Creativity involves a complex interaction among creators, products, and audiences. Creators can appear to be larger-than-life figures, sometimes elevated to their status based on the evaluations of their contemporaries but, more likely, viewed as creative superstars only through the rearview mirror of history. Nobel Prizes, for example, are most often awarded for work that took place decades prior (Cima, 2015). The young researcher laboring away through the tedium of trial and error that is the essence of creativity doesn’t seem particularly intimidating. “I could do that,” their colleagues remark. When the same researcher is delivering the Nobel Lecture in formal attire before Swedish royalty, colleagues stand in awed reverence, muttering, “I could never do that.” Making rock stars out of Big C creators threatens society’s creative enterprise. While the recognition may be nice, the impact is the opposite of that intended.
Architect and engineer I. M. Pei created iconic buildings ranging from the Louvre Pyramid to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but few people remember the names of the engineers (and carpenters, surveyors, plumbers, electricians, and scores more craftspeople) who brought Pei’s vision to life. Novel visions require novel approaches to implementation. Pei’s visions depend on the similarly visionary work of those who helped the buildings leap from the architect’s plans to three-dimensional structures. Some of Picasso’s most recognizable work, such as the untitled giant horse sculpture in Chicago, required the collaboration of others who could transform the master’s conception into reality. For example, the engineers and craftspeople at American Bridge Company, which had never previously done this sort of artistic work, applied their knowledge from one domain, bridge building, to a completely new domain, the cutting, welding, transportation, and installation of Picasso’s new work (Srivastava, 2014).
Scholar Mark A. Runco (2014) argues there is no evidence for this dichotomy and, more important, that the emphasis on Big C creativity undermines the essential work of little c—that is, the foundation for application and dissemination of the Big C ideas. He argues:
Little c creativity is meaningful in and of itself. This is in part because it is not really extricable from Big C creativity. Little c creativity may develop into Big C creativity. Big C creativity involves things that lead to social recognition, but the creativity results from the same process that is involved in little c creativity. (p. 132)
We reject this dichotomy not only because it is inaccurate but also because it is pernicious, undermining the contributions we all must make to create a future that is brighter, safer, and more enjoyable than yesterday.
Completely Original Work
One of the worst epithets that can be directed to one’s competitors in the creative realm is that their work is merely derivative. As Blaise Pascal (1910) said, “The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men” (p. 10). Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1899) added, “A poor original is better than a good imitation” (p. 290). These ideas are the basis of much of the academic distinctions between innovation and creativity, with the latter representing original ideas and the former derivative. But Nina Paley (2010) has argued that everything is derivative. By the logic of the distinction between original and derivative work, the invention of the wheel was creative, but every other form of land transportation since then, from the horse-drawn wagon to a Formula One race car, is derivative; the aircraft that flew for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, under the direction of the Wright brothers was creative, but the Space Shuttle was derivative; choral tones identified by Pythagoras three millennia ago and harmonies played on didgeridoos on the Australian continent more than a thousand years ago were creative, while the works of Ludwig van Beethoven were derivative. Poppycock! By denigrating the creative efforts of today and dismissing them as derivative, critics go down the reductionist rat hole that anything since the Big Bang was derivative and not worthy of being called creative.
Innovation and creativity are often distinguished from one another, with creativity representing the landmark insights and innovation representing merely the application of creative insights to contemporary challenges. Whether it is the expansion of the color palette and the use of perspective in visual arts; variations in meter and rhyme in poetry; dropping the barrier for the audience in theater; the representation of statistical data in multiple dimensions; or the conception of time and space as relative, these remarkably creative endeavors are, when pedants argue about the term, merely innovative. We find this distinction and its implied hierarchy to be useless. There is innovation in every creative enterprise.
If we accept the premise that creativity is vital for the future of our families and of the planet, then recognizing the creative spirit in all of us is cause for deep reflection on our responsibility to apply our creative gifts to the challenges before us. We believe that creativity is within the grasp of all of us—every student, colleague, neighbor, and friend. This universalist approach is not meant to make people feel good, but to challenge them. Every time we defer to the Big C version of creativity, we let ourselves off the hook by employing a false logic that says if you didn’t write the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, or U.S. Constitution, you can’t improve democracy in creative ways; if you didn’t demonstrate for women’s suffrage, you can’t make a creative contribution to women’s rights; if you didn’t write a symphony or invent the twelve-tone scale, you can’t sing your child a creative lullaby. We are all responsible for and capable of innovating to extend and improve on ideas to create solutions.
The Artistic Personality
The popular Myers-Briggs personality test claims the ability to sort people into sixteen distinct personality types and is used throughout the business, government, education, and nonprofit communities to profile potential candidates and employees. Despite widespread adoption, this theory of personality has never been tested and proved scientifically (Burnett, 2013), and the scientific literature on the test challenges the essential elements of any test—reliability (consistency of results) and validity (testing what we think we are testing; Eveleth, 2013).
Worse still is the commonly cited left- and right-brain dynamic. This is the staple of many so-called “brain research” seminars that are, unfortunately, about neither the brain nor research. But the story of the left-right brain dichotomy is so pervasive that it holds a place in the pantheon of folk wisdom. People who are “right brained” are supposedly impulsive, emotional, and also more creative, and those who are “left brained” are more rational, logical, and realistic. Or is it the other way around? The story has been retold so many times with breathless enthusiasm that it is difficult to keep track. It doesn’t matter, because the theory does not stand up to scrutiny.
There are several problems with this model, not least of which is that it has been thoroughly debunked (Iezzi, 2015). While it is true that some control of speech is localized in the right hemisphere, the brain is a much more complicated machine than the hemispheric theory suggests. The left and right portions of our brains don’t operate in isolation, but instead work together to form our thoughts and ideas. For instance, when examined in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device, our right brain lights up when noticing the general shape of an object, whereas the left portion of our brain is focused on assessing the details of the object. Between the two, we automatically recognize the difference between an orange and our neighbor Frank.
As with many myths, the idea contains a kernel of truth. The left side of our cerebral cortex controls the right side of our body and vice versa. But that is where science stops and mythology begins. Those people who favor one side over the other, as in left-handedness versus right-handedness, are also distinguished by certain aptitudes, according to the theory. But hand preference is not an indication of favoring one side of the brain versus the other (Kosslyn & Miller, 2013). Indeed there have been some very interesting evolutionary theories that seek to explain the phenomenon of hand preference, but none of them show any correlation with hemisphere preference (Faurie & Raymond, 2005).
Another example of analysis linking brain function with personality is the five-factor model of personality (Digman, 1990),