Creativity and the Individual

Question

What are the various aspects of Creativity on an individual in the creative industry ?

 

 

Answer 1

The majority of “Western” commentators, from Plato to Freud and De Bono, have tended to focus on the divergent, spontaneous and “irrational” aspects of creativity. It is Poincare’s period of incubation followed by illumination which appears the most difficult part of the sequence to explain and to imitate; analysis and verification appear relatively straightforward. It is here too that the core of the creative process, the creation of something new, seems to take place. The emphasis on one particular type of thinking leads to an assumption that creativity is associated with one particular type of person, the individual creative genius. The myth of genius dominates managerial approaches to creativity and popular culture.

This mythology has been propagated through many unsubstantiated first-hand accounts of creativity (Ghiselin, 1985, pp. 18–19). Weisberg (1993) examines the evidence behind these tales of irrational genius and spontaneous invention in science and the arts (Kekule’s discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule while dozing in front of the fire, Coleridge’s poem Kublai Khan, Picasso’s painting of Guernica ). In each case,Weisberg argues that the “discovery” resulted not from a sudden and mysterious moment of illumination but as a result of careful, concerted effort over a period of time and the technical expertise of the creator; moreover the first-hand accounts sometimes conveniently overlook the direct and indirect contributions of others (collaborators, contemporaries, editors and advisers) which lie behind the individual creative moment. In popular culture, the image of the individual creative genius offers the producers of popular culture a convenient way of branding disparate cultural products, thereby glossing over the collective nature of many creative enterprises.

Weisberg’s conclusions are provocatively anti-romantic; creative people are not dreamers and visionaries, but intellectual beachcombers, skilfully reclaiming ideas and experiences from the past and reapplying them to problems in the present. The “aha” moment of discovery is based not on genius but on “domain-specific expertise”. Individual creators tap into expertise and specialist knowledge within a particular intellectual or cultural “domain”; “breakthrough” thinking always has an unacknowledged precedent in the individual’s accumulated memories, experience and knowledge of their own and others’ ideas within that domain. Weisberg’s model of “incremental creativity” re-emphasises that creativity is only possible in the context of a deliberate intellectual process and a collective intellectual system. Nevertheless, the mythology of genius contains several assumptions which infiuence managerial approaches to creativity: creativity is person-centred not process-oriented; innovation is privileged over value; intuition is prized over rational decision-making; ideas emerge suddenly and “spontaneously”, not from evolutionary “incremental” processes. These assumptions lead managers to regard creativity as a human resources issue (recruitment and training), rather than a matter of organisational design (systems and processes). For example, many managers approach the problem of creativity by sending individual employees on a creative thinking course, rather than examining the procedures and systems within the organisation that might inhibit or enliven creative processes. After a few days of mind games and lateral thinking exercises, the employees return, enthused but not empowered, to confront the familiar hierarchies and traditions which continue to block the transition from individual innovation to organisational creativity.