creativity as one of its Peer Review magazines. Between 1920 and 1950, “out of the 121,000 titles listed in Psychological Abstracts . . . only 186 dealt with creativity . . . From the late 1960’s until 1991, almost 9,000 references have been added to the creativity literature.”12 See the bibliography at the end of this book for many examples.
10. Application to “All Disciplines”
One of my colleagues, upon being told of creativity in science, engineering, math, business, and maritime transportation, exclaimed, “And I thought creativity was just an artsy-fartsy thing!”
Not at all! Creativity is all around us, even in the everyday objects we use. For instance, Daniel Pink alludes to an aesthetically remarkable toilet brush, to be had at Target for $5.99 and “designed by Michael Graves, a Princeton University architecture professor and one of the most renowned architects and product designers in the world.”13 Pink says, “We may not all be Dali or Degas. But today we must all be designers.”14
11. Contribution to “Effective Leadership”
A leader today must know how to be creative and to inspire creativity in others. A good example is US Captain Michael D. Abrashoff, who commanded what he called “The Best Damn Ship in the Navy.” He states his philosophy as follows: “I worked hard to create a climate that encouraged quixotic pursuits and celebrated the freedom to fail. I never once reprimanded a sailor for attempting to solve a problem or reach a goal. I wanted my people to feel empowered, so they could think autonomously.”15 In the modern maritime world, the empowerment that supports both creativity and leadership occurs in the system of Bridge Resource Management. (See the discussion by Professors Messer-Bookman, Hayes, and Buckley, interviewed for Chapter 12 of this book.)
12. Enhancement of the “Learning” “Process”
Thomas L. Friedman says that in our fast-changing global economy, “Average Joe has to become special, specialized, synthesizing, or adaptable Joe.”16 The world of the future belongs to the lifelong learner—someone willing to explore new ideas.
In US colleges the learning process can seem fragmented. You take one course, do a final and paper; take another course, do a final and project. It can seem that all you’re doing is accumulating credits, checking off the boxes on a list. But when you think creatively, you transfer ideas from one course to another, synthesizing knowledge and creating new knowledge from it. This sort of skill that will make you happy, productive, and successful all your life. Daniel Pink says,
The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.17
So here are “12 solid reasons” to study creativity. Can you think of any others?
Exercises
1.Which of the reasons in this introduction appeals most to you? Why?
2.What can you add to this list, or how would you react to it in general?
3.What has been your experience with creativity so far? Do you feel you are a creative person? In what fields and in what ways?
4.How can you exercise your creativity now or in the future?
5.What creative people do you admire? Which of their characteristics would you like to imitate? (Try imitating them.)
5Quoted in W. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 7.
6“Why Study Creativity?” The International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State, State University of New York, 2005, http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/cbir/readingroom/html/Why_study.html.
7Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 150.
8P.D. Hart Research Associates, It Takes More Than a Major: An Online Survey among Employers Conducted by the Association of American College and Universities, (April 10, 2013), retrieved from www.aacu..org/leap/index.cfm, 1, 2, 8. This important report is also summarized in Rick Reis’ Tomorrow’s Professor listserv, post # 832. Tomorrow’s Professor, housed at Stanford, is free to anyone who wishes to subscribe: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/tomorrows-professor.
9Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2005), 2-3.
10Isaacson, Einstein, 6-7.
11Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, in conjunction with the American Psychological Association, 2004), 110.
12These statistics are quoted in Gregory J. Feist and Mark A. Runco, “Trends in Creativity Literature: An Analysis of Research in the Journal of Creative Behavior (1967-1989),” Creativity Research Journal 6 (1993): 272, as cited in Robert S. Albert and Mark A. Runco, “A History of Research on Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg, (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1999), 17.
13Pink, A Whole New Mind, 34.
14Ibid., 69.
15D. Michael Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (New York: Time Warner, 2002), 34.
16Pink, A Whole New Mind, 367.
17Pink, A Whole New Mind, 1.
