MC: Sure, and that's why you need the judgment of a community, because the judgment is made relative to a standard, and you have to know what the standard is.
RE: I guess I'm less confident than you are about the validity of that judgment, knowing how often those judgments change, and how often they fail.
RE: I don't think that insight is fundamentally different from other, more awkward kinds of problem solving. When the conditions are just right--in experiments with both pigeons and people--solutions emerge in that spectacular way we call insightful: there's a period of quiescence, followed by the sudden onset of the full-blown solution--pow! If I change the conditions slightly, or if I alter the organism's learning history, I can engineer a sloppy, trial-and-error solution to the same problem, and I can even engineer a failure.
The creative process is lawful, and we're discovering what the laws are that govern this process. The same laws seem to govern a wide range of creative performances. Only the parameters are different.
MC: Well, I'm not an expert in pigeons [laughter from audience], but in people I can tell you that the "pow" experience is important but not the whole process. Successful problem solving often requires many replays of the same sequence, and it depends on the type of problem the person is grappling with and on the kinds of skills he or she brings to the problem.
Problem solving is rarely clear-cut. In fact, the interesting thing about creativity is that there is often no problem there to begin with. You have to formulate the problem, and only then can you try to solve it. This can take a long time.
The aha experience can be very misleading. We have aha experiences all the time, and then 10 minutes later we realize our idea was worthless. We need to engage in constant evaluation in order to determine whether our idea was a will-o'-the-wisp or whether it had real substance. You're lucky if you can throw a bad idea away immediately. Some of the most creative people I've interviewed say that the reason they are creative is that they can throw away the bad ideas much quicker than other people can.
RE: We know now how to train creativity, and I think we should be providing every child with the skills he or she needs to express creativity throughout his or her life. We give all of our children basic basketball skills. Why not give them basic creativity skills? I think novel behavior in and of itself has value, even if people are just reinventing wheels. Let's give every child the skills he or she needs to reinvent the wheel. If we could tap that kind of potential, with nearly everyone generating art, science and invention, think of the enormous pool of novelty that would be available to us.
The business community knows how important it is to have an enormous pool of ideas to choose from. Supposedly, only one in 10,000 ideas that are generated in business is good enough to make it to market. Let's give our children the skills they need to express their creativity daily, both in the workplace and at home.
MC: I think we do a disservice to children and to parents by using the word creativity to describe the individual's need to express himself and to explore the environment. If we use that word, we give children the expectation that their novel ideas are going to be rewarded in some way. If all sixth-graders invented wheels, we would be run over. We don't have space for that many wheels.
Reality puts boundaries on what is needed and what is useful. When you take a big corporation like Motorola and try to make their 25,000 engineers more creative, what happens? Nothing, because there are no selection mechanisms in place. You get lots of new ideas, but no one knows which are good and which are bad, and you have far more ideas than you can ever implement. Ultimately, you're just alienating a lot of people whose new ideas are not realizable.
So I think we need to distinguish between what I call creativity with a small "c"--creativity that serves your own personal satisfaction and fulfillment--and what I call creativity with a capital "C," which implies some sort of acceptance.
RE: Again, it supposedly takes 10,000 ideas in business for one good one to emerge. That's what Fortune magazine says, and I suspect that that estimate is low. So if you get two ideas from each of your 25,000 employees, that gives you only five good ideas to work with. If a company lacks the mechanisms it needs to review the flow of new ideas, that's just another problem to be solved.
As for our children, I don't want even one child to be deprived of the skills he or she needs to express creativity optimally throughout life. If that means there's going to be a glut of new ideas out there, so be it. I think that's a wonderful problem for society to have. Fortunately, we have a new means of expression--the Internet--that will allow ideas to be expressed and evaluated at thousands of times the rate than has ever been possible before.
MC: I've heard the hype about the Internet, but I'm still waiting for the first example of a useful application. What is personally generative is rarely creative. Flow, which is the subjective feeling we have when we perform at our best, is what makes life worth living. Yet it does not necessarily translate into a creative accomplishment. I like to keep clear the distinction between what is good for the person and what is good for the culture.
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