Managing Creativity

A Systems Thinking Journey

José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138500211
• eBook ISBN: 9781351012737
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

For over a century, creativity has unfolded as a valuable field of knowledge. Emerging from disciplines like psychology, management and education, the field of creativity is making strides in others including the arts and engineering. Research and education in this field helped it establish an identity as evidenced by a growing number of courses and specialised journals. However, this progress has come with a price. In a domain like management, institutionalisation of creativity in learning, research and practice has left creativity subordinated to concerns with standardisation, employability and economic growth. Values like personal fulfilment, uncertainty, improvement and connectedness which could characterise systemic views on creativity need to be rescued to promote more and inclusive dialogue between creativity stakeholders.

The author aims to recover the importance of creativity as a systemic phenomenon and explores how applied systems thinking, or AST, can further support creativity. This demonstrates how creative efforts could be directed to improve quality of life for individuals as well as their environments. The book uses the systems idea as an enquiring device to bring together different actors to promote refl ection and action about creative possibilities. The chapters offer conceptualisations, applications and refl ections of systems ideas to help readers make sense of the field of creativity in academia and elsewhere.

Complemented by the author's own personal, conceptual and practical journey, the insights of the book will act as a vital toolkit for management researchers, career-driven students, practitioners and all creators to define and pursue creative ideas and thrive through their journeys to benefit themselves, other people and organisations.

1 A history of creativity

The journey starts here.

Utopias afford consolation; although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they do make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.

– Michel Foucault, “The Order of Things”, commentary in Creators on Creating (Barron, Montuori and Barron, 1997), p. 111

Introduction

It is valuable to provide a challenging and historical account of creativity to raise awareness of how a field of knowledge that continuously unfolds has begotten two ‘lineages’ of a closed system of thought and action that is often subordinated to economic imperatives. Given my background as a software developer, entrepreneur and critical systems thinker, the account will highlight some key assumptions that have contributed to it.

The chapter presents two main traditions or lineages in the creativity field. These lineages could help us to situate the ideas of this book. With this distinction of lineages, the chapter advances the argument that the creativity field can be usefully seen as a ‘mess’, with researchers and practitioners stepping on each other’s toes even when claiming that they are different from each other. This idea will be taken further in later chapters to identify and validate possibilities in order to study creativity using systems thinking perspectives.

The chapter is organised as follows. A brief overview of the history of creativity is introduced. The overview is expanded via two lineages which show different orientations and contributing disciplines to creativity. There are commonalities and differences between these lineages which suggest that the field of creativity could be considered ‘a mess’; in such a mess, this book aims to provide complementary systems ideas to help creators manage their journeys and ultimately themselves.

A brief overview of creativity

Up until the eighteenth century, creativity was easily confused with the idea of God as the only creator or inspiration of creative work: The idea of creativity as ex-nihilo (something derived from Godly forces) was dominant; creators had divine inspiration or were considered later as unique geniuses (Pope, 2005; Runco and Albert, 2010). To reinforce this assumption, creativity later became confounded with other human talents and characters as mentioned earlier. Talents included imagination, artistic flair and genius. As of today, a strand of activity in the creativity field still explores relationships between genetics and environmental influences in eminent individuals (Simonton, 2012).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the works of Darwin and Galton among other scientists provided us with a first glimpse of an interest in human creativity as resulting from both inheritance and nurturing, if not adaptation. A focal point of attention in science was human traits in relation to evolution (Sternberg, 1999). Although the notion of human creativity was still overlapping with others to some degree (i.e. imagination, intelligence), methodologically rigorous studies enabled a better identification of individual differences contributing to creativity (Galton, 1889). Scientific tests aimed to target groups of individuals with a view to identify individual traits that enabled people to overcome set challenges.

During the twentieth century, creativity as a construct and as an area of research and practice became differentiated from other constructs like intelligence, creative talent, mental illness or imagination, and bodies of knowledge like psychology, education, art or innovation. There are also some common knowledge elements that help constitute creativity as a field. These include types of cognitive thinking (convergent, divergent) (Guildford, 1950; Cropley, 2006); wider (and contestable) processes involved in creativity like preparation, incubation, elaboration and dissemination (Wallas, 1926; Lubart, 2001); and criteria to assess a creative idea or product as novel, valuable, elegant and implemented (Csikszentmihalyi and Wolfe, 2000; Cropley, 2001; Runco and Jaeger, 2012). There are also established and proven methods to assess creativity at the individual level (Barron, 1968; Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels, 1971; Torrance, 1981). These could help us know a bit more about the dimensions of an individual’s personality that could help her generate valuable and potentially socially or commercially relevant ideas.

