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Components of Creativity

3 min read

From Teresa Amabile.

Three Components of Creativity

1. Expertise

Technical, procedural and intellectual knowledge. 10 years is the approximate time required to build the domain knowledge to super creative successes (Howard Gardner).

2. Creative Thinking Skills

How flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems.

  1. Synthetic: ability to generate ideas that are novel, high quality and task appropriate

Knowledge acquisition:

  • Selective encoding: distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information
  • Selective combination: combining bits of relevant information in novel ways
  • Selective comparison: relating new information to old information in novel ways
  1. Analytical: ability to judge the value of one's own ideas, strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Practical: ability to apply skills in everyday contexts and to "sell" creative ideas

3. Motivation

A set of motivational attributes — childlike curiosity, intrinsic interest, perseverance bordering on obsession — usually the individuals who change cultures.

Types of motivation

Intrinsic: People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.

Extrinsic: External pressures, such as rewards. The extrinsic-motivated person will take the shortest, most obvious path to the reward (e.g. sales teams).

Studies have shown that intrinsic motivation enhances creativity and extrinsic rewards hamper it.

Key to individual creativity

Knowledge: balance between breadth and depth of knowledge. Thinking: ability to create novel ideas by combining disparate ideas. Personal motivation: appropriate levels of intrinsic motivation. Environment: Non-controlling climate conducive to idea combination and re-combination. Decision: Explicit decision to be creative.

Education of creativity

Well structured problems: "How do you find the area of a parallelogram?" — there's only one correct answer. Ill-structured problems: "How do you succeed in a career of your choice?" — different arguments, ideas from different people.

IQ-based academic intelligence is measured with well structured problems. Real world successful intelligence is the ability to solve ill-structured problems.

How to stimulate creativity in the workplace

You need to bolster intrinsic motivation:

  1. Challenge: match people to jobs where challenge is optimized, not too big, not too small.
  2. Freedom: Give people autonomy concerning the process, not necessarily the end result.
  3. Resources: In both time and money. Teresa Amabile discovered that people are less creative under pressure of time. Time for evaluation and playing is key.
  4. Workgroup features: When teams include people from varied perspectives, ideas combine and combust in interesting ways.
  5. Supervisory encouragement: Organizations that tolerate failure and encourage risk taking are more likely to see successful innovation.