This post is a component of the Decoding Creativity series from designers Hub Follow on FB subscribe designers hubs blog, and join the discussion by commenting together with your questions and thoughts.
Imagine, if you'll, two hypothetical people. Let’s call them Charlie and Pat. Both are in their mid-20s, fresh out of school, and both work for a corporation that values clear communication, personal responsibility, and diligence. Charlie self-identifies as a “creative,” while Pat self-identifies as a “problem solver.” Assume that those descriptors are 100% accurate. Based only thereon information…
Whom does one think will leaders trust with an outsized, important project?
Which of the 2 is more likely to point out up late or miss a deadline?
Who are going to be promoted first?
Now, let’s make this more personal.
Imagine that you simply have applied for 2 different positions, and after completing a pair of assessment tests, you receive rejection letters for every. One says “This job requires better problem-solving skills than you were ready to show,” and there after the other says “This job needs more creativity this two makes you to find out , find ways to increase, and apply again within the long run.
Which opportunity would you be more likely to pursue again?
Do you believe it's possible to urge better at problem solving? Are there techniques you'll learn and practice to grow in your problem-solving skills?
What about creativity? Can that be improved? Or does one believe that your capacity for creativity is fixed from birth, something encoded in your genes?
Given your responses to every of those scenarios, would you preferably be perceived as a “creative,” like Charlie, or as a “problem solver,” like Pat?
I don’t realize you, but I’m going with Pat.
Maybe you're keen on being identified by your creativity. tons folks (myself included) have fully embraced our roles as “creatives” in our social and professional circles and have surrounded ourselves with people that value us for our creativity. For us, i feel there's tons to be learned from problem solvers without abandoning our identities. But many of us find that being identified by their creative or artistic leanings actually leads to unfair stereotyping and assumptions, and for them, there's potentially some benefit to understanding that they're, at the core, problem solvers too.
The forming of a hypothesis
A few years ago, I worked for a billboard agency that displayed this quote on a wall near my desk:
“Whatever creativity is, it's partially an answer to a drag.” —Brian Aldiss
That quote has cursed with me ever since I first read it. Is it really true? I often wondered. For sure, people use creativity to unravel all kinds of problems, but is creativity always linked to solving problems? Maybe this is often a good statement, I thought, when applied to copywriting, programming, or graphic design, but does this truism delay in other realms? What about the arts? What problems, I wondered, are painters and musicians solving once they create?
I had always viewed these two modes of thinking as separate and dissimilar. Problem solving was the type of skill I employed when playing a puzzle game or trying to work out the simplest thanks to drive traffic to a client’s website. It felt decidedly “left-brained.” Creativity, on the opposite hand, was the type of thinking I applied to songwriting, logo design, and fiction writing. it had been obviously “right-brained.”
The longer I have pondered this question, however, the more I have become convinced that Aldiss was correct. the matter that's being solved could also be more or less obvious during a given application (a scientist must design an experiment which will verify a hypothesis while a composer must make an emotional reference to a listener), but the brain engages in similar mental processes whether the specified outcome may be a work of art or an answer to a clearly defined problem: information is pulled from what's known, remembered, and observed within the moment; it's examined, shuffled, stripped to its essence, and combined with other information in new and novel ways; potential outcomes are imagined, considered, and evaluated; the foremost viable outcomes are tried and tested. the method is that the same in either case; only the semantics, perspectives, and end goals differ.
What if it’s true?
This connection between creativity and problem solving is incredibly exciting to me, and here’s why. If all creativity is problem solving, then:
It should be even as possible to become more creative by practicing a group of techniques and improving a group of skills because it is to become better at problem solving.
Perhaps books and curriculum and checklists and practices designed to assist people become better at problem solving (like the CIA’s famous Phoenix List, for example) are often applied to creative pursuits and the other way around.
Having a healthy imagination could be even as important to traditionally “left-brained” pursuits because it is to the humanities. As Einstein said sometime ago , “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is restricted. Imagination encircles the planet.”
Charlie, the hypothetical “creative” at the start of this text, could, in good conscience, self-describe as a drag solver to bypass anti-creative bias within the workplace.
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