Can we learn creativity? Creative test George Land yielded the following results:

In 1968, George Land conducted a research study to test the creativity of 1 children between the ages of three and five who were enrolled in the Head Start program. It was the same creativity test designed by NASA to help select innovative engineers and scientists. The evaluation worked so well that they decided to try it on children. They tested again the same children at the age of 600 and again at the age of 10. The results were astounding.

Test results for five years: 98%
Test results for 10: 30%
Test results for 15: 12%
The same test was administered to 280 000 adults: 2%

"We have come to a conclusion." wrote Land, "That creative behavior is not taught in schools."

Dr. Land says there are two different types of thinking - convergent and divergent.

• Conversational thinking is the ability to critically think and judge thoughts, which is what happens in our conscious thinking.
• Divergent thinking is the ability to imagine new ideas from nothing, it's the ability of creativity, and this happens in our unconscious mind.

Dr. The Land states that these two types of thinking can not be used uniformly by all, but that the school system teaches us that it must be so, which in children causes one type of thinking to deflect the other. In order to give children a chance to retain their creative abilities, Dr. Land emphasizes that children should not be led to use their minds in this conflicting way.

Dr. Land says, "When we look into the brain, we find that neurons fight each other and thus reduce the brains' capabilities because we constantly judge, criticize and censor. If we work with fear, we use a smaller part of the brain, but when we use creative thinking, the brain seems to light up."

Why are not adults as creative as children?

Creation was mostly embedded in rules and regulations. Our education system has been designed during the industrial revolution more than 200 years ago to train us, to be good workers and follow the instructions.

Can Creativity Learn?

Yes, creativity skills can be learned. Not by sitting in lectures, but by learning and applying creative ideas. Here is an abstract from the study of effectiveness of creativity training.

Over the last half century, many educational programs have been designed to develop creativity. The implications of these observations for the development of creativity through educational and training interventions are discussed, along with guidance for future research.

Creativity is a skill that can be developed. Creativity begins with basic knowledge, knowledge of the discipline and mastering the way of thinking. We have learned to be creative by experimenting, researching, questioning assumptions, using imagination, and synthesizing information.

Creative Creativity at IBM

Every great leader is creative. If creativity can learn, how is it done?

In 1956, Louis R. Mobley realized that IBM's success depended on teachers' leaders thinking creatively rather than learning how to read financial reports. Consequently Based on these six findings, the IBM Executive School was built.

Firstly, traditional teaching methodology, such as reading, lecture, testing, and memorizing, is worse than useless. This is actually a counterproductive way for ideas to be presented. Most education focuses on providing answers in a linear step. Mobley realized that the key to creativity was requirement radically different questions nonlinear way.

Mobley's second discovery is that creativity is a bit learning than the process learning .
The goal of IBM Executive School was not to add additional assumptions, but to refine existing assumptions. Exposed to a "stunning experience," IBM executives were often outraged by the loss of a comfort zone in embarrassing, frustrating, and even furious situations. To expose the ego of an executive manager to such humiliating experience was a risk, but Mobley undertook them to get the managers to knowWow, I've never thought of that before. ", which is the birth of creativity.

Three, Mobley said he did we do not learn to be creative. We have to state creative people. A sea recruit learns to be a sailor by reading a manual. He becomes a sailor by undergoing the humiliation of a training camp. Just as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it is transformed to the sailor. Mobley Executive School was a twelve-day experiential training camp. Hours of lectures and books were exchanged for puzzles, simulations and games. Like psychologists, Mobley and his staff have always devised experiments where an "obvious" answer has never been sufficient.

Mobley's fourth glance is that the fastest way to become creative is possess with creative people - without no matter how stupid they consider us. An early experiment in controlled chaos. The IBM Executive School was an unsystematic, unstructured environment, where most of the benefits of peer-to-peer interaction were rather informal and immediate.

Fifth, Mobley found that creativity is highly correlated with self-confidence. We can not overcome the prejudices if we do not know that we have them, and Mobley's school was designed to be one of the great mirrors.

The last and perhaps most important thing was that Mobley allowed his students to be mistaken. Every great idea grows out of the land of hundreds of bad ideas, and the biggest reason most of us never experience our creative potential is the fear that they will consider us crazy. There were no bad ideas or even worse ideas for Mobley, just building blocks for even better ideas.

"I find Mobley's insight true, although I would have avoided his frantic approach to unlearning creativity. There are ways to unleash creativity that does not involve placing subjects in a psychologically degrading training camp. Learning to be creative is similar to learning a sport. It requires practically developing the right muscles and supporting an environment in which they can grow. ”

Generative Creativity Research

Generative research shows that everyone has creative abilities. The more you train and the more diverse the training, the greater the potential for creative output. Research has shown that in creativity, quantity creates quality. The longer the list of ideas, the higher the quality of the final solution. Often the best ideas appear at the bottom of the list.

"Behavior is generative; as the surface of a rapid river, it is inherently new… New behavior is generated continuously, but is described as creative only when it has some value for the community… Generativity is the basic process that governs all the behavior we call creative. ” Robert Epstein PhD, Psychology Today, July / August 1996