Tag Archives | creativity

Fleeing The Tiger Is No Time To Get Creative

By Joe Patti | on October 23, 2012 | 0

There was a recent series of posts about creativity and children on the Creativity Post website that have made some concepts gel for me.

In September Dr. Peter Gray made a post about declining creativity scores in school aged children. In part he blames an education system which increasingly focuses on the concept that solutions are either right or wrong rather than providing free time to experiment and play. Given the research he cites, parents that over schedule their kids’ time also share some of the blame.

As much as we in the arts tout the benefits of creativity, you may be surprised to learn how important it is to success in life and how significant the decline is:

According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)] at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large….

…but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.

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Indeed, the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

In a post this month, Gray continues on this theme discussing how important it is to allow a child to create in a non-judgmental environment. He cites some interesting research on the impact of judgement in home environments on the creative development of children.

My ah-ha! moment came after Gray discusses how people will generate a more creative product if they don’t know their work will be evaluated. People tend to edit themselves in order to please the evaluator and out of fear and anxiety about being judged. (my emphasis)

“If a tiger is chasing you, your best bet is to use well-learned or habitual ways of escaping from the tiger, not to dream up new creative ways of doing so. Creative ways always run the risk of failure, so we are biologically constructed to cut creativity off when failure has serious consequences.”

Many in the arts, myself included, have written about how important it is for arts organizations to embrace the risk of possible failure by experimenting with new approaches to the creation of art, audience/visitor experience, marketing, pricing, etc.

In the context of Gray’s observation, it isn’t that arts organizations are simply risk averse about new experience the way kids are worried about the first day of school or audiences are anxious about attending their first classical music concert.

Rather the fear engendered by financial consequences evokes a hard wired primal fight/flight reaction that actually shuts down our ability to think creativity.

The idea that this situation is biological was as illuminating to me as Neill Archer Roan’s observation a few years ago that emotional satisfaction engendered a diminished sense of responsibility for self-/professional development in arts professionals.

I think it is helpful for arts organizations to be aware the fear of experimentation in the face of perceived threats is not only probably irrational, but also a genuinely visceral reaction. Knowing this, they can endeavor to create a decision making environment where the influence and presence of these threats are diminished.

Likewise, it is important for arts organizations to know these things when providing and advocating for arts education. Creativity is cultivated by arts instruction that provides opportunity for wholly free expression alongside direction and evaluation.

What Would Happen To Wine If Everyone Wanted Free Grape Juice

By Joe Patti | on May 21, 2012 | 0

Hat tip to Adam Thurman for distributing the link to an interesting piece about devaluing artistic content by Todd Henry. Henry wonders about the fate of artists when increasingly the view seems to be that content should be free.

“This means that artists have to shift their business models to give away (or make available for cheap) their main art, and instead focus on selling scarce peripherals. Authors sell lectures. No longer able to make a living from recording, bands sell tickets to concerts and survive off of merchandise sales. Content creators give away their content in order to gain eyeballs and ears,…

The problem is…some people are just great at being artists. They aren’t great at business models, distribution or line extensions. They just want to make great, valuable art and sell it at a fair price. What do these people do?
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Would we have had The Beatles if they’d been told, “Never mind spending years in the studio crafting your records. Those things are just promotional fodder to sell these snazzy Sgt. Pepper t-shirts and posters. You should focus instead on how you’re going to monetize.”

I am currently exploring bringing a show, which heretofore has only existed on YouTube, to our stage. The creative team is actually excited that they might not have to cover most of their expenses out of pocket for once.

Until Todd Henry pointed out that increasingly it is ancillary products rather than the artistic product supporting the creation, it never occurred to me what a bizarre situation it is. These guys from the YouTube show I am talking to mentioned the same thing–T shirt sales helped defray some of their expenses.

But there are a million stories in the naked cit.. -erm, YouTube and not everyone is going to be paid for them. We already know that places like YouTube are eroding the concept that you should have to pay for content. People will clearly continue to create content and try to support it however they can. I don’t think an effort to inspire a shift in attitude is going to gain much traction.