In this regard, the creativity field has also promoted a classification of different degrees according to their potential impact, ranging from ‘small’ creativity or ‘c’ to mini, potentially, and big ‘C’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009; Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco, 2010). We now see that creativity can range from personal and unknown efforts that bring satisfaction to an individual, to larger efforts that could have a higher degree of social relevance and economic impact.

Recently and with the increasing use of technologies that can rewire brains (Eagleman, 2015), speed problem solving or become super intelligent on their own (Bostrom, 2016), the field of creativity could face new challenges related to where creativity is to reside as well as what/who else could be considered creator(s) (Pope, 2005). These challenges suggest that alongside creativity, and perhaps more than before, ethical awareness needs to become an important part of the agendas of creators.

Lineages in creativity research

At the risk of oversimplifying for now the rich landscape of creativity, in this section two different lineages or traditions in creativity are identified. The aim is to provide some initial insights into how coming up with an idea about creativity or a creative idea could fit within the current landscape of creativity research and practice, and how systems models of creativity could be further researched and enriched.

The idea of lineages or traditions came to me after reading the work of the sociologist Andrew Abbott (2001) and using some of his own distinctions to understand the dynamics of social science disciplines. Elsewhere, I have used these ideas to collaborate with other researchers in exploring a common interest related to identifying cycles of knowledge generation in the field of information systems (Córdoba-Pachón, Pilkington and Bernroider, 2012). In retrospect, I could say that I was paying homage to a way of doing research in this field whilst providing a creative contribution by bringing ideas from sociology and systems thinking into it. Whether paying too much or too little respect to academic conventions, I was trying to fit within what I saw were traditions or lineages of research that were valued in my new workplace.

Following Abbott (2001), lineages inherit distinctions and assumptions from disciplines. The emergence of distinctions and associations between them depends on what is conceived of as the status quo. The sequence of these elements through time can be called a lineage.

For creativity, a first lineage seems to inherit many features of the discipline of psychology. In it, creativity could be almost defined and assessed at least at the individual level. Scientific methods are used to that end and to promote further studies of creativity. Creativity can be conceived of as a human capacity, a set of talents or intelligences with key and distinguishable criteria to assess if not develop them (Gardner, 2011). The plethora of studies that also make use of insights of areas like neuroscience and strong relationships with education seem to suggest that creativity has become a field on its own with its origins, key tenets, methods of study and development (Sternberg, 1999; Runco and Albert, 2010).

In a second lineage, creativity might or might not be a definable or assessable capacity, as it might not only reside in creators (Amabile, 1998; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Gruber and Wallace, 1999; Sawyer, 2006; Gardner, 2011). In this lineage, creativity emerges. It could have individual or collective manifestations. Given its context dependence, within this lineage a generalisable definition of creativity is not particularly important. What is important is how we can study it more comprehensively and how different disciplines and fields of knowledge and practice (including organisations) can foster it systemically, e.g. by working on different aspects and relationships between them.

Figure 1.1 Two lineages in creativity

Within the second lineage, ideas from sociology, systems thinking and complexity have helped to map and articulate the influences of and relations between several contributing parts to the emergence of creativity phenomena (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Montuori and Purser, 1995; Glavenau, 2010). There is a systems model proposed by Csikszentmihalyi (1988) which provides a valuable way of mapping influences and relations between different elements involved in creativity. As this book shows, there is scope to enrich this model with other systems ideas.

The two lineages can be represented in the following diagram, which shows some originating and contributing disciplines and a commonality between them in relation to study methods.

First lineage: progressive creativity

With the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century, an interest in the relationship between human agency and creativity emerged but later faded as enquiry into human nature and its ‘progression’ to human sciences took shape in the late nineteenth century. The inherited desire to disseminate scientific thinking as stemming from the work of individual ‘geniuses’ like Isaac Newton somehow contributed to undermining individuality. Those people who were interested in science had to somehow abide by or subordinate their individual interests to those of the scientific communities and publication outlets that were emerging. In this century creativity has become dichotomised between being scientifically and ideologically based.

