The ‘I’m not Creative’ bias
Skills related to innovation, creativity and problem solving are highly in demand around the world, yet when I ask a roomful of people to put their hand up if they consider themselves to be creative, no more than 20% will.
There is a prevalent bias out there that creativity is a talent and not a skill. (There is another which I connect to this which is that creative acts are unique and random as opposed to following a pattern…).
I experienced this lack of belief in being creative first-hand during a workshop with a client in the city of Perth, Western Australia.
I was pretty revved. My guy on the inside had managed to drum up lots of takers for this inaugural training and I was excited to see that there was a good mix of senior folk who had chosen to be there. I was launching into a working definition of that dreaded word ‘innovation’ when one of the participants, Craig, stopped me and said: “Rachel, just to be clear. There is lots of evidence to show that once you are over 35, you are no longer creative. I never have been.”
This is not an unusual sentiment.
The problem is, as creativity consultant Kathryn Haydon explains: “When you say you’re not creative, you inadvertently perpetuate a myth. The myth that a person can be exempt from having creativity doesn’t even make sense. Go ask your mom what you were like when you were a little kid.”
In the 1960s, creativity guru George Land was asked by NASA to develop a way to assess the creativity of its engineers. Being creative, he used the same tests as were being used to assess the imaginative capabilities of children aged 3–5 years. He found that while 98% of the children scored as top-ranking creative, only 2% of the adults did.
Land tested the same children again at five-year intervals and found a progressive and dramatic drop in that creativity, down to only about a third of them scoring that high by age 10. By age 15 it was down to just 12%. Land reported that we don’t learn to be creative; we start out creative and learn to be uncreative!
In one of the most popular TED Talks of all time, Sir Ken Robinson, a much-acclaimed education and creativity expert, blamed the education system for eroding our creativity. “We stigmatise mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make— and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
Whether it is the education system or other ‘systems’ that drill out our creative capacities, Craig’s perspective is highly relatable. As we get older, we get stuck in our ways and replace playfulness and exploration with conservatism and fear of failure. Needless to say, I set out to prove him wrong and, by the end of day two, Craig’s energy had shifted and he was generating fresh thinking along with the best of them.
The problem is that the I’m-not-creative bias is a limiting belief which, when left unchecked, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; you believe you are not creative so you steer away from creative pursuits and cease to hone your creativity.
“Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of,” said Robinson.
The bias is problematic for a number of reasons:
▶ It is a fixed mindset that will inhibit risk taking and colour our view of failure; the antithesis of what creativity and innovation activities require!
▶ Holding this bias unchecked reinforces the belief that creativity can’t be taught and distracts from efforts to build creative skills.
▶ Organisations where this bias manifests itself may opt for more hit-and-miss approaches to creativity and innovation initiatives because they will not seek out ways of teaching creative thinking.
▶ The I’m-not-creative bias leaves a gaping hole between what is being asked of organisations (‘go and be innovative’) and their perception of their ability to do so. When unchecked, individuals and organisations may be burying untapped potential for growth, better solutions and fulfilment.
The good news is that creativity can be learned or re-learned.
SKILL UP & LEVERAGE PATTERNS
One of the fundamental ways of countering the I’m-not-creative-bias is to foster a growth mindset in an individual, team or organisation. This means reinforcing the value of effort, risk taking, flexibility and an open mind.
Creativity has never been a fixed state. It is cultivated by practice and experimentation. It is also enabled by methods that help us to be creative.
Creativity is not random. Contrary to popular belief, creative ideas are often not unique. In fact there is a DNA to the best ideas. This DNA can serve as a template to follow. When a template — or pattern — is reverse-engineered into a thinking tool, it gives you a much better chance of coming up with similarly inventive ideas and helps remove the risk that can be associated with trying something creative. My experience is that these patterns or templates are available in ways that are more or less relatable and learnable. Here are five different sources to explore:
▶ Reverse Engineering
I recall, in my corporate days, that we ran a workshop in a national conference and had teams reverse-engineer some of their most successful initiatives. We called this ‘patterns of excellence’ or ‘bright spots’. It is a smart way of shifting our hearts and minds by showing us what a desired path or outcome looks like. We were then able to replicate these examples elsewhere in the business. I found this helpful as a starting point even if it didn’t necessarily give us fresh thinking or counter-intuitive ideas.
▶ Frame Creation
We know from personal psychology that ‘reframing’ a problem can help us gain a new perspective and bring fresh answers, so too can adopting a certain pattern of relationships, applying a metaphor or alternate ‘frame’. Frame Creation was designed for large or complex problems that are ‘open, networked and dynamic where no quick fix is available’.