Though who knows, I hear Comcast cable is trying to get people used to the idea of paying for bandwidth consumption. As much as I am resistant to the idea, it could change attitudes about paying for content as well.

To extend the question Todd asks about killing the golden goose, I wonder how many creatives will persist until their abilities mature if few are willing to pay for the content. That might be the real long term threat.

The guys I am trying to present are young and their show is fun. But what happens in a few years when they settle down and look to raise a family and they decide they don’t have time to create content alongside their regular job and family? The fact artists have never been paid well has always been a problem, but if even the possibility of a pittance wanes then unremunerated recognition becomes the only motivator to create.

Artists and other creative types need time to allow their skills to develop. Ira Glass said as much in the speech I linked to last week. As a country, we need creatives to mature into their abilities rather than quit early on.

Present Ability≠Quality Of Creative Taste

By Joe Patti | on May 15, 2012 | 0

Brain Pickings had an animated kinetic typography video of Ira Glass’ advice about how to succeed in creative work. Essentially he says when you are starting out to produce creative work, your taste is likely excellent but your execution is probably going to suck. You need to refine your work by exercising your abilities at every opportunity.

This topic has been on my mind quite a bit recently. I had a slightly new understanding about that advice we usually give to young people about entering a career in the arts: “Don’t do it unless you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else for the rest of your life.”

When that advice was first given to me, I interpreted it to mean that if there was any other career path that appealed to me, I should pursue it instead. I recently realized it also means you should be prepared to spend the rest of your life honing your skills through exploration and repetition.

Depending on your specific discipline, in every moment of your life, some part of your consciousness needs to be observing the interaction and behavior of everything around you-living things, light, sound, smells, movement, material properties, physics, speech, text, color etc,. Then you need to choose to take what you observed and make it part of your practice.

Perhaps it is just being the child of two teachers, but I don’t understand people who don’t want to learn a little something more each day. I suspect most people of an artistic temperament similarly have an underlying curiosity that drives them to ask, observe and experiment.

The thing that is tough is having patience with your own failings for weeks, months and years. I pursued certification in secondary education when I was an undergraduate and I remember that one of the things my cohort suggested for our training program was a refresher in grammar. Once we got up in front of the class, we realized we couldn’t properly teach it having ignored it for so long as students ourselves.

A couple weeks ago I properly used “fewer” rather than “less” in a sentence and a woman who just started teaching second grade about five years ago asked me about the grammar rules. There were some implications in her tone that she viewed me with some respect but also as a grammar nerd. I chuckled inside recalling being at uncertain about grammar rules when I was fresh out of college. I decided not to tell her that even though I had about 20 years on her, I really only felt like I started to understand many of the grammar rules in the last 8 years I have been writing this blog.

Now I worry that my writing is getting a little too stilted every time I go back to revise sentences to read “with whom/which.”

I am not trying to promote the pursuit of good grammar as something everyone should do. Nor am I trying to say it will take 30 years to attain. I have always been a voracious reader and have done a lot of writing throughout my life so I have had a lot of exposure. I am not sure when better grammar started to matter to me.

And I certainly don’t follow all the rules. <—-I will start sentences with "and" and will use the singular "they." At some point I realized better grammar would improve the quality of my blog posts and give me a better understanding of grammar and started to make incremental changes in my practice.

I recognized an important point in Ira Glass’ assurances that inability to express one’s creativity has no bearing on the quality of your taste. There are plenty of people who have great taste who have no ambitions to express it as an avocation or vocation and suffer no anxiety over it. It is only when we are frustrated at our inability to express ourselves that we suddenly decide there is a direct relationship between our creativity and quality of its manifestation.

No one would claim you couldn’t have a great vision for an opera simply because you didn’t speak Italian. You just wouldn’t be able to create a good opera in Italian without help. Even after a year or so of learning Italian, your opera probably wouldn’t be too good because your understanding of Italian would only be overlaid on your English language skills, sitting awkwardly atop them.

