Part I: Who killed creativity?
Chapter 1: Investigating the crime scene
Creative thinking CSI
Crunch.
‘Look Dad, a sailing ship!’
Sitting in the back of the car, our five-year-old son Kallen had taken the first bite out of a large, round biscuit — and opened up a world of possibilities.
Crunch.
‘Look, it‘s a moon now!’
Kallen was beside himself with excitement, but he wasn’t getting much response from Dad up front. You see, Andrew’s mind was engaged in serious work, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted by childish play. He had a keynote to prepare for, a presentation on groundbreaking new research into creativity and innovation, but he was having trouble coming up with a creative opening. Feeling under pressure to produce something suitably dazzling for the afternoon session, he knew he needed to maintain his focus on the task at hand.
‘Sorry Kallen, I’ve got work to do.’
Crunch.
‘But look Dad, you gotta look! It’s become a mountain.’
‘Son, not now! I’m trying to be creative.’
Crunch. Crunch.
Undeterred: ‘Hey Dad, now it’s a bird!’
Mostly out of a guilty sense of parental obligation, and probably also as a way to help stop the interruptions, Andrew turned to look at his son, who held a biscuit wedge a couple of bites short of complete annihilation, and grunted a cursory acknowledgement, before turning his attention back to the serious challenge confronting him.
But then it hit him. In a Eureka moment, Andrew suddenly recognised that while he had been busy trying to conjure up creative solutions, Kallen was expertly demonstrating the creative mind at work. It became apparent that while we approach these sorts of tasks with academic rigor and discipline, creative development is really about being able to imagine and to dream. In that moment Andrew truly appreciated that creativity is more an attitude than an action, and that creative development flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Instead of becoming more ‘expert’ in the field, instead of accumulating more facts about creative thinking and problem solving, he saw that we need to know how to open ourselves up to new ideas and possibilities, how to better utilise and harness the innate curiosity we are all born with.
This story became the opening of Andrew’s presentation later that day. He had bought a packet of biscuits, and for the opening of the keynote Andrew invited six bankers out of the audience of 300 up onto the stage and asked each of them to take a bite out of a biscuit. He then asked the first participant what she could see, and the banker scratched her head, thought deeply, and finally replied with the utmost sincerity and conviction, ‘A biscuit with a bite out of it!’ Kallen’s effortless ability to see seven utterly different objects after seven consecutive bites unexpectedly launched us into the more serious part of our journey in exploring creativity and innovation. (It’s interesting to note here a simple creativity assessment exercise in which people are asked to think of a number of different uses for a common object — for example, a brick. While most people struggle to get past five ideas, a creative person can keep going well beyond that.)
This early experience led us to wonder about why, as we age, we seem to move away from that innocent, playful approach to life and appear to lose the ability to think creatively. As the need to think and act creatively has increased with the exponential increase in the demands and pressures of modern life, rediscovering this ability has become more vital than ever.
Is creative thinking that important?
A free spirit who would happily skip school or work and spend hours daydreaming in the open fields, creativity is the inner child within all of us dying to break free. When restricted by routine or limited by expectations, creativity struggles to survive. She relies on fresh opportunities to bring new ideas that will oxygenate the mind and soul. Where these are stifled by any number of openly brutal or subtle agents, creativity is murdered.
Creative thinking enables people to approach problems and solutions in more inventive ways. Related to the capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations, without creative thinking we cannot learn to adapt in order to be able to deal with the future. We will always be stuck in the past, and we will not survive.
The evidence that creativity is now a critically important work and life skill is overwhelming. Many scholars argue that not being able to think creatively is a significant risk factor for any enterprise. In a classic divergent–convergent thinking challenge that measured the ability to think creatively, those who were more successful in problem-finding and problem-solving tasks were found to have better relationships. Creative thinking enabled them to develop more flexibility, which in turn enhanced their ability to handle stress and find solutions rather than seeing problems as setbacks. A study of 1500 US middle-school students found that those with good creative thinking skills tended to have more confidence in the future, believing they would be able to come up with creative solutions to any problems that came their way. It has also been shown that students who have had more exposure to creativity are more engaged at school, achieve better academic results and are more likely to stay at school longer.1
Creativity is now widely recognised as a critically important work skill. In a recent IBM2 survey of more than 1500 CEOs from 33 different industries and 60 different countries, creativity was rated as the most important quality in leadership (60 per cent), more important even than integrity (52 per cent) and global thinking (35 per cent). IBM has identified a number of factors that set apart ‘creative leaders’ and found that 81 per cent of them rate innovation as a ‘crucial capability’. These leaders are able to break with standard approaches and models to come up with new solutions that stand out from the crowd.3
Creative thinking enables us not only to deal with existing problems effectively, but also to anticipate potential problems and come up with superior solutions. Yet creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established — for entirely sound reasons — to maximise business imperatives such as coordination, productivity and control. Managers cannot be expected to ignore business imperatives, but in pursuing these imperatives they may be inadvertently designing organisations that systematically crush creativity.4 As one CEO of a financial institution we have interviewed put it, ‘If I tell my team to conquer that mountain they are great, but if I ask them which mountain to conquer they stare blatantly at me’.
