What Do Children Need to Become More Creative?

In the previous chapter, we’ve seen how we can help our children feel more creative by giving them time when they are free to explore the world playfully, free from the fear of being wrong. What else do they need as they grow?

One of the key building blocks of strong creativity is the ability and willingness to make connections between ideas that don’t obviously go together. Albert Einstein called it combinatory play.

The novelist William Plomer called creativity ‘the power to connect the seemingly unconnected’. So how do you get an understanding of ideas that are unconnected? You simply need to be interested in lots of different things.

When we analysed the data from 700 breakthrough inventions, we found that nearly 72 per cent of the successful innovators have a diverse range of knowledge, which increases their chances of making useful connections between ideas from different fields.

In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), this ranged from 70 per cent up to 83 per cent. (physics). You can see the results of the analysis at: https://linkology.org/s15 .

Why would music, poetry, philosophy, football, and economics matter to technology inventors? Yet, STEM innovators are interested in them. But a diverse range of knowledge does not mean that an innovator is an expert in all the fields of knowledge; quite the contrary.

We found they are strong in one or two areas, either by training or work experience. The rest are the ones they are interested in, which they learn about independently. I call it the ‘documentary level depth’.

It’s a level of understanding you gain when watching a documentary on TV. If, after a while, you are still interested in it, you tend to learn more about it. It’s a growth mindset of interests. One way to understand this is the idea of a T-shaped model of knowledge or T-shaped mind.

The vertical bar of the T signifies areas where someone has a depth of knowledge or expertise, and the horizontal bar of the T represents areas where they know just enough to collaborate with people who have deep knowledge in other fields to fulfil a mission. You can read about the study at https://linkology.org/s16 .

The vertical bar is about specialisation and gives a firm foundation. Our current education system is particularly good at developing this. The horizontal bar represents the breadth of knowledge of the innovators. Broad knowledge is often driven by a strong curiosity, mixed with respect for other fields or cultures. If you are open to it, then everyone you meet can teach you something. Creative people tend to have a T-shaped mind.

Neuroscientists discovered something interesting about creative individuals. When they start with a specific word to create a sentence, other related words are more likely to come to mind. What's unique is that creative people tend to use less common and unusual concepts and words in their sentences. They explore a broader range of word connections, which helps them come up with more creative ideas. However, if they go too far and become too random, it can lead to manic creativity that lacks practical value.

That is why the T-shaped mind, which combines exploration of distant concepts with exploitation of possible solutions is crucial for innovation. We saw overwhelming evidence that connecting the seemingly unconnected led to new ideas of value. But how do people make these connections?

We are all Creative