Myths of Creating Creativity

In an earlier blog post, I explored several studies about creativity and concluded that children should have lots of opportunities to play in unstructured ways outdoors and with traditional toys such as blocks and art materials, and that they shouldn't be hurried into formal academics such as reading instruction and paper-and-pencil math. Creative thinkers need situations in which they can uninhibitedly brainstorm ideas and make mistakes.

Pictured here are creative tributes
paid to creative musicians.

Today I will look at a research study that was done with adult subjects (some time ago). Not only does it confirm the same findings, it also shows us that many of us hold onto certain myths about creativity.

Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School headed up the ambitious study, which dealt with 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects for a variety of companies. The companies were in industries such as high-tech consumer products and chemical industries. None of the study participants knew that her focus was creativity.

For her report in her own words, you can read Fast Company, but I sum up her myth-busting findings here and then relate them to children and education.

Myth 1: Some people are creative, others aren't. And that's just fine.

Amabile says that many adults, including business managers, assume that, although people in the arts and in fields like advertising need to be creative, people in, say, accounting don't. However, Amabile finds that, in reality, all professions benefit from creativity. Further, she points out that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of creativity.

My last post confirms the ubiquity of creativity in children. Teachers and parents should know that all kids are creative geniuses and that all jobs and hobbies benefit from creativity. Amabile warns against “ghettoizing” creativity, but I would further warn against “pedestal -izing” creativity. That is, we shouldn't think, “Oh, so and so is so creative. I would never be able to think of that!” or “Such-and-such's child is so creative. Well, it's no wonder, with parents that are artists! My kids aren't so lucky!” When we categorize creativity as out of our own reach (which it isn't), we easily slip into the idea that it may well be out of our child's reach as well.

Myth 2: Extrinsic rewards motivate creativity.

Amabile reports that adults assume that they themselves are directly motivated by money to work hard, be creative, and solve problems. Also, managers tend to operate on the assumption that the almighty dollar has this motivational power. However, although adults are more creative when they work in an environment that makes them feel valued (and being underpaid may well erode this feeling), day-to-day work is not tied to thinking about extrinsic rewards.

She further finds that adults who do think a lot about rewards—people who are worried about their bonuses, for instance, or about a potential raise—aren't doing creative thinking. They tend to get risk-averse, which is definitely a creativity killer. If you can't risk making a mistake, you can't risk having new ideas.

Kids in traditional schools are generally rewarded with grades rather than money (although some parents and even the occasional school tie cash rewards to grades). These extrinsic rewards do not motivate greater creativity. In fact, worry about grades, like worry about bonuses, distracts from creativity and even directly lessens it by making students risk averse.

Myth 3: People are more creative when working under time pressure.

People tend to say about themselves that they work best under deadline pressure. They even claim that such pressure makes them able to be their most creative selves. But the 12,000 days of journaling proved that the opposite was true: people were least creative when under time pressure. There was, in fact, a lingering effect of deadlines: people were less creative during times of great time pressure plus two days afterward.

According to Amabile, creativity requires “an incubation period.” People need to “soak” in a problem, need time for their unconsciousness to grapple with it, need time to allow ideas and possible solutions to “bubble up.” This is why a really tough problem can often be conquered only after a time period of working on it that is followed by a rest or break—sleeping on it, or taking a walk and coming back refreshed.

Amabile notes that, when there does have to be a deadline, if the deadline is genuinely important rather than arbitrary, people can rise up to the occasion and act creatively to solve problems, even under the gun.

Children, too, need to be doing work they feel is important, with either no deadlines or genuine deadlines. They should be able to settle into a project, steep in a subject, soak in a problem...and take the sort of breaks that help all of us.

Myth 4: Fear and sadness often give rise to creativity.

Although there is some research that indicates a somewhat higher incidence of depression in creative geniuses, Amabile's research an association between positive emotions—joy, happiness, and love—and creativity. On the other hand, she found that fear, anger, and anxiety tend to tamp down creativity.

When people feel happy one day, they tend to make creative break-throughs the next day (after the overnight incubation period we discussed).

Although educators don't, I'm sure, set out to cultivate fear and anxiety in their students, a study of traditional school policies does indicate that, in actual fact, schools focus their motivational efforts on fear and anxiety more than on happiness and love.

Myth 5: Competition helps bring out creativity.

Amabile reports that many companies deliberately foster internal competition in order to motivate excellence, creativity and problem solving. Especially in high-tech industries, she says, managers often believe than innovation is the result of such competition. However, her research shows the exact opposite: it is collaboration, not competition, that encourages creativity.

During collaboration, people share and debate ideas, but within a competitive structure, people usually stop sharing information. The result? Fewer problems are solved, less creativity is expressed, fewer discoveries are made.

By and large, traditional school policies encourage competition, not collaboration. There is a common word used for student collaboration within schools: cheating. Grades, GPAs, and class standings are the trappings of a system of competition...and the focus on competition is even more clear when we realize that no teacher is encouraged or even allowed to give every student an A. What if an excellent teacher is able to motivate all his or her students to master the curriculum? They all deserve As, right? Apparently not. Apparently there must be some way to discriminate between the students. Grading on a curve makes sure that some kids' gains are other kids' losses.

Myth 6: Streamlining, downsizing, and restructuring foster creativity.

In the businesses that Amabile studied, downsizing was often an economic reality. However, creativity does take a hit during the process, despite what PR departments and managers often say. This is an obvious result of Myth 4, above: fear and anxiety tamp down creativity and distract from problem-solving. Amabile found out that the actual negative effect is even worse than she imagined, because anticipation of the downsizing was worse than the actual downsizing, and because the effect lingered long after the event. (For example, five months later, creativity was still down.)

There is no strong correlation between downsizing in the business world and the education world. However, we talked earlier about anxiety about bonuses and raises. Surely downsizing and the resulting worry about keeping a job at all represent “high stakes” for adults. These days, education is filled with high-stakes testing such as high-school-exit-exams. Could it be that we are creating higher stakes, and therefore higher anxiety, with the result that creativity and education actually go downhill?

Enough with myths. What should parents and teachers do?

According to my reading of Amabile's results, it looks as if traditional schools were engineered to diminish creativity rather than maximize it. Amabile's recommendations to business managers and CEOs provide a blueprint for improving education, too.

She writes, “People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored.”

She goes on: “[W]hen people are doing work that they love and they're allowed to deeply engage in it -- and when the work itself is valued and recognized -- then creativity will flourish.”