by his diminishing eyesight; and Elliott Carter, who produced great 21st century music in his nineties and conducted world premieres after his one-hundredth birthday. This reality stands in stark contrast to the legion of YouTube creativity gurus, led by Sir Ken Robinson (2006), whose popular YouTube video and accompanying books argue that while children are innately creative, the spark is dimmed or extinguished by our woeful education systems. Similarly, Ugur Sak and June Maker (2006) claim that mathematical creativity decreases as students progress in schooling. But the evidence we will present in the remainder of this book shows that people can engage in the process of creativity at any age.
Elements of Creativity
As we noted previously, in contrast to these various myths, we understand creativity to be the process of experimentation, evaluation, and follow-through that leads to a significant discovery, insight, or contribution. The evidence is clear that creativity is a process, and a single product—the breakthrough scientific paper, the magnificent sculpture, the soul-inspiring bars of music—is not the result of a single moment of inspiration, but of processes that included many considered and discarded ideas (Grant, 2016; Johnson, 2010). Outlining this process provides the foundation for understanding not only what creativity is, but how it can be nurtured. It also provides insight into how creativity is, however unintentionally, undermined in classrooms, boardrooms, halls of government, and councils of industry. In particular, creativity is undermined when educational, business, and governmental organizations punish errors. While leaders often talk a good game about how they value mistakes and learn from them, the prevailing evaluation mechanisms for students and for adults is based upon the average—that is, the sum of every observation divided by the number of observations. In this system, we do not value mistakes and failure, but systematically punish them. Every mistake of January is remembered and calculated into the final evaluation in December.
Experimentation
The centrality of process to creativity is as important in the sciences as in the arts. Experimentation is the initiating element in this process. Consider Archimedes’s contribution to physics. He is said to have discovered the nature of mass as he noticed the displacement of water as he bathed in ancient Greece. The tale goes that, having successfully reckoned that the volume of an object could be determined by its displacement of water, he leapt from the bathtub and ran naked through the town shouting “Eureka!” or “I have found it!” This tale, enshrined in the eureka moment of discovery by scientists and artists
