It is (not) about Creativity.
True story.
April, 2015 I was in London renting a car to fill it with all my 90% inutile stuff and to move to Manchester to take a Masters in Digital Experience Design (WTF is this? I will leave it for the next publication) at Hyper Island. An unusual school, well renowned in the industry as one of the top digital institutions, with a lively community of lovely crazy mix of talents, experienced professionals and mid-career crises suffers coming from all corners of the earth. Some say it is the “Digital Harvard”. I don’t know if I like it though.
When I say unusual, I mean it. Hyper Island was born 20 years ago, in a former military prison in the island of Stumholmen, just off the idyllic coast of Karlskrona in southeastern Sweden. Thanks to Jonathan Briggs, Lars Lundh and David Erixon.
Back to Manchester headquarters, I was wondering how could I be that “cool” in the middle of so many amazingly interesting people. I was frightened.
You know the feeling of being completely vulnerable in front of 45 strangers? Yes, it happened. But I am gonna keep it in secret as an asset in case you intent to be part of us. Well, as you can see below, this fear was overcame in the very first hours (for those wondering, before alcohol got involved).
Ok, let’s talk about creativity!
The notion of “creativity” was originated in Western culture through Christianity, as a matter of divine inspiration. And except from my early childhood, I think God was not in the mood to give me such talent. I never saw myself as the creative type. Indeed, I learnt a lot on how to be analytical, strategic and logic. Everything should make perfect sense. Ok, I can say that during my professional trajectory I sometimes heard the cliché “think outside the box” but really, it was never more than a sentence on the wall in one of those corporate (boring) creative workshops.
Interestingly, in the most ancient cultures, including thinkers of ancient Greece, ancient China, ancient India, lacked the concept of creativity (Runco, 1996). So I was wondering how would they describe those gifted people we have on earth? Think about the creative directors, creative heads, creative technologists, creative strategists? or any creative-ish job titles we have in the industry? Well, it’s even listed as a skill on LinkedIn. Speaking from the “I” (I) think this atmosphere cloak creativity in mystique and they foster elitism. Imagine the ones who don’t have this magic word in their job titles? Are they allowed to be creative too?
The idea that creative faculties are attributes of geniuses and gifted, lucky, special persons are broadly spread. Many of us believe that creative people are visionaries who are ahead of their time, “right-brain” types who think differently from everyone else (Nussbaum, 2013).
What is creativity by the way?
The development of a modern concept of creativity begins in the Renaissance, when creation began to be perceived as having originated from the abilities of the individual, and not God (Niu and Sternberg, 2006). Progress knocking on our doors?
There are many definitions in literature. I am going to keep it simple, saying that creativity is the ability to produce work that is both, novel (original, unexpected) and appropriate (useful and adaptive)(Sternberg and Lubart, 1999).
Oh, it is still important to remember that creativity is not art
And don’t ask me what art is because it would open a whole discussion.
The fact is that many people are being trapped by this wrong mindset that is being cultivated since our early days in traditional education or even at home. It seems that we are all born creative and then we learn how not to be creative or we learn that our colleague sitting next to us is a gifted person and is very creative but we are not.
Let me tell you something that you probably already realised: They are wrong.
Real neuroscience says: if you are human and you’ve got a brain, you are capable of being creative. Most people are born creative, but because of socialisation and formal education as we now nowadays, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses (Kelley and Kelley, 2012).
The thing is many of us got blocked. We got shut down by many years literally learning how not to be creative. To understand why and how we go from free imaginative to creative block (Land, 2011) we have to look back in our society history. Our society rejects mistakes so many of us have became frightened of taking the risk of being wrong (Robinson, 2006).
Unfortunately, without the license to be wrong, we also miss the chance to get closer to creativity.
This battle is built on the fear to be judged. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers (Kelley and Kelley, 2012). Weirdly, the general understanding of success is the absence of failure.
In 1968, George Land developed a creativity test to help NASA select the most innovative engineers and scientists. Later, the same test was applied on children at different ranges of age. The results suggest that we are all born creative and we loose it though life. Surprisingly, his conclusion is that what is being taught is the non-creative behaviour (Land and Jarman, 1998).
Stereotypes and myths around creativity make people less confident about themselves and their own potential to be creative. It acts as a cause and consequence of the fear of failure.
This concept has so fully penetrated in some of our minds that when someone gave me a pen and asked me to draw something in a flip chart in the first days at Hyper Island, I got so scared that I could feel Forrest Gump inside me.
Such as Hyper Island challenged and helped me to find my lost creativity, I would like to encourage you to find yours.
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Thanks to the work of Sir Kin Robinson, David Kelley, George Land and most of all, people from Hyper Island, my crew, Tash Willcocks and Lauren Currie. It’s being a long journey back.