Kees Dorst, Professor of Design Innovation at the University of Technology, Sydney, says that “the ideation of a new frame is largely a creative leap” but it has been successfully applied in a range of contexts f rom stopping people f rom climbing the Sydney Opera House to fighting crime in the red light district of Sydney’s Kings Cross.
▶ Biomimicry
This is an appealing approach that looks to nature’s best ideas and adapts them for human use. There are many examples of how this has been applied but I was rather tickled by the Japanese high speed train story shared with me by Melissa Silk, Casual Academic at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Trains were getting so fast that the typical bullet shape was causing a loud booming sound when the train would come through a tunnel. The story goes that one of the engineers was a birdwatcher and was inspired by a kingfisher. Tests showed that objects shaped like the kingfisher's beak created less pressure waves and this was therefore the perfect design for Japanese ‘Shinkansen’ bullet trains. The new kingfisher beak- style trains produce 30% less air pressure, use 15% less electricity and are 10% faster.
Another great example is that of Speedo’s Fastskin line of high- performance swimsuits—one of which was banned at the Olympics because of the speed benefits it was perceived to offer. These swimsuits were inspired by the skin of a shark which is covered in dermal denticles, a bit like teeth, that apparently enhance thrust and have some impact on drag. There is something rather poetic about learning from the experience of Mother Nature.
▶ TRIZ
Another pattern-based method is TRIZ (the Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), founded on the work of Genrich Altshuller back in the 1940s and used by global brands such as Samsung, P&G and Intel.
Altshuller was a Soviet engineer, inventor and writer. The story goes that he screened over 200,000 patents searching for general rules that might lead to new, inventive patentable ideas. What he realised was that the same sets of rules have been applied over and over to solve all kinds of inventive problems. He listed 40 templates, called ‘Inventive Principles’, considered as the foundation of TRIZ.
One of the many aspects that appeals to me in TRIZ is the observation that innovations involve an elimination of a conflict rather than just alleviating it. It is a method that rejects the idea of ‘trade-offs’ xxxxx
As VictorFey, a disciple of Altshuller, explained to me:“TRIZ seeks compromise-free solutions.” It is a rich method that did not stop at thinking tools but explored predictive modelling of the next innovations.
▶ Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)
During the 1970s, one of Altshuller’s students, Ginadi Filkovsky, immigrated to Israel and joined the Open University in Tel Aviv. He began teaching TRIZ and adapting it to the needs of both Israeli and international tech companies. A number of key academics were involved in this research.
Two Ph.D. students, Jacob Goldenberg and Roni Horowitz, joined Filkovsky and focused their research on developing and simplifying the TRIZ methodology. Their work formed the basis of SIT as it exists today. Both TRIZ and SIT share a basic assumption—that you can study existing creative ideas in a field, identify common logical patterns in these ideas, translate the patterns into a set of Thinking Tools and then apply them to increase your creative output. This makes creative thinking infinitely learnable. In the 25 years that followed, SIT has created an entire methodology that covers most aspects of innovation.
The move from TRIZ to SIT was motivated by the desire to create a method that is easier to learn and retain (achieved through a smaller number of rules and tools), more universal in application (achieved through elimination of engineering specific tools) and ‘tighter’ in keeping the problem solver within a real inventive framework (the Closed World principle). Incredibly, over 75% of the best innovations in the world can be explained by these five patterns. If you learn them, you will be better at generating creative ideas.
These pattern-based tools of SIT work by taking a product, concept, situation, service or process and breaking it into components or attributes. Using one of five techniques, anyone can manipulate the components to create new ideas that can then be put to valuable use.
The five ‘idea provoking’ techniques are deceptively simple but powerful in their ability to help unearth less intuitive ideas. Here is one example:
Attribute Dependency is where you make the attributes of a product change in response to changes in another attribute or in the surrounding environment.
One of the best examples of this particular pattern in action was given to me by my friend and fellow MEDIUM contributor, Streicher Louw. Apparently, the Danes, like many others in the early weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, succumbed to a fear of having inadequate supplies of hand sanitiser.
While in some countries supplies were temporarily depleted, in Denmark they did something rather novel: they charged €5.50 for one bottle and €134 for two! This pricing trick is delightfully counter-intuitive and a creative disincentive to hoarding and depriving others of this sought-after product.
Thinking creatively to come up with novel and useful ideas in a business is a craft like other creative pursuits. It may come easily to some, but many have lost the childhood ease with which they took on creative tasks.
Why would you search the world for ways in which a problem has been solved when you can access tried and tested patterns? Learning how to draw on templates for creative ideas will give you the confidence and the results to apply this in your own world.
Rachel is an innovation and marketing facilitator, trainer, coach and advisor. She thrives on helping not-for-profit and for profit organisations to think well…and think differently. In 2020, she published UNBLINKERED: The quirky biases that get in the way of creative thinking…and how to bust them.
