Everyday, inspired, and radical creativity

early draft & pieces

Creativity is certainly not a unidimensional phenomenon. Artistic creativity may be different than scientific creativity may be different than economic creativity. I'm also pretty sure that creativity comes in different strengths or degrees. I suspect that the strength or amount of creativity falls along a continuous quantitative dimension. If I had to break this continuum down into sections or groups, I would probably group "creativity" into three levels or degrees: everyday creativity inspired creativity transcendent or radical creativity I think of "everyday creativity" as being the first level of creativity--when someone creates something (an idea, an insight, an object, a performance, etc.) that is relatively new and different (it's not a literal copy of something else). Everyday creativity is all the small incremental changes that keep individual lives growing and human culture changing and moving. I think of "inspired creativity" as creativity that is "stronger" than everyday creativity. This is the creativity the wows us, that gets us excited, that really stands out, that wins awards. It's creativity that makes an evolutionary jump. The highest and rarest level of creativity can be called "radical creativity" (Theresa Amabile, 1996) or even "transcendent creativity." This is creativity that is so extreme and so game-changing that it frequently isn't immediately even understood or recognized as such. It's revolutionary, not evolutionary. It's creativity that is so far ahead of its time, that is such a departure from the current context, that it is initially ignored or dismissed by mainstream culture. You can see an example of the difference between inspired creativity and radical creativity in the two paintings below. It's hard for me to believe that the first painting, The Potato Eaters, and the second one, Bedroom at Arles, were painted by the same person--Vincent van Gogh--and that they were painted only three years apart (1885 & 1888). This is not an evolution of a personal painting style--it's a revolution. The change in Van Gogh's color palette alone is breathtaking. [Although this dramatic change is often attributed to Van Gogh's mental illness, we also know that Van Gogh intentionally pushed himself to find a new style of painting.] And what was the immediate impact of this transcendent creativity? Van Gogh sold one painting during his lifetime. Most of the western world had painted in a style like The Potato Eaters for hundreds of years and most artists continued to do so for another fifty years. It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the world caught up to Van Gogh. It's actually hard to appreciate now how radically creative Van Gogh's color and style were, since we now live in a world whose predominant color palette and style resonates much more with Room at Arles than The Potato Eaters. I'd like to believe that Van Gogh's transcendent creativity is the source of this change in the color palette of western civilization. Regardless of the truth of this, these two paintings by Van Gogh powerfully illustrate the difference between inspired and radical creativity in the life of one person. Radical creativity--a shift to a revolutionarily better paradigm, aesthetic, or whatever--is the "holy grail" of human creativity. It's the stuff of great intellectual romance and legends. It's the most surprising creativity, it takes the longest to take root and to spread into main stream culture, and it's the longest lasting and most legendary of the various degrees of creativity. Because of its impact, radical, transcendent creativity is one of the most historically documented types of creativity (e.g., biographies of our creative geniuses). Because of its rareness and elusiveness, it is the least scientifically studied type of creativity. The question becomes: are radical creativity and everyday and inspired levels of creativity different ends of the same scale or are they entirely different beasts? We don't really know. Theresa Amabile, one of the leading researchers of how social psychological factors influence creativity, has argued that her groundbreaking method of measuring creativity (relying on a consensus of human judgment) cannot be used to study radical creativity (1963, pp. xxx). By its definition, radical creativity defies immediate recognition via social consensus. By the time radical creativity is recognized, the complex interplay of the variables and context that spawned it has long ago shifted. We can probably infer from its rareness in human culture and from the inability of even "creative geniuses" to produce radical creativity with any frequency or reliability, that it is a complex, complicated, and probably unnatural phenomenon. Inspired creativity also suffers from these same observational problems--even though it occurs more frequently and more consistently than radical creativity. Historical speculation...our ancestors and their culture were less open to radical creativity than we are today. The creation and recognition of radical creativity may even exist in a positive feedback loop. More radical creativity leads to more/quicker recognition of its existence. More openness to radical creativity spawns the creation of more radical creativity. Some of our ancestors viewed inspired instances of human creativity as being attributable to being visited of an external creative spirit or force--a force that elevated the artist's normal level of performance. The artist was honored for being an instrument and vessel of this creative spirit, but was not expected to duplicate this level of performance on their own. In my professional creativity consulting work I try to help people/groups organize and raise their creative game. My goal is push people to higher levels of creativity than they would achieve on their own. My hope is get the participants to levels of inspired creativity. It certainly doesn't happen in every creativity workshop or brainstorming session. But when it does it's exciting. What I dream about--in my most creative and grandiose of dreams--is conducting a creativity workshop that is recognized--years later, of course--as having changed the world. May be I already have but I haven't recognized it yet!