The Nature of Creative Development

Jonathan S. Feinstein

• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780804784498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Théorie économique

The Nature of Creative Development presents a new understanding of the basis of creativity. Describing patterns of development seen in creative individuals, the author shows how creativity grows out of distinctive interests that often form years before one makes his/her main conributions.

The book is filled with case studies that analyze creative developments across a wide range of fields. The individuals examined range from Virginia Woolf and Albert Einstein to Thomas Edison and Ray Kroc. The text also considers contemporary creatives interviewed by the author.

Feinstein provides a useful framework for those engaged in creative work or in managing such individuals. This text will help the reader understand the nature of creativity, including the difficulties that one may encounter in working creatively and ways to overcome them.

1

INTRODUCTION

In this book I describe the nature of creative development of individuals engaged in creative endeavors. I define creative development to be the process of development and creative activities of an individual engaged in a creative endeavor, extending over a period of time, usually several years or longer. Creative development encompasses processes, experiences, and structures that lay the foundation for creativity, as well as the generation of creativity in its myriad forms—including ideas, insights, and discoveries, and the engagement in creative projects, leading to creative contributions.

The organizing principle and central theme of this book is that the creative development of an individual engaged in creative endeavors, across a wide range of fields, has a basic structure, which centers on, is based in, and grows out of his creative interests. More specifically, as I describe it, an individual’s creative development is based in, centers on, and grows out of his creative interests, his conceptions of his creative interests, and conceptual structures he builds up in the domains of his interests which guide him in his development, are generative of his creativity, and are the basis for his creative projects, thus a fundamental source and basis of his creative contributions to society. Creative interests, as I describe them, are distinctive domains or topics that individuals define for themselves.

I describe and characterize creative interests and conceptions of creative interests; describe the formation of creative interests; and describe fundamental processes through which individuals develop their interests creatively—processes through which their interests and the conceptual structures they build up in the domains of their interests are generative of their creativity and creative projects, including ways in which they are guided in their development by their conceptions of their interests and associated principles and values. Then I extend my description, describing project work, multiple interests as the basis for creativity, patterns of projects rooted in interests, and longer term processes of creative development, including the evolution of creative interests and conceptions of interests, and sequences of interests. Finally, I discuss difficulties of creative development, and the implications of my description for understanding and modeling cultural development.

Woven through my description I present many examples describing the creative developments of individuals whose developments I have analyzed, illustrating the description and providing evidence in support of it. These include individuals famous for their creative contributions whose creative developments I have analyzed drawing upon biographical and primary sources, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Darwin, Alexander Calder, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Hannah Arendt, Hans Krebs, Galileo, William Faulkner, Ray Kroc, Tim Berners-Lee, Piet Mondrian, Pierre Omidyar, and others; and individuals drawn from several fields, mainly academic but not only so, whom I interviewed about their development, and for whom I also obtained and have drawn upon source materials. In the examples I describe individuals’ creative interests and their conceptions of their interests, as they described them or I reconstruct them, and how their interests, conceptions of interests, and conceptual structures they built up in their interest domains were, and in some cases continue to be, the bases for their creativity and creative contributions. I also describe their formation of their interests and paths of development. I discuss the empirical basis for my description, including sources of information and information about the set of individuals I interviewed, later in this chapter, and list the individuals I interviewed and source materials I have drawn upon in analyzing their developments in the Appendix.

In describing creativity as based in and growing out of a process of development I follow and build on the great tradition of biography. I also follow and build on a smaller but important tradition in the literature on creativity describing and tracing individuals in their creative work over time, describing creativity as rooted in and emerging out of a process of development. What I add to both traditions is a conceptual framework for describing creative development—a theoretical structure that manifests and describes general features of creative development. In turn this enables the developments of different individuals, in different fields, to be described within a common framework.

Descriptions of creativity often focus on peak creative moments of insight, idea generation, and discovery, depicting creativity as a sudden flash of illumination or discovery. This continues to be the common view of creativity and dominant focus in the literature on creativity. Although peak creative moments definitely do occur and are important, they are just one element in a larger process. To focus only on them, and ignore the larger, rich process in which they are embedded and out of which they emerge, skews our understanding of the nature of creativity, specifically its context and conceptual basis. The framework presented in this book delineates specific processes and structures of creative development that are the source and basis of generation of several principal forms of creativity leading to creative contributions. In particular it delineates and thus shows how individuals’ ideas, insights, and contributions are rooted in creative interests they form, explore, and strive to develop creatively, including projects they undertake based in their interests, and conceptual structures they build up in the domains of their interests. These roots and bases are by no means evident on the surface: the creative interests that are the basis of individuals’ creativity and contributions are often not clearly visible in their contributions, which emerge often through a long process of development, so that the importance of the interests that underlie them is masked. I have as a principal aim to manifest these linkages, to show that creative interests are the basis for creativity generation and creative contributions.

In the conceptual framework presented in this book individuals, through defining their own interests and pursuing the exploration and creative development of their interests, define, at least to a degree, their own paths of creative development. An individual’s creative development is thus, at least to some degree, an autonomous activity—an important addendum being the importance of creative collaborations, and another being practical requirements, for example resources. Of course random events and experiences, such as chance encounters, have important roles, which I describe—but within a larger, self-defined, self-guided process. Further, the originality of individuals’ contributions is rooted in their interests and the paths they define and follow pursuing their interests, thus in their own self-defined paths of development. As I describe, individuals’ creative interests are generally distinctive, even unique—even within a field and a cohort of individuals in a field each individual typically forms a different, distinctive interest; the creative interests I present and describe as examples illustrate this point. In defining a distinctive interest or set of interests, then defining and following a unique path of development pursuing the exploration and creative development of his interests, an individual has a unique set of experiences and encounters, and builds up distinctive conceptual structures in the domains of his interests. These experiences and structures are the basis of his creativity—his ideas, insights, and discoveries, which in turn are the basis of his distinctive, original contributions. Thus an individual’s creativity and the originality of his contributions is rooted in the distinctiveness of his interests and the path he follows pursuing their development.

