The War on Creativity

of the War on Christmas in these January duel drums? Yeah, well, this is actually the perfect time to concentrate on another ongoing war, and that's the war on creativity. And it's really it's a good time to talk about it because January is always it's a time of new beginnings. It's a time of you know, of new corporate goals and new personal goals, and a lot of times that incorporates a certain amount of creative thinking. I want to think

more creatively, I want to be more creatively. I want my company to figure out new and inventive ways to go about our process. That's right. In fact, one of the things we can pick from in our development goals will fall under a theme of I think it was like customer service innovation. All sorts of different categories, but innovation that's one of them. Creativity essentially, And this is

a huge cottage industry in the marketplace, right, incorporations. Everybody wants and out of the box thinker, someone who can really come up with juicy new novel ideas. Yeah, and one year we even had like the whole company was like Creative Innovation Year, and we had like a fun room in the in the office with like being back chairs and all that stuff that nobody used. Yeah, well because badly we're busy being creative at our desk. Um. But it is one of those things that everyone thinks

they want anyway. I mean, everybody likes the idea of being more creative, and everyone sees the fruits of it with if you really cherry pick your examples, well that's the problem. Everybody loves the after effects of creativity versus the oddball ideas, the things that people put out there, or even the sort of projects that people are working on that seem you know, too strange or uncomfortable in

order to be accepted. Yeah, now we can. We can name numerous individuals who are great examples of Oh they were. They were ahead of their time. They were free thinkers, and look how it paid off. The two that you were mentioning were who Van Go and Jobs. You know, at the time maybe a little too obsessive. Some people might have thought, oh this is crazy, these ideas are coming out of left field. Um. You know, these are larger than life characters and they don't really drive with

everything else that's going on. But but of course now and certainly after both their their deaths, they are held up as as figures. I mean, Van Go is a is, a is a legend of of the art world. Uh, Steve jobs is is just cemented as an icon of technological innovation. He is. But then you have some people who, again they might be the oddball out. Um, I'm thinking

about Troy Hart to Bias. He is a Canadian scrap metal dealer in nature enthusiasts who, after being attacked by a bear, became obsessed with constructing a series of increasingly elaborate bear proof suits designed to withstand any onslaught essentially power armor like this crazy sci fi power armor, in order for him to do battle with bears or hold his own in the Company of Bears, and he said, you know, he thinks that there are applications beyond just

trying to avoid being mauled by a grizzly. That he thinks that government agencies could actually use this in war warfare and whatnot. And he's been turned down again and again. One there's the idea, because he just doesn't have the credentials. And too it's because it's like this one guy who became obsessed with a bear suit, right right, Yeah, there's a documentary about him, Project Grizzly Who film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. I have not actually

seen it. I really want to. I've seen the trailers for it, and it looks like an amazing journey into this individual's mind. If you want to check out the stuff he's into now, you can go to his website. That's www dot Inventor Troy, that's I n V E N T O R t r o y dot com and you can see that he is still really into crazy sci fi looking combat armor. Yeah, and what does

this take. It takes innovation, it takes takes risks financially his own really um, but we end up laughing at it in the case of Troy, we end up saying that guy's a goofball, he's out of touch. He has these crazy inventive ideas, but none of them are landing anywhere. This is not the kind of person where most big corporations would say that's the brain we want setting in on our brain storming meetings. That's right, because you know,

fifty years from now he might be celebrated. They might say he really like he had some very crazy ideas. And if you look back at Da Vinci and the fact that he made this, what was a wooden automaton that sat at his dining table, it's just one of his many thought experiments. You know that people sat at that dining table with him were like a little office rocker. Yeah, but this is necessary. This, this kind of creativity, in this idea that you can throw yourself into the void

and be comfortable with that. Just give this a little more background. Here's here just a few noted individuals celebrated geniuses who died penniless, who only after their death that really people come back and say that person was a genius.