Furthermore, and with the popularisation of evolution theories at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, scientifically based creativity took off. This branch of creativity in the work of Galton (1889) inherited methods and theories to identify variations of creative traits among populations and generations of individuals. The interest to explain creativity as evolution-dependent challenged ex-nihilo and ideological views on the area. Human beings with certain inherited traits and inclinations were now seen as able to create and implement ideas. Human consciousness became an area of study for the generation of such ideas (Barron, 1972). Human creativity was starting to be conceived of as a transformation. Human nature became itself an accepted subject of enquiry – which principle saw itself as different from exploring phenomena like genius or imagination (Runco and Jaeger, 2012; Simonton, 2012).

With a sense of human power to create also came awareness of its potential dangers (Runco and Albert, 2010). Considering the dichotomy between scientifically and ideologically related creativity, such awareness was best seen as an ideology or series of ideologies against economic progress which required some sort of ‘scientific’ proof to be seriously considered. Tayloristic ‘scientific’ management could be regarded as well spirited although potentially misused when it came to release the human being to do other things than work. The proof of the danger seems to have come in the form of two world wars.

Some key questions driving research on creativity which transcended from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and which still drive the creativity field are (Shaheen, 2010; Runco and Jaeger, 2012):

1. 1 What is creativity?
2. 2 Who has creativity?
3. 3 What are the characteristics of creative people?
4. 4 Who should benefit from creativity?
5. 5 Can creativity be increased through conscious effort?

The last two questions seem to have been brought by economic imperatives under democratic and educational ideologies coming from the Anglo-Saxon world, now emerging to make use of scientific thinking. These ideologies also brought the idea of creativity as a common feature in individuals, thus helping to distinguish it from others at times (e.g. genius).

The twentieth century in the Western world also saw the emergence of studies in creativity and thinking to better distinguish and understand individual capabilities and how they could be enhanced as a way of also making use of what human evolution provided (Montuori and Purser, 1995; Cain, 2012; Glavenau, 2010). As mentioned earlier, the importance of thinking for creativity was highlighted by Dewey (1910), who advocated efforts to train the human mind to think ‘usefully’ so as not to add to social waste or inaction. By this he meant that children’s curiosity, imagination and love for experimental enquiry were very near to the attitude of ‘scientific minds’. If a mind was to be trained properly to ‘think’, then a step-by-step, logically oriented process was to follow.

A keynote address by Guildford in 1950 introduced the importance of the study of creativity as an area of knowledge distinct from psychology. Guildford challenged the association between creativity and intelligence and advocated a focus on personality. He said:

in a narrow sense, creativity refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people … [These abilities] determine whether the individual has the power to exhibit creative behaviour to a noteworthy degree … the psychologist’s problem is that of creative personality.

(Guildford, 1950, p. 444, brackets added)

With this proposal, Guildford (1950) raised awareness about other dimensions than intelligence which could be related to a creative act by individuals – for example, sensitivity to problems, fluency in the generation of numbers of ideas, novelty of such ideas, synthesising ability, reorganisation and redefinition of ideas, analysis and evaluation. New dimensions required researchers to move away from using intelligence tests to measure creativity and to devise alternative tests as well as methods of investigation.

Moreover, Guildford’s address was also an invitation to recognise different and more common types of creative behaviour leading to creative performance and creative results in several domains of life. Identification of individual differences could also yield insights on how to improve behaviour through practice. Guildford says:

It is not incubation [of ideas] itself that we find of great interest. It is the nature of the [mental] processes that occur during the latent period of incubation, as well as before it and after it. It is individual differences in the efficiency of those processes that will be found important for identifying the potentially creative [individual].

(Guildford, 1950, p. 451, brackets added)

Creativity as a capacity that could be developed

Moreover, as put forward by Guildford:

Once the factors [contributing to creativity] have been established as describing the domain of creativity, we have a basis for the means of selecting [and supporting] the individuals with creative potentialities … eventually [after economic development and automation] about the only economic value of brains left would be in the creative thinking of which they are capable … there would still be need for human brains to operate the machines and to invent better ones.

(1950, pp. 445–446, 454, brackets added)

In Guildford’s view, rote learning, focus on passing tests and lack of sensitivity to other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• To the reader
• Introduction
• 1 A history of creativity
• 2 Socio-cultural creativity
• 3 Other systems ideas to creativity
• 4 Creativity in knowledge ecologies
• 5 Practising creativity: a self-ethnography
• 6 Governing creativity
• 7 Developing ethics for a creative living
• 8 Final reflections
• References
• Index