What is creative?
An excellent piece of recent research got a flawed title.
Psychologists have documented how our environments influence our behavior. Room color, lighting and ceiling height can impact our performance in documentable ways.
A study conducted at the University of Minnesota and published in Psychological Science http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/9/1860 has advanced this by examining the effect of ordered and disordered environments on our behaviors.
What the study powerfully suggests is that someone placed in an unfamiliar space that’s orderly is more likely to exhibit convergent thinking: that is, identifying and activating rules and processes.
By contrast, subjects placed in an unfamiliar space that’s disorderly were more likely to exhibit divergent thinking: which is more responsive to context and tends to allow thinking across categories. For example, as one way to identify divergent thinking, participants were asked to come up with new uses for ping-pong balls.
However, the title does great harm to a piece of excellent research.
The title: Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity makes a false equivalence between divergent thinking and creativity. As a result, a nuanced study is cycling through the media as messy = creativity, and who doesn’t want to be more creative?
Further, the protocol looks at the subject’s response to someone else’s disorder. Someone else’s mess is merely interesting to me. My own mess is highly distracting.
Creativity does spring from the divergent idea that a ping pong ball can be cut in half and used under table legs to make them slide easier.
Most often though, our creativity is applied to developing strategies for holding our attention and focus on a rapidly moving ping-pong ball to create a high-level integration of our neuromuscular system in order to strike it on time and in a certain way to achieve a specific outcome.
This is the creativity that springs from convergent thinking: focusing our attention to understand how things work and how to get things done.
Bias results from creativity falsely linked only to divergent thinking. A huge amount of our productivity results focusing our attention to understand how things work and how to get things done
We can’t afford to undermine this highly fruitful creativity though labels that suggests one kind of thinking sparkles and the other kind is dull.
Yes, divergent thinking is important and powerful.
We all know Facebook results from the divergent idea that if you took the Harvard mugbook, gave users control over their profiles, and allowed them to share elements of the profiles with others, you’d have a better product.
However, it also results from nearly unimaginable hours of focused attention to understanding the rules of computer code and developing processes to write it in a clean, effective, and scalable way. What’s more creative than that?