The description of creative development in this book includes, as an important facet, channels through which individuals are influenced in their creative development by their culture and the world around them—channels that are not recognized or described in standard accounts of cultural transmission, at least not in the same way. The most distinctive channel of cultural transmission described in the book is that which occurs through individuals’ formation of their creative interests. Creative interests originate in individuals’ engagement with the world, sparked by specific experiences and elements they encounter. Cultural elements and experiences are the basis for many creative interests, making this a main pathway of cultural transmission and influence. Because these cultural elements and experiences influence an individual at such an early stage in his development, and their influence is transmitted indirectly, by and through his creative interests, their influence, important and pervasive as it is, is nonetheless often not readily apparent in his subsequent projects, ideas, and contributions. To identify these cultural linkages we must trace an individual’s development with care, beginning far before his main contributions, at the time when he forms his main creative interests.

Additional channels of cultural transmission and influence I describe arise during exploration and development of interests. Notably, elements and experiences spark creative responses, and individuals build up rich conceptual structures in the domains of their interests out of elements they encounter, that in turn are generative of their ideas and insights.

Beyond describing channels of cultural transmission, the description in this book provides a basis for describing cultural development. Cultural development—the progress of civilization—has its primary source, ultimately, in creative contributions made by people in all walks of life. A well-grounded description of cultural development thus must be based in a description of individual creativity. The description in this book points towards such a description: a model describing cultural development based in individuals’ creative developments and creative activities.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE DESCRIPTION OF CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

The core of creative development consists of three steps: the formation of a creative interest, including a conception of the interest; the process of exploring the interest and developing it creatively; and, in the continuation of this second step, the defining and execution of projects rooted in the interest and growing out of its development, leading to creative works and contributions. I focus on describing the first two steps, then extend my description to include the third step and larger patterns of development. In this section I sketch main features of my description, providing an overview of creative development as I describe it. At the end of the section I outline the organization of the book.

Individuals form their creative interests in and through their engagement with the world around them. In the course of their lives individuals have many experiences and encounter myriad elements of diverse kinds. They have many social interactions and personal experiences, witness and learn about many events, encounter and learn about a great variety of phenomena, are exposed to and learn or learn about a great multitude of concepts, facts, ideas, theories, beliefs, experiments and experimental results, methods, styles, and approaches, and are exposed to, learn about, and study the creative works and contributions of many people, both in their field and their culture. Out of the vast numbers of experiences they have and elements they encounter and learn about, a small number of distinct elements or experiences—or clusters of interrelated elements or experiences, or, in the case of complex experiences and elements, a particular aspect or a few component elements—catch their attention and stand out, spark their interest, and spark a response in them.¹ They form their creative interests in response to and based upon these experiences and elements.

Individuals are most open to forming interests during periods of their development when they are most open to the world and their experiences. Often this is just after they enter their chosen field or a new field, when they are actively learning about the field and encounter many elements in it that are new to them—they often form creative interests during these periods.

In forming their creative interests, especially in the initial stages responding to experiences and elements they encounter, individuals generally respond intuitively and spontaneously to what excites and interests them. Their responses are not rationally planned out, and often they know only a little bit about a topic or set of elements at the time they form an interest in or based upon the topic or elements. Interests are primarily rooted in and generated by intrinsic interest: individuals find their interests interesting, exciting, fascinating, challenging—that is why they form them as interests and wish to pursue them. I describe a variety of sources of intrinsic interest in Chapter 4. Extrinsic factors also have a role in the formation of interests, including individuals’ decisions about which interests to pursue. The two main extrinsic factors are (1) the sense of openness and creative potential—the sense that an interest holds opportunities for fruitful creative development, and (2) the sense that an interest is potentially important, that contributions generated through pursuing it are likely to be significant and important for one’s field and society.

Beginning from their initial interests, individuals form more defined creative interests, which form the basis for their development going forward. A key step in the process of forming a more fully defined creative interest is forming a conception of one’s interest. An individual may or may not form a conception of his interest at the time he forms an initial, incipient interest; if he does, it may well be quite rudimentary, or alternatively, as occurs in some cases, he may have a quite clear conception of his interest from early on. Over time, as an individual thinks about his interest, reflects upon it, makes connections among different concepts, ideas, images, works, phenomena, facts, and other elements that fit with it, and imagines it more fully, he develops his interest conceptually, and it becomes clearer, more integrative and more coherent; as part of this process, and generative of it, he forms a fuller conception of it.

In general an individual’s conception of his interest develops together with his interest, each developing in stages. There are different patterns of development of interests and conceptions of interests. Thus, in many cases an individual’s interest and conception begin as relatively simple and become richer. In some cases an individual’s initial interest and conception are narrowly focused, centering on specific elements and experiences, then expand out to define a broader, richer domain; in other cases his interest begins as more general, then he narrows his focus.

Individuals conceive of their creative interests as domains filled with creative possibilities, filled with promise. They desire to learn about them and explore them, and to develop them creatively. They believe or at least hope that through exploring their inter...