It is only after long involvement with Italian when the language becomes organic that you can finally effectively express your great vision in Italian. That original vision didn’t suddenly get better because you learned Italian. Italian just happened to be superior to English as a mode for expressing your vision and it naturally took awhile to develop your proficiency.

I am digging Brain Pickings these days. You should visit the site. If you can’t do that, then at least take 2 minutes to watch Ira Glass’ advice

We’ve Discovered Creativity!

By Joe Patti | on April 16, 2012 | 0

Creativity is getting A LOT of play lately. I have written on the subject at least six or seven times since the new year, including a discussion about the IBM study that found corporate executives value creativity over pretty much everything else. Thomas Cott features a cross section the subject in his You’ve Cott Mail today. There is the Creativity Post site which devotes itself pretty much entirely to the subject.

You’d almost think no one was aware of creativity until Richard Florida discovered it in 2005 launching a mad scramble to mine it.

Of course, it existed long before that..and we have proof! Maria Popova posted a videos of a talk John Cleese gave on Brain Pickings this weekend. At first I thought he just gave the talking in the last month, so timely did it sound. But he looked a lot younger than he did when I saw him a couple months ago. But you know, despite sounding so recent, he gave the talk in 1991.

Those of you who recognize Cleese’s name from Monty Python probably have no doubts about his credentials to talk about creativity. You may not know that Cleese also has a series of really good management videos, which come to think of it, I believe I first saw around 1991. He was the first to introduce me to the idea that good leadership means creating an environment which can effectively function in your absence, rather than requiring you to make every decision.

One of the things that Cleese says in the creativity video, which is borne out by research and recent writings on the subject, is that creativity is something you have to work at. He mentions that there was another member of the Monty Python troupe he felt had far more creative talent than he, but who would give up on an idea very quickly compared to Cleese because, in his view, there was a lot of discomfort associated with spending time working with a weak idea to make it stronger and more original.

Apparently research shows that people who are deemed more “creative” do spend more time playing with a problem trying to find a solution. These people learn to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty rather than reaching for the easiest solution in order to gain the satisfaction of completion.

The need to be decisive runs counter to the process of creativity because creativity requires weighing many options. Earlier in the video Cleese talks about how it is easy to do small things that are urgent rather than taking the time to do big things which aren’t so urgent, like giving yourself the time and space to be creative. In the same manner, it is difficult in today’s work environment to escape the sense that you should be doing something (be it internal or external) long enough to stimulate creativity.

It has been suggested on Americans for the Arts Artsblog’s Private Sector Salons that the arts community has a lot to offer the private sector in terms of training in creativity.

My concern is that the arts community doesn’t really know how and why they are creative. There are things that we do that elicit creative thoughts like improvisation games, walks in the woods, etc., but we may not realize is that it isn’t the activities per se that make as creative as much as that they represent the carving out of time, space and environment separate from our daily lives in which we can be creative.

Teaching people to do improv games or telling them they should take long walks in the woods isn’t going to make them creative if they aren’t allowing their minds to leave their desks. If they don’t have the courage to embrace uncertainty, be wrong and appear indecisive, participation in playful activities won’t help. If arts groups are going to help private sector businesses become more creative, they need to be clear that the exercises they are teaching them are just tools to help them attain a creative mindset.

The activities are meaningless of themselves and interchangeable with many others that you may find convenient and enjoyable. Some are certainly more conducive to group interactions toward creativity than others, some may better suit the corporate culture, but no one activity is necessarily the key to magical creative synchronicity. You can be creative sitting at your desk if you have the discipline and courage to allow yourself to be.

The most interesting thing Cleese talks about is the importance of humor to solving problems. He notes that people may not feel humor is appropriate when addressing serious problems, but that it absolutely is. That is why I found it interesting. I would be afraid to interject humor into a serious discussion. Serious should not be confused with solemn he says. You can talk about serious matters of the day while laughing and it wouldn’t make the problems any less serious. Cleese seems to say that the use of humor can help mentally insulate you from the problem enough to arrive at creative solutions.