Wrestling with Creativity

8th September 2008

I was recently asked to develop a non-credit certificate program on creativity and innovation in business. It’s very early in the process, there aren’t a lot of limitations yet. I started by looking around online for discussions about creativity and asking questions of my network. I’m looking for input from as many people as possible.

Creative Tools

The concept of creativity

I started by asking my Twitter network : How do you teach creativity?

hjarche @cmartell for adults, you may have to do a lot of unteaching first
layoutmonkey @cmartell It’s more like ‘facilitating’ the creative thought process.
dramagirl @cmartell Set a ‘problem’ within a set of limitations. Stand back and let students engage.
danielrose @cmartell you want me to tweet a reply? how about a 3 day conference on the subject. how can we compromise. i love, love, love this question
danielrose @cmartell have you read Path of Least Resistance by Fritz? That’s where I start when I want to “teach” “creativity”. Lots of “’s.

Lots of “’s. I noticed this too. And it’s not just in this list of responses, I saw it in other discussions of creativity. Not sure exactly what to think of it yet, but it is a distinct pattern. Could it reflect the elusive nature of the concept? Or it’s amoeba like nature that shifts as soon as you focus on it?

And what is creativity anyway? People sure seem to have a wide range of ideas about it. And lots of ideas about whether they are creative or not. It gets twisted up with art. Some who seem very creative to me, don’t think they are because they don’t express it artistically.

Expressing Creativity

I have used art in facilitation for many years. I used to focus more on the expressive arts, asking people to draw, paint, play music, dance, do yoga. What I noticed was I spent a lot of time on creative anxiety, and helping people get beyond their fear to be willing to engage. I heard story after story of mean art teachers and parents who told kids their trees couldn’t be purple. Layers and layers of lessons that shut down the natural instinct to create.

I had those mean teachers and people who didn’t support my art also. But for whatever reason, it drove me deeper into it rather than away. It’s not that I don’t feel creative anxiety, it’s just that I push through it. So I can be creative on demand. How can other people discover that place?

Giving permission to create

If I am going to facilitate creative expression in others, part of it needs to be creating a safe space and helping to find a place inside that activates permission. To unlearn all the lessons about I am not creative, to foster yes I am creative.

Next, I will look to mitigate the effects of judgment. There is a time and place for assessment in relationship to the quality of our creative efforts. Sometimes I think my ability to create relates more to my ability to suspend judgment for quite a while and produce a lot of total crap. So often I see people give up after only a couple of tries. Yes, people get lucky and hit right away sometimes. But most of the time, its a small percentage of ideas that are exceptional.

Tools and skills are part of it

Certainly there are tools to help us, and skills that can be developed. Just as important are to develop the ability to access when it is the right time to use a particular tool. Which tools do you think are important? Things that jump to mind for me

brainstorming effectively
storytelling
generative divergent methods for idea generation
mindmapping
variety of visual tools
improv

What else?

Tension between divergence and convergence

There is something about the concept of balancing process and task that is critical to creativity. I’ve been seeing it manifest in a variety of ways. With the visual processes I work with I see it in the shift between the divergent generation of ideas and the shift to converging into an action plan. After you generate ideas, there is a moment of possibility where if you look carefully, new patterns and connections can be made. All too often though, it’s a moment where old patterns of thinking and agendas surface and groups are off and running into an ‘answer’. Instead of basking in possibility, a kind of group think surfaces that generates least common denominator solutions. As a facilitator, I’m focusing my attention in this place. Looking for activities and sequences that allow the group to use pattern recognition and ways of reconfiguring. Anyone have any ideas?

In The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about a number of traits that tend to be separate in many people, but in creatives they both exist. Like introversion and extroversion, high energy and sleeping a lot, imagination and reality. I recognize these things about myself, but I suspect it’s my ability to rock back and forth between the opposites that releases the creativity. There is something about being able to tolerate tension?

What else should I be thinking about? Have any resources to share?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Creativity and Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On September 8th, 2008, Ken Allan said:

Kia ora Christine!

This is a very philosophical topic. It requires deep searching to even think about expressing an opinion.

In a comment I left on Tom Haskins’ post, I expressed the view that creativity is stimulated by constraint. Tom’s earlier post was really about freedom being a side effect of the creative process. I had posited that by presenting limits (constraints), the creative urge could be stimulated.

Despite the ‘free’ nature of creativity, it is not always stimulated or fostered by ‘freedom’ or lack of constraint. You brought this out in your reference to tolerating tension. Tension is a form of constraint.

Introversion tends to break out - extroversion has already. The introvert uses creativity to break out. So to stimulate creativity in an introvert requires constraint.

Extroverts tend to be stifled by constraint. They need more space to exercise creativity.

Different strokes for different folks.

I get the feeling that this personality factor tends to confuse us when looking for universal ways of stimulating creativity in people. Unless it is recognised that creativity is drawn from different sources, depending on personality, we can go round in ever-decreasing circles. It is not simple.

Ka kite
from Middle-earth

2 On September 9th, 2008, Christine Martell said:

@Ken Allan: Different strokes for different folks is very true. I also see people so attached to their own way of organizing the world that they miss some of the magic that is possible. So perhaps it’s about building a diverse tool kit, where you can utilize a variety of approaches. Perhaps even multiple approaches to generate multiple options before choosing “the one”?

3 On September 10th, 2008, Ken Allan said:

Kia ora Christine!

I think there are multiple approaches to creativity. There are so many different ways a person can release this from within.

Obi-Wan Kenobi said, ‘Use the power Luke!’ This fantasy line is not so fantastic when it comes to creativity. Tapping the ‘power’ is what it is like, whether singing, drawing in charcoal, writing a poem, carving a canoe or cleaving a diamond.

I used to think de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ was a bit of a fantasy until I discovered how the blue hat works. This is the one that calls the shots. It is the hat I use most often before the green. Used together appropriately is such a poweful combination in metaphor.

But it is in defining constraint that can force diversity in creativity. The creative know how to create, whatever the constraint. Those attached to their own way of organising the world don’t know what to do.

Ka kite

4 On September 10th, 2008, Michele Martin said:

As always, Christine, lots of food for thought here. . . I do suspect that creativity takes place within the space created by the tensions of opposites. The problem is that I think most of us are very uncomfortable living in that space–was it Mark Twain who said that the mark of genius was being able to hold two opposing thoughts in the mind at the same time? I think that we naturally seek relief from tension, as opposed to learning to live with it. There’s a certain anxiety that comes from living in that space and you’ve obviously found a way to be OK with that. I wonder if the start of teaching creativity doesn’t lie in helping people experience the tensions between opposing forces and having them become more tolerant of that. So, perhaps, learning to be still in the midst of a lot of noise and activity or something along those lines. Just something that springs to mind, although I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful.

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