Creativity; what actually is it?

Creativity; what actually is it?

By Frank Newman

There is so much talk about the need for creativity in the workplace as well as in our personal lives. It’s hard to find a company vision statement that doesn’t refer to it. But what actually is it? And more importantly, can we learn it a skillset?

As an artist with over 20 years in theatre as a performer, director, producer, teacher and everything in between, creativity is something I have thought long and hard about. I currently work at the Sydney Opera House, as the Creative Learning Specialist, running two creativity programs. One is an education transformation program, called Creative Leadership in Learning and the other program is called Creative Play, an immersive series of interactive installations for families. So thinking about what creativity is, where it is situated, how to do it and how it can be taught is a core part of my practice.?

Over the next few months I’ll write a series of articles that dive into the subject. So if you’re an artist, designer (UX, CX, LX or other), an educator or involved in innovation or transformation programs, read on, as my aim with these articles is to be more than just informative, offering practical suggestions you can put to good use immediately.?

Foundations

Alongside some incredible humans, including Lily Blue, Howard Matthew , Curly Fernandez and Professor Judith Mc Lean , I wrote a creativity framework and 10-day course at the Sydney Opera House to help educators teach any subject through creativity.?

The course (which we’ve delivered over 40 times) unsurprisingly starts with a big question; “What is creativity?” In the free ranging conversation that follows, groups have responded with a variety of answers saying that creativity is:

• Thinking outside of the box
• Risk taking
• Imagination
• Flexibility
• Self expression
• Freedom
• Originality
• Play
• Dancing, making, doing without thinking

To all of these answers I say “yes”. I then provoke them with one of the major theories coined by Flow master Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Big C creativity that suggests it doesn’t live inside us, and has nothing to do with the mind or body, but rather it’s political, or socially determined. Creativity is about the group.?

For example, if there is a shaggy haired person in tattered clothes in a shed making wild inventions, and we all think those inventions are notable and important, then that shaggy haired person is deemed creative. If we all think those inventions are mad, serving no purpose, then that shaggy haired person is just a mad person in a shed. So it’s us, society, the sector, the field, that determine what is and what is not creative.?

I am not sure I agree with this. If I am that shaggy haired person and my inventions make me feel good and proud, then to hell with everyone else.

Surely creativity can’t be about what everyone else thinks is good. That feels like conformity. Where certain people are gatekeepers or arbiters of creativity and the group determines whether you are or aren’t creative. Is it really up to society, with all its bias, power and coercion to deem what is and what is not creative - and the rest of us just fall into line? Doesn’t sound creative to me. Sounds like the opposite? Or is it? We do after all have to arrive at some sort of definition of what is creative. There has to be some sort of agreement between us that something is creative, or we just won’t see it!

It gets complicated very quickly. Where is it situated? Is it inside us, or in the mutually accepted agreement of a group? And what actually is it? We haven’t yet touched on that.

The definition

Creativity research started in the 1950s, in the field of cognitive psychology and was principally interested in how to define and replicate that magic thing that made someone a genius. Big C creativity falls into that category of research.?

There soon emerged numerous branches of research that moved away from cognitive psychology, and became interested in knowing more about pervasive everyday creativity. Researchers turned to the workplace, investigating smaller creative acts such as collaborative problem solving and brainstorming. Theorists predictably labelled that sort of creativity Little c creativity.

But what about personal creativity, like cooking or diary writing, where there is no group work or audience and it’s all about an experience? That they named Mini c Creativity or P Creativity. Later, H Creativity popped up (which is closer to Big C), describing the process of having a wholly original idea.?

According to Kampylis and Valtanen, there are 42 definitions of creativity that straddle business, psychology, geography, the arts, history and various domains of science.?

Boiled right down, the generally accepted definition of creativity is that it is novel, useful and intentional.?

Creativity as a way of seeing and being

For artists, learning designers and facilitators developing a course on creativity, this definition was not overly helpful. What we needed was a clear statement around which we could build exercises and sequences on how to be creative.?

After considerable research we settled on a definition grounded in art theory as much as cognitive psychology, responding to John Berger’s famous work Ways of Seeing (1972), which proposes that it’s our personal biases (cultural, political, social) that determines how we interpret creative action.?

The definition we continue to work with today was most clearly articulated by artist and researcher Lily Blue; that creativity is a way of seeing and being. It’s a way of seeing the world, seeing connections, combinations, joining the dots. It’s about being comfortable in ambiguity and knowing how to hold the unknown. Being creative is an ability to see the world through curious eyes that instinctively connect ideas. It’s a cognitive function we understand through all our senses.

It’s also a way of being. It’s how we move through the world, full of our unconscious and conscious biases. The more we understand why we are who we are, the more we can understand - and control - our creative actions. Creativity is a way of seeing and being in the world, and by virtue the novel and useful become possible.?