We should worship their example. We're talking about Nicola Tesla, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allan, Poe, Socrates, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Stephen Foster, Johannes Guttenberg, and those are some pretty big names and the sciences and the arts and in philosophy, but world changers, world changers. But it was it was

only an after effect. And certainly, I'm sure they know any number of these individuals had numerous contemporaries who did not have that kind of impact, and it certainly would be given more of the Project Grizzly view by corporations or or or even people within their own field. The reason for this is that we tend to as humans, gravitate towards the middle terrain. And we'll talk more about that. But creativity is big problem and why there's a war

on it is that it contains a risk factor. This is really underlying the problem of why a lot of people can't get behind it or commit to it. Yeah, creative types are risk takers. They tend to buck accepted and proven trends. They try new things, and they often ignore warnings uh from the more cautious among us, even after repeated failures. Uh. So you know, it's like the

grizzly Man. People have been telling him for ages, Hey, let's stop making Maybe you should stop making arm and maybe this isn't working out, maybe you should try something a little more proven. He's not gonna do it. This is his thing, this is his dream, and he's following that, and he's gonna follow that into the grave, be it at the hands of a grizzly bear or a grizzly

bear in armor. So so there's a there's a riskiness in in hitching a ride on these particular stars, right, because if you give someone a choice between a large, uncertain reward and a certain smaller award, they're always gonna go with something that's more of a sure thing. Yeah, unless unless the situation is dire, then they're going to roll the dice. But Barry M. Star he actually wrote in uh. He wrote a great essay in the book called Creative Action and Organizations Ire Tower Visions in Real

World Voices. He wrote that no one really wants creativity, especially corporations, because just what you describe, we're talking about someone who is deviating from the norm. They're vulnerable, they're obsessive,

they're sharing information, they're bucking the system. And he says the average person may become intrigued when the glorious of successful creativity are hailed by the media, but when presented with the bald truth that most scientists never come up with any earth shaking findings, most new businesses and in failure, and most whistleblowers get demoted or fired. It's not surprising that most people usually up for a safer, more normal

life than that followed by the creative. And if you think about it, you know, you hear the corporations say we want creativity, we want innovation. Well, that doesn't really fit in the model of a lot of corporations because uncertainty is that the basis here of creativity. And that's

kind of a dirty word, you know, incorporations. You wanna you wanna have every nook and cranny of a corporation sanitized of uncertainty, because that is when the presence of it could usher in unforeseen costs and turn up revelations

that might not square with that corporation's culture. Yeah, we've we've talked before about about movies and about trying new things in Hollywood, and then's you know, the old adds that Hollywood rather roll out the same thing every year than try something new and but but then you have to remind yourself that the production of any big budget film, I mean, that's that's a that's a corporation, that's a that's an event that involved lots of money, lots of

people's jobs. Uh some dudes. Yacht may even be on the on the line, and all companies of that size. It's essentially the same with an oil company. Whereas an oil company gonna drill, are they gonna drill where they know the oil is? Are they gonna drill where there might be oil? And again, we it's just like with the noted individuals, the creative outliers that we we look back to him, they go, oh, that person was a genius. That was a genius. That guy was ahead of his time,

that woman was ahead of her time. It's it's similar with movies. You look at some of the films that went on to be cult classics who went on to be highly influential on other um filmmakers, and they were flops at the time. Big Lebowski, Big Trouble, A Little China, Two of my favorite films Clue, Office Space, Fight Club, Citizen Kane. Those are all films that when they came out. People really didn't know what to make of and they didn't make that big of an effect, and they certainly

didn't make enough money to justify their their existence. It's only afterwards that people gravitated towards them and they made money and they made a name for themselves. Yeah, that's because they were outside of the realm of what you know, the usual sort of Hollywood products. Stamp out, uh was a part of right, it was outside of that structure.

And so where that structure is certainty. Right, and again talking about uncertainty and risk as being the enemy of creativity, now that's not necessarily a bad thing because you think about it this way. Are are Magdala's the part of the brain that processes fear. They are ramped up in situations of uncertainty. All right, this is sort of hardwired inness to say, oh, we're not really sure, we're risk adverse.

