In short, yes.
Some universities even teach it. Hurrah to them – yet why on earth, if being creative is one of the key human-only skills we will need in the increasingly automated workplace, isn’t learning to be creative a standard part of any – every – school curriculum?
The late Ken Robinson claimed that schools crushed creativity, and clearly struck home with many people as his TED talk became the most watched of all time. The Torrance Tests of creative thinking (sadly not related to me) ask children to think of alternative uses of objects. The scores today are lower than they were in the 1990s. Exasperated educationalists argue that this is because standardised testing encourages conformation rather than the trait of thinking differently: when are children ever examined on their imaginative ideas?
Other research shows that when taught to think differently and primed to stand out from others, we perform far better on creativity tests, showing clearly that our environments could do with some intervention – the authors entitled their paper “follow the crowd in a new direction”.i
Professor Puccio, Professor and Chair at the International Centre for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State (also currently the only place in the world you can study for a Masters degree in creativity) says “Creative thinking is no longer a luxury, it is about survival”.
Eight top tips to get good at creativity:
- Understand the process. Professor Puccio explains it comes four stages.
- Clarifying: asking the right questions.
- Ideating: exploring as many solutions as possible. This includes brainstorming. (but when brainstorming, be critical. Some ideas are just, well, silly and impractical. Say so).
- Developing, and…
- Implementing, making sure that the idea is practical and convincing to others.
- Relax. Being in a relaxed mood primes creative thinking. Next time you’re chilling on the sofa with your children, ask them some obscure questions. Research shows that lying on your back helps even more. Being mellow encourages a wandering mind.
- Habituate everyday thinking. When driving in the car, or walking the dog, question things. Ask your children why trees grow with rings inside their trunks. Why sunsets and sunrises are red, yet the daytime sky is blue. Why do they speak differently to you and their headteacher?
- Practice making weird and original associations. Being able to link seemingly unrelated topics is a key to creativity. Like Hannah Herbst. We can be incredibly clever ‘linear thinkers’, specialising in a single topic, but if you can combine subjects and find patterns between rather than within subjects, you’ll find original insights.
When you’re eating dinner, ask the children to come up with a way in which the food on their plate is related to the chairs they’re sitting on (wooden tables and broccoli are both plants; plants are eaten by the animal product on the plate; a plastic chair is made from oil with is the decayed matter of animals and plants. If eating off marble table tops is more your thing, then marble is made from limestone rock, which is made from dead animals, like the fish and oysters on your plate).
But how? By listening. And reading. Other people give you new perspectives. Becoming more cultured will never be a bad thing: you’re probably going to struggle to make new insights into life unless you engage in literature, the arts or languages at some level. Not to mention enhancing your dinner-party chat.
Being creative is when you’re then able to move beyond using other people’s ideas, and add your own contribution.
- Be open to new experiences. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, said the writer Annie Dillon. Doing the same thing every day will not help your creativity. No matter what your age and experience, do new things – go to new places, talk to different people, read new books and try new recipes. Boring people do boring things.
- Go for a walk. Researchers from Stanford University found that “walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity”ii when undertaking classic tests of how divergent and creative their thinking was. The effect remains even after you’ve sat down. In another test, people were asked to think of alternative metaphors to “an egg hatching”; only 50% of those who sat in a room were able to do so, yet 95% of those who spent the same time walking came up with answers such as a “chrysalis opening”. Good teachers let their students move around, even if it’s just for a quick boogie to Rhianna, and good bosses encourage walking meetings.
- Look at green things. If you look at something green immediately before, or during a creative task, it has a significant effect on our performance. If you’re not able to gaze out of your window onto green lawns and trees, then invest in some pot-plants.
- Dare to be different. Professor Sharon Kim who studies group creativity explains that the experience of being rejected from a social group rather than stifling creativity is a psychological process that actually stimulates performance on creative tasks.
So those of us who are prepared to dabble in a bit of social rejection – are less bothered about rigid societal norms – are better able to tap into creativity. If children grow up in an environment where being different is encouraged, they’ll thrive. Obviously, non-conformity shouldn’t extend to out and out anarchy, but when it comes to thinking, think big and broad.
The main thing is to keep at it. As Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do. Leonardo da Vinci’s found painting success in his late forties with ‘The Last Supper’, and Stephen King spent nine years on his first book, Carrie.
And remember, you’re probably not going to be able to turn yourself or anyone else into a Picasso or an Einstein, but you will become more productive.
We’re all wired to be creative. We just need to give ourselves the opportunity.
i Goncalo, J.A. and Duguid, M.M., 2012. Follow the crowd in a new direction: When conformity pressure facilitates group creativity (and when it does not). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 118(1), pp.14-23.
ii Oppezzo, M. and Schwartz, D.L., 2014. Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 40(4), p.1142.