Types of Creativity

Over the last eight years of running creativity courses at the Opera House, coupled with 20 years of directing shows,?I’ve catalogued two main types of creativity that can help learning designers and facilitators structure programs. There is emergence, where something new and novel arises as a result of an emergent process. And there is combining disparate ideas, joining the dots between things to create something new as a result.

Emergent Creativity

Emergence is a way of being that can be facilitated through specific processes or environments. It can be manufactured and set up to provoke solutions or novel ideas. Often the ideas are already there, and we just need to reframe something, cajole or assist them to emerge. Imagine you have an empty page, then you write one thing down that sets off a series of other ideas that were not front-of-mind before. They emerge.

Combination Creativity

Combination creativity, or otherwise referred to as connective creativity, is where you encourage or force the connection between ideas or objects. You join the dots between disparate concepts. We have an incredible capacity to do this as humans. We can’t help but create new relationships, concoctions and blends, whether out of necessity or playful imagining.

It is important to revisit at this point the notion that creativity is an intentional act. The difference between combination creativity with day dreaming or imagining is the act of focussing this cognitive capacity on a task. it's the intention of activating this thinking process that makes it creative and not merely the imaginative mind trundling through trains of thought. Combination creativity is such an important mode of thinking and one that is so easily trained through simple exercises.

Each of these types of creativity easily collapse into one another, and splitting creative hairs can become an academic exercise. It quickly becomes evident that trying to define something so inherently ambiguous is hard and possibly foolish. As John Berger once said while grappling to describe his creative process: “it’s an inarticulate, amorphous thing.”?

But teach it you can and teach it we do. As we’ve progressed and refined our creativity course we’ve honed in on specific aptitudes that are needed to see and be creative. I’ll get into specifics of these in ?later articles, but at a glance they are:

1. Listening, looking, observing, noticing, becoming attuned?
2. Rupture, de-ritualising, breaking patterns
3. Ensemble, exchange, collaborating
4. Play, make believe, immersion
5. Ambiguity, unknowns
6. Questions, revelations, maieutics?
7. Making
8. Showing
9. Reflecting

?

EXERCISES

I promised these articles would be practical, so to start I’ll share an exercise for each of the aforementioned types of creativity.

Emergence Exercise

‘Bucket’?

The Bucket game is done in pairs and is a great warm-up for an ideation session or strategic planning. It’s also a great story writing technique.?

Part 1

• In pairs, link arms. One person leads the other around the room, changing directions and not getting caught in patterns. (You can also do this sitting down opposite one another.)
• The person being led must say one random word every second without sequencing ideas (like ship, sea, wave, spray) or making lists of things they can see (like wall, floor, ceiling).?
• If they falter, repeat a word or say “um” or “er” the partner shouts ”bucket” and they swap roles.?
• The pairs continue to swap roles, one leading, one blurting out random words.

Trust me, it’s hard! We never list un-associated words like this. But try it and be disciplined. There is a zen spot when somehow the words start to fall out of your mouth from the back of your brain.?

Part 2

This is in the same format as the Bucket Part 1, but the person speaking has to start a narrative that does not end and has no full stops. It ends up being dream-like, where the most bizarre things occur, but the idea is to speak as fast as you possibly can, with no pauses to think. You just motor through the blank spaces in thought with words that you then make sense of as the dream narrative unfurls itself, morphing and meandering. Many people are very good at this part so you might need to force a swap so they both get a go.?

Part 3

Discuss as a group. Ask questions about the nature of how and why we associate ideas and how we can get into that flow state. Why both parts of the exercise?

Combination Creativity Exercise

Part 1: Disparate Stories (you will need paper and pens)

• Work in pairs. One person makes up three completely unrelated sentences. Different time frames, different styles, tone of voice and length. The more wildly different the better.?
• The other person writes them down and uses them to create a story, speaking it aloud to the other person, weaving elements of all three sentences together.?
• They don’t have to verbatim incorporate the sentences, but draw together the ideas from each sentence, in no particular order. The story should last 2-3 minutes maximum.
• Swap over roles. Do it at least 3 times each. (‘Bucket’ is an excellent warm-up game for this.)

Part 2: Disparate Projects

The above exercise is now applied to a real-world context. I will use a school as an example, but it could be a workplace or the elements of an ecosystem map.?

• Following the same game structure as Disparate Stories (still working in pairs)
• One person picks three unrelated parts of the school, from physical (broken fence) to intangible (a piece of the curriculum). Write them down.
• The other person then has to weave these into a project that could be done within the school.?
• This time they should work together; this is not about testing their creative abilities, but rather using their collective brains to dream up a project that could actually be carried out. The only rule is that you have to incorporate all three elements.

I’ve done these exercises hundreds of times and some of the ideas that emerge are brilliant and have since been carried through and delivered.?

Please respond with any questions about the article or exercises, and feel free to post other creativity exercises that have worked for you.