According to Dr Geoffrey West, interviewed on the topic of ‘Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster’,5 innovation is critical for the survival of our civilisation, literally. A physicist and the former president of the Santa Fe Institute, West believes that if you are going to have open cycles of growth (as in our current capitalist system), you must have innovation to support them. The problem is that we need to innovate faster and faster in order to keep up with the pace of growth. West has discovered that the pace of life also increases with size of population. So, he says, ‘Everything that’s going on in New York today is systematically going faster than it is in San Francisco, than it is in Santa Fe, even the speed of walking. There’s a clock that’s getting faster and faster. And so you have to innovate faster and faster in order to avoid the collapse. And it all comes out of this exponential growth driven by super linear scaling.’ All civilisations and all organisations follow a so-called sigmoidal growth curve, stopping or resetting after a certain period of time, West explains. For large corporations, the growth typically stops at the same value — about half a trillion dollars — or 40 years or three generations. Up to this point, the sigmoidal curve indicates that although sales might have been steadily increasing, the ratio of profit to sales has been steadily decreasing. Theoretically, the curve indicates that this ratio eventually goes to zero, but fluctuations in markets end the life of corporations before this point is reached.
It is usually only at the point that an organisation first sees the writing on the wall that they cut back on spending on innovation, for example limiting research and development budgets, and yet this is exactly the time when it is most needed. The lack of foresight organisations usually demonstrate at this critical stage in their life cycle is what ultimately kills them. When companies allow themselves to be dominated by bureaucracy and administration rather than creativity and innovation, as West says is inevitable, they are suffocated by the essentials.
Therefore, creativity is vitally important for individual and organisational survival. Perhaps even more important, creative thinking will help us save the world, because it enables us as a species to dream, to envisage a better future and to implement this vision. When Martin Luther King Jr set out his vision for the future in his famous ‘I have a dream…’ speech, he epitomised the potential of creative thinking, the ability it has to provide motivation for transformation and to induce a passion for real revolution. Without this creative spark, a spark that needs to live to some extent in all of us, the ember of a meaningful life, and our very existence would have no real substance or purpose. Creative thinking is essential for the evolution of the species and the survival of life beyond just the physical. Looking back, many ideas and ideals that have now become mainstream (such as the environmental movement) started with the creative dream of a few isolated revolutionary individuals who were perceived as radicals at the time but came to have an impact on the future of the whole planet.
Is creative death imminent? The vital statistics
Research into the decline of creativity has led to some startling conclusions. In a sample of 1500 children aged 3–5, 98 per cent ranked as ‘geniuses’ in divergent thinking; in children aged 8–10 the figure fell to just 32 per cent; and by age 13–15 it had declined further to a mere 10 per cent. In other words, children become less creative as they grow older. Moreover, in a control test of 2000 adults (aged 25 and over), only 2 per cent ranked as geniuses.6 When, more than 50 years ago, American psychologist E. Paul Torrance began identifying the key elements in creative thinking and assessing individuals according to these criteria, he had no idea what these assessments would eventually reveal. Torrance and his colleague Garnet Millar, who followed individuals over time, found that the qualities they identified in young children were major predictors for creative professional success. These assessments became the gold standard in the field and have since been used as a reliable predictor of adult accomplishment. By looking at the lifetime data Torrance and his associates collected, and reanalysing it, it was found that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishments is nearly three times stronger for childhood creativity than it is for childhood IQ.7
A shocking new finding from the analysis of Torrance data collected over time is that although IQ levels increase with each generation by about 10 points owing to enriched environments (the Flynn effect), creativity scores are actually falling over time. After analysing up to 300 000 Torrance scores from children and adults, it has been discovered that although creativity scores rose along with IQ scores until 1990, creativity scores have since dropped significantly.8
Another example of the decline of creativity with age can be seen in an exercise called ‘The Marshmallow Challenge’. In this activity, in which participants are asked to build the tallest freestanding structure they can using only marshmallows and spaghetti sticks, children consistently outperform adults. In fact, only half the adults end up with a standing structure, while the children build taller and more interesting structures on every measure of innovation. Adults literally don’t measure up.9
So why does this happen? Evidently there is some sort of intervention, and unfortunately the evidence points to the very structure that should be encouraging and nurturing creativity — the education system. We found, for example, that when Kallen had not yet started school his enthusiasm for invention and discovery was inspiring. At the same time his older sister Zoe, it seemed, had already become a victim of the system. Zoe was well and truly entrenched in the structure that appeared to be directed towards limiting the child’s vision to specific areas of focus and shutting down divergent thinking. In fact, we started to wonder whether, rather than inspiring creative thinking, the education system was actually killing it.
