To learn more about Douglas’s work, visit Creative Leadership Solutions (https://creativeleadership.net) or the Change Leaders blog (www.changeleaders.com), or follow @DouglasReeves on Twitter.
Brooks Reeves is a playwright, actor, and author. He authored New York Times-reviewed The City That Cried Wolf. His frequent leading roles in New England area theaters have been reviewed by the Boston Globe and many other New England publications. Brooks received the Best Supporting Actor award from the New Englander Theater Critics Association in 2015. He lives in Boston. To learn more about Brooks’s work, visit his blog at www.BrooksReeves.com, where his latest literary and artistic work appears.
To book Douglas Reeves or Brooks Reeves for professional development, contact [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
THE CREATIVITY IMPERATIVE
Much of history is divided into epochs based on the development of human innovation: the rise of agriculture, written language, philosophy, geometry, the printing press, the steam engine, the transistor, vaccines, and the Internet, just to name a few. These innovations and many others have fundamentally shifted not only our worldview but also our capacity to grow. Cultures are defined by their art, music, and literature. Things that are useful—and perhaps more important, that are meaningful, beautiful, and good—can be seen as an outgrowth of the creative process. Creativity is at the heart of the solutions to our most intractable challenges and is, therefore, essential for survival.
Readers would doubtless do anything to spare their children, grandchildren, and complete strangers of future generations the pain of disease, hunger, violence, and oppression that are part of the daily lives of too many people today. Creative solutions in medicine, government, and technology have made modern life immeasurably better than that of our ancestors. But now the torch has passed, and we are not merely the beneficiaries of creativity but the authors of it. In particular, society now depends on creative solutions to address competing demands. For example, how do we cure devastating illnesses and feed the hungry while providing the resources to sustain a growing population? How do we address the global challenge of climate change while still encouraging economic growth and technological innovation? How do we fight global terrorism while respecting commitments to democratic ideals and privacy rights? If the lesson of the 20th century was as Alan Deutschman (2007) asserts, change or die, then the lesson of the 21st century is create or die—and die miserably. And yet, in few areas of human endeavor is there a wider gap between aspiration and reality than in creativity.
The Creativity Chasm
In his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama touted the importance of creativity, saying, “In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living” (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2011). A 2010 IBM study of more than fifteen hundred chief executive officers shows that creativity ranked number one on the list of qualities that these CEOs valued in their employees (IBM, 2010). John Hattie’s landmark synthesis of more than nine hundred meta-analyses (2012; Hattie & Yates, 2014) concludes that creativity is strongly linked to academic achievement, particularly when instruction in creativity takes place. The themes that surface again and again from these diverse realms of world politics, business, and education emphasize that innovation and creativity in science and politics, and collaboration among nations and individuals, will be essential for our civilization to conquer future challenges, from poverty to climate change.
The value placed on creativity is well documented, but the reality is that the deck is stacked against the creative process. Creative business leaders are tolerated as long as they avoid the risks required in creative work. Artists, writers, and musicians struggle to earn a living in an increasingly globalized marketplace that values conformity over originality. Educators invested in building creative skills in students risk lowering test scores and jeopardize the jobs they have dedicated their lives to. Policymakers proposing innovative solutions to domestic and international problems are often discounted by a system mired by gridlock. For example, Adam Grant (2016) finds that in a variety of fields from the classroom to the boardroom, the behaviors essential for creativity—risk taking, testing boundaries, challenging rules—are least associated with short-term success and the approval of teachers and bosses. When schools and public officials who fund them (unintentionally) undermine creativity among students, teachers, and administrators, they not only diminish the beauty of the earth but also threaten our collective ability to preserve it. Schools rarely undermine creativity intentionally. After all, vision and mission statements extolling the virtues of creativity are ubiquitous. But when we compared the good intentions of schools as they aspired to enhance creativity with their actual behavior (Reeves, 2015), we found an enormous gap between rhetoric and reality.
To better understand the gap between how much educational systems claim they value creativity and how much they actually do, as well as to better understand the science of creativity as whole, we must turn to the research.
Research on Creativity
What with the aforementioned climate change and global terrorism to contend with—along with myriad other challenges we face in the modern world—we assert that creativity is essential to the survival of civil society and the planet. If we are to successfully respond to this great responsibility we now face, then we must first understand what creativity truly is. It is not a matter of applying decoration and glitter to an otherwise mundane presentation. It is not a curricular afterthought, with time and resources allotted to students and teachers once their standardized tests have been completed. Creativity is also not merely a form of entertainment to be enjoyed by the wealthy or performed by artists who possess some inherent creative genius.
In exploring what creativity is, we are committed to an evidence-based approach to a topic in which folklore often takes precedence over research. Pervasive myths have led to gross misconceptions in our society about what creativity is, where it comes from, and how it can occur. Our understanding of who creative people are—or can be—is often reduced to caricatures, clichés, or tropes. The reality is much less simplistic and opens up creativity to many more possibilities.
While since the mid-1990s, we have seen many studies devoted to the subject of creativity, rarely have these studies been cited or explained to a general audience. Indeed, in surveying business or self-help literature, the same stories and anecdotes are dredged up time and time again with the same reliability of ghost stories told around a campfire. Staples of marketing and science literature have retold the stories of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Bob Dylan for decades without citing the source or researching for accuracy.
Rather than cherry-picked anecdotes and personal war stories, our approach is based on the preponderance of the evidence, including observations, interviews, quantitative analyses, qualitative observation, meta-analyses, and syntheses of meta-analyses. We should note that, as you read, you will see quoted material from students. Student quotations are composites of authentic conversations we had with students and are used with the permission of students and their parents.
In