We all want to survive. Now, this seems a little silly on a Hollywood platform where they're just producing movies, but still those people are tied to money, and money is seen as survival in our society. Right. So Jack Nitchi, a u W. Madison Professor of psychiatry found the uncertainty intensifies a person's perception of a bad experience, at least

in the case of disturbing photos. Um Nitchi showed participants and found that the emotional centers and the brain responded much more strongly to the material if the person didn't know what was coming. So again, we're talking about disturbing photos. This is an extreme scenario, but I think that it makes the case that in some ways we are overreacting

to uncertainty because we're hardwired to do that. Yeah, Because ultimately, if you take things down to a primal you know, life amid the saber tooth tigers example, you want certainty in your life as much as you can possibly hoard as much as you can possibly grab onto. You want the certainty of food, and you want to avoid the uncertainty of of a starvation or death at the hands of some apex predator out there. And even uh, you know,

even in some of the small choices in life. As much as we we try to think that we're creative and we think, oh, you know, I love a highly creative work. I love the uncertainty of a of a really good book or a really good movie. How how much uncertainty are we really comfortable with? Like if I were to hand you a book right now and say you should read this, I'm not gonna tell you what it's called or what it's about, but devote you know X and u X hours of your life to reading

it and just see what happens. You would be hesitant to to take that challenge, I would imagine, and so would I. I would know about the risk and reward ratio. I would say to myself, not really certain here what the outcome is going to be there for I will default to the norm, which is to push it aside. Yeah, I mean one of the big things that we turned to the internet for so much is to the vet

stuff that's coming to us. So even if it is a new film that might be dealing with the new idea, we want to know who's behind it, who wrote it, who's directing it, who start in it, what's their track record with success in the past, what do noted critics think of it, what do our friends think of it? So we in a way, we we still want to remove as much uncertainty from our consumption of creative products

as possible. You know, I was just thinking about the normal ty biased episode that we did about how people will underreact in a traumatic situation because they want there to be that certainty, that the reality that they know. Because at the end of the day, the sort of patterned reality that we encounter over and over again, this idea of normalcy takes a less of a cognitive load

on us then novel thoughts and uncertainty. So from a survival perspective, you want to go with the thing that's sort of known, albeit a little bit wrote and possibly boring. You know, one of the tragedies is that some of the most memorable experiences of our lives, assuming they're not negative and kill us or our injurius or traumatize us,

are often situations that involve a lot of uncertainty. End up going on this adventure, right, And the rare opportunities that we do read something or view a film or consume some piece of of media without any preconceived notions, with with next to zero um in terms of anticipation, like, some of those can be the most rewarding experiences because you're just flying completely blind into the unknown. But if given the choice, it's our our natural evolved instinct to

avoid those kinds of encounters. That's why every once in a while you should submit to the crazy makers in your life. You know, the people who tried to push you into new experiences. Come out to this club, come see this play. Yeah, just do it because you could get the reward there. All right, let's take a quick break, and when we get back, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this biased against creativity and some studies

that confirm that it exists. Alright, we're back. We're talking about creativity and how no matter how much we cling to it personally, no matter how much corporations and employers will will celebrate creativity in the workplace or make a show of it, ultimately we're all a little suspicious of

the topic to begin with. Yes, there is a paper called the Bias against Creativity, Why people desire but reject creative ideas and these This paper is by researchers from Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, and they say, essentially, creative ideas make people uncomfortable. Now, this paper is based on two studies from the University of Pennsylvania, which involves more than two participants. Yeah, and two experiments.

They manipulated uncertainty during different models, and the results of both experiments demonstrated the existence of negative bias against creativity when participants experienced uncertainty. And furthermore, they found that the bias against creativity interfered with participants ability to recognize the

creative idea to begin with. So the results the results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face, they say, as as they attempt to gain acceptance for their incredible, crazy, awesome ideas. Right, because what you're talking about is the demand for more of that cognitive load on the brain. And then you have the uncertainty factor, and then this is so interesting to me that it could actually interfere

