The explanation for the messy creative person and the
uncreative brainstorming session can be found in research by Poornika Ananth and Sarah Harvey published in Administrative Science Quarterly. They had a big
study of creative individuals in theatre and architecture, and among their many
findings two stood out. Creativity can be drawn from storage. Creativity can be
stored.
A key insight is that people who have creativity as
their main work do not work on a single project, but many, both in sequence and
concurrently. They get ideas and inspiration, which fuel creative outputs, but
often these do not fit their current project well enough. What to do with ideas
and inspiration that do not fit? Think about them creatively, create symbols
that make them concrete and memorable, and store them for later. Try to make
the storage systematic enough that they are easy to retrieve later.
What to do with creative projects when no ideas and
inspiration are coming? Go to the creativity storage and see what fits.
Probably nothing fits exactly, but there will be pieces there that look almost
right and can be cobbled together. Creative people, especially when working in
creative industries, are good at their work exactly because they have a
portfolio of stored creative inputs that they can use in their portfolio of
creative projects.
It is interesting how this description of creativity
fits a theory of culture known as “culture as a toolkit.” When people have and
use culture as a toolkit, culture is partly in their memory and partly picked
up from others. They can have many cultural elements, which are not necessarily
consistent with each other, and they will draw from those cultural elements to
solve problems they encounter. The individual with a large and diverse cultural
toolkit is a lot like the creative individual – a large storage of ideas and
inspiration, and great ability to solve problems.
Perhaps we should not be surprised? A lot of
creativity is culturally judged, and some of it even creates culture. We learn
from theatrical plays and from watching buildings, if they are creative. The
creative individual who stores and retrieves ideas and inspiration also creates
ideas and inspiration for us, and is doing society a great service.
As I finish writing this, I am looking at my office,
which is disturbingly tidy for a professor. I still like to think of myself as
creative, and maybe it helps that my brain is messier than my office. I do have
good memory, though, and I maintain a portfolio of projects that I work for.
There is hope for everyone once we understand the processes that lead to
creativity.
