Understanding Creativity And Its Attributes

Understanding Creativity And Its Attributes

When a kid rushes to show something that he has scribbled on the paper or when tries to explain a clay model that he has formed and believes to be an elephant, we often hear the adults exclaiming in amazement, “How creative!” Most people associate creativity with the fields of art and literature. In these fields, originality is considered to be a sufficient condition for creativity; unlike other fields where both originality and appropriateness are necessary. In a training program one of the candidates expressed the wish to be a part of a creative team when asked about how he views job satisfaction. So what is creativity? Is it something important? Is creativity connected with happiness? Can people be trained to be creative?

As Steve Jobs put it, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

What is creativity?

Not all creative people are alike, which makes defining creativity a challenge. The traditional psychological definition of creativity includes two parts: originality and functionality. Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as “new” may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. Similarly, the concept of “valuable” can also be defined in a variety of ways.

There is no concrete definition of creativity, but most experts agree it has something to do with the ability to come up with new ideas, new links between ideas, and novel solutions to problems. The field of creativity as it exists today emerged largely as a result of the pioneering efforts of J. P. Guilford (1950) and E. Paul Torrance (1962, 1974). Both concentrated on divergent thinking as the basis of creativity and devised tests that emphasised the assessment of divergent thinking.

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Creativity implies to generation of ideas or products that are novel or original and useful. The unusualness of such ideas or products finds surprised reactions from others, which are tinged with positive emotions and receive affirmative feedback. The other indicative parameters of creativity are fluency, flexibility and elaboration.

According to the investment theory, creativity requires a confluence of six distinct but interrelated resources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation, and environment.If there’s one thing that distinguishes highly creative people from others, it’s their ability to see possibilities where others don’t. It is what we call vision.

Creativity And Intelligence

Intelligence is classically defined as the ability to acquire and utilise knowledge, whereas creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas through a mental process of connecting existing concepts. Being able to come up with creative ideas isn’t something that requires a person to have an overly-high IQ. Intelligence matters as it demonstrates your ability to gather knowledge and use it effectively. Creativity is the ability to go beyond intelligence and capitalise on seemingly random connections of concepts.Three intellectual skills are particularly important:

(a) The synthetic skill to see problems in new ways and to escape the bounds of conventional thinking.

(b) The analytic skill to recognise which of one’s ideas are worth pursuing and which are not (c) The practical–contextual skill to know how to persuade others of the value of one’s ideas.

A very popular model known as the ‘threshold model’, proposed by Ellis Paul Torrance, holds that a high degree of intelligence appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for high creativity while there was this debate in the psychological literature about whether intelligence and creativity are part of the same process or represent distinct mental processes.

Knowledge

Knowledge is important as one cannot move forward in a field without enough knowledge. But on the other hand it can be argued that knowledge about a field can result in a closed and entrenched perspective as the person may not move beyond the way in which he/she has seen problems in the past.  Thus knowledge can help or can hinder creativity as the argument goes.

Thinking styles are preferred ways of using one’s skills. In essence, they are decisions about how to deploy the skills available to a person.

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Personality

Certain personality attributes like willingness to overcome obstacles, willingness to take sensible risks, willingness to tolerate ambiguity, and self-efficacy are found to be important for creative functioning.

Motivation

Intrinsic, task-focused motivation is essential to creativity. Research shows that people rarely do truly creative work in an area unless they really love what they are doing and focus on the work rather than the potential rewards.

Environment

 Finally, one needs an environment that is supportive and rewarding of creative ideas. One could have all of the internal resources needed to think creatively, but without some environmental support, where such ideas are encouraged, the creativity that a person possessesmight never be displayed. School environments typically are not adequately supportive of the use of one’s creativity.

Creativity is hypothesised to involve more than a simple sum of a person’s level on each component. First, there may be thresholds for some components (e.g., knowledge) below which creativity is not possible regardless of the levels on other components. Second, partial compensation may occur in which strength on one component (e.g., motivation) counteracts a weakness on another component (e.g., environment). Third, interactions may occur between components, such as intelligence and motivation, in which high levels on both components could multiplicatively enhance creativity.

Teresa Amabile, a professorat Harvard Business School, in her 35 years of research trying to study how the work environment influences creativity and motivation has come up with a theory of creativity and innovation called the “componential model of individual creativity.”The model states that an individual must have knowledge, technical skills, and special talents in the domain or discipline in which the person works. But simply having domain-specific skills doesn’t lead to creativity. In order to produce truly novel, innovative products or ideas, the individual must also possess certain traits, such as the ability to suspend judgment, self-discipline, perseverance, and nonconformity.Finally, to truly achieve creative outputs, the creative individual must have a high degree of intrinsic motivation where the individual pursues a task with passion for the “love” or enjoyment of doing that task.

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Can People Be Trained To Be Creative?

The view of creativity as a decision suggests that creativity can be developed. Merely requesting the students to be more creative can render them more creative if they believe that the decision to be creative will be rewarded rather than punished. Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake. Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it. As children’s freedom has declined, so has their creativity. Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform restricts them from becoming unusual thinkers.  We are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children and sometimes the teachers too for daring to try different routes.

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