Creativity

How is your creativity skill? Often in studies on people who are creative and those who are not creative one major difference stands out. The people who thought they were creative were and those that didn’t weren’t. But does that really help? I think not. (As one author put it, “TBU: True but useless”.) Let’s look at some basic concepts of creativity.

Phases

Researching a bit into different writing about creativity one of the things that comes up frequently is the idea of different phases of creativity. Most break this up into 3 or 4 different phases. I will break it up into three. First, a generation or creation phase. This is the phase were you create ideas, brainstorm, dream, or whatever you want to call it. The second phase is a phase of reducing. Here you trim down the number of options that you created in the first phase to a more limited or applicable set. In the third phase you take a single idea and refine it, manipulate it, modify it, and get it into an actual useable form of the idea.

Different fields and forms of art have different requirements to the balances of these three phases. Some are heavy on generating a lot of ideas (like graphic artists making a few hundred versions of a logo). Some are heavy on culling down the ideas (too many great things to do, not enough time, often computer programming is like that). Some are heavy on the editing/tweaking phase (dance can be a lot of that, acting can be that way, writing poetry can be that way).

Often I see the problem of people working in groups where they are not clear about what phase they are in at any one point in time. Ever been in a brainstorming group and as the others are throwing out one great idea after another and there’s someone there just saying, “no no no that won’t work”. That person is out of phase with the rest of the group.

Blocks

Creativity is one of those things (like enthusiasm, love, and sexuality) that people actually have an endless supply of but it’s their own internal blocks that prevent it from letting it be expressed. It is less a skill to build doing creativity, and more so a skill to build not blocking it from happening. We are a society that over trains ourselves for the single right answer. As the famous educator Neil Postman once said, “children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

Mind mapping (read Tony Buzan’s Mind Map book) is an excellent way to start to train people not to block their ideas. The idea is that you start with a central idea and expand from that. Adding relationships and associations as one builds out from the center. Try not to limit what you associate with the other ideas. If you thought of it, it’s valid, add it to the mind-map. Sometimes it might be funny, bazaar, wacky, odd, and every time it will be different, even if you started with the same word or center idea.

Criticism

We, as humans are actually really good at remembering things. Perhaps too good. And unfortunately too good at remembering criticisms. This is a huge block to creativity. I see a lot of teachers just blatantly criticize in their teaching. It’s true you need to give feedback to a student, but you have to make sure the student understands that it’s there for them to learn so they have more technical skill to accomplish more with technical ability and not less by restricting what they do. If you move with your leg and foot in this way, then you will be able to move faster, stronger, more expressive, etc. Not you must move your leg in this way because it’s right and that’s they way to do it, all other ways are wrong. And then wonder why your student is not expressive, they look dry and boring.

The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey is an excellent source of ways to teach to help students get rid of their inner critical voice and also how to teach to not put it there in the first place.

Group Think

Working in a group sometimes you can end up with less creative results than might be possible. If you do one of the classical exercises for brainstorming where people kind of free through ideas out into a pile one right after the other, maybe you have observed this. Our brains think associatively, one thought leads to another. As one person adds an idea to the group it steers the group. The group then ends up having a single conscience idea and not divergent ideas.

Tony Bazan noticed this and recommended a different approach to group creativity exercises. First start with each member of the group separate – on their own. Then working individually they all mind-map out their ideas. Only after they’ve come up with their own unique ideas they come back together and share their ideas. This simple change gets rid of a lot of the group think and results in more variation.