We decided to interview children in the school context to try to understand what happens as children go through the education system.10 We approached our children’s international school in Bali armed with no more than a series of questions and a video camera but were fascinated to get such stark responses from our small sample groups. As we walked into the school, we passed playgrounds with colourful gardens and wonderful play equipment and then moved into a junior classroom adorned with all sorts of creative products made by the children themselves. When we interviewed these young children there was great enthusiasm. Yes, they all felt they were creative, and of course they were proud of it! We felt significant relief and hope that creativity was still well and truly alive in the school. In the senior classrooms, however, the story was different. The wall art had been replaced with maths and science charts, and the children sat in rows, disciplined and subdued. The teachers we interviewed suggested there was ‘no need for the additional stimulation in the environment’ as students were ‘being prepared for high school’ and then ‘prepared for university’. The students’ responses to the questions we asked were also markedly negative. Zoe was horrified to see her parents enter the classroom and ask embarrassing questions about creativity. Our usually chatty and outgoing daughter failed to show any interest in the topic. Like her classmates, she merely shrugged her shoulders and looked away when we asked if she felt she was creative. Her love of learning has continued to diminish rapidly ever since.
We had hypothesised that children might feel they are less creative and as a whole demonstrate less creativity in the school context as they progressed through the system, and our first impressions confirmed our fears. On the premise that children are naturally creative thinkers (for reasons we will discuss throughout this book), we had wanted to see if innocent, non-academic minds could support the academic research on creativity and were fascinated to discover that many of the unscripted answers we received were consistent with the research findings. Children as young as five shared with us startling insights, such as how creative thinking was ‘looking for different patterns’ and ‘coming up with different ideas and putting all the pieces together’. (See ‘Hands up’ video at www.whokilledcreativity.com.)
We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it — or rather we get educated out of it.
Sir Ken Robinson
Are you creative?
Since our school visit we have surveyed thousands of international seminar participants from companies we have worked with. Asked if they think they were more creative as children than as adults, more than 80 per cent of respondents have agreed. Many have admitted to struggling with being creative in their current work environment, which is probably not surprising when you consider the emphasis in the workplace on reaching pragmatic targets and on the bottom line. And most have reported in our survey that they were more creative when they entered the organisation. It appears that both the education and work systems stifle creativity in some way.
So what can organisations do to help resolve this problem? Smart companies will start taking some responsibility for proactive education, and not simply for training skills. They will start to understand first that training is not always education. Training is about developing a specific skill set, and imparting knowledge and facts in the hope that workers can utilise this information when necessary. Education is about developing skills for ongoing learning and enquiry — ultimately it is all about learning to think creatively. Perhaps we should recognise the shortcomings of many current systems that rely on what educator and theorist Paolo Freire called ‘knowledge banking’ and start to think about how we might incorporate genuine learning processes into our organisations instead.
It is a mistake simply to assume that the participants in corporate training programs want to learn and want to hear what the facilitator has to say. Adult cynics can provide the greatest resistance to learning. Their poor experiences with the education system can often leave them with little desire for more, and consequently they are not equipped to cope with change. They can have trouble coming up with new ideas and with thinking creatively. When these people end up in management positions, the friction created between their understanding of the way the world is and the way they can see others can have far-reaching effects — and can even grind the company to a halt.
The key to creativity is sustaining that childlike freeform imagination while enriching it with knowledge, rather than replacing it with knowledge!
Bruce Haddon
To help rebuild creativity through targeted education processes (rather than simple training), you first need to recognise and deal with the killers to ensure they are no longer having a negative impact on the environment. And that is what we plan to do next.