with the person's ability to perceive that as a creative idea. Yeah, as it almost as if you know, I can't see I've got, you know, hysterical blindness to this idea because I'm so overloaded. Yeah, And again, coming back to the films and fiction, you so often see like a highly creative film that is following an accepted plot path, you know, like like none of the plot points or the character notes are really going to be that surprising, but it's

the wrapping that they're in. So even something that is on the surface highly creative and highly original is is structured in a way that it's very accessible and very uh, non frightening. Now, in a nutshell, the paper is saying, Okay, the corporations need to take note of this, and if they truly want innovation and creativity in the workplace, then they need to create a more supportive framework for creativity rather than just saying, hey, I want a bunch of

creative ideas. Because again, if you think about how a corporation is set up, um, it tends to default to these these sort of norms in the language you hear corporate speak all the time, and the way that people dress right, um, bucking the system and and being you know, sort of going off on your own is frowned upon.

Now unless you're looking at a business like Google, which you know they there's a whole mandate for just go off and do something that you're interested in, because the idea is that later on they can take that person's novel thinking or or crazy making in the workplace and get something out of it later, even if it doesn't

fit into what's actually going on at that very moment. Yeah, but for most of us, there's there's at least some sort of if there's not an actual dress code in place, and there's an implied dress code there, you know, unless it's you know, freaky Friday or Halloween or whatever kind of day you might have. Yeah, it's that you have to wear pants rule in our office, which which totally

messes with my creative vibe. Okay, So we recently moved to a new location and we are sharing a space with one part of the business that is involved with sales, and then the other part of the business is editorial us. Right, and we have two different sides of this office space. Did you know I recently found out that the sales department calls us the dark Side. Well, that's interesting because it reminds me very much of that episode we did

about the tidally locked worlds. Yes, and I mentioned an old sci fi novel about a world where half the world is in dark and as half the world is in light and on the light side they're ruled by science, and the dark side they're ruled by magic. So maybe we're like that they're the science with the magic. Well, I think initially they called us that because we are all apparently sensitive to light, and so we don't have any overhead lighting on our side. But you know, this

weird aversion to harsh artificial light. But we also dressed maybe a little nutty, because we don't have to go out on sales calls. I will venture to say that the break room talk is bizarre just because of the amount of topics we're covering. So I kind of I sort of love that they have decided to call us the dark side. I'll accept it, embrace that. Yeah, Yeah, all right, that was a bit of a diversion. Let's get back to this idea of creativity and particularly among children,

because we talked about this before. Children are great at dealing with un certainty and making all sorts of new associations between things. Yeah, and they are often a great place to go for your creative thought. I mean, they'll

come up with this crazy ideas like I've mentioned. I mentioned before going to Uncle Grahampa's the uh, the children's puppet show UH that they do here in Atlanta, where they let the children shout out ideas for the improv puppeteers to then use and at one point to a puppeteer said hey, all right, we need a name for

the princess. What would the princess's name be? And one little girl shouted out Batman the girl which is which was just hilarious at the time and and just not the kind of idea you would expect an adult to come up with. Or likewise, there's I think it's called

Axe Cop. There's like a whole like web series turned cartoon series where the ideas originated with this little girl and then her her father took the ideas and they were you know, it was like goofy stuff, like here's a cop and he's on the beat, but for some reason he runs around with an axe instead of that I've done. So on the surface of things, you would think, all right, well, children are just a font if creativity. They're just these you know, just wonderful, crazy abstract thoughts,

just just just bubbling out of the ground. But a two thousand ten study, uh, gives us a little more information to go on and shows that creativity at les American children is actually down in recent years. Yeah, we're gonna roll out from these stats here. Sorry about giving you the sads, but we're talking about three hundred thousand

creativity tests going back to the nineteen seventies. Young He Kim, a creative a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children, and since children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas, they're also less humorous, less imaginative, and less able to elaborate on ideas, according to Kim, and the researchers point to a tightly bound education environment like those

such as No Child Left Behind, an Act of Congress pass in two thousand and one that requires schools to administer annual standardized tests as a way to assess whether

they are meeting state educ catian standards. Now, this inadvertently hamstrings what and how educators teach and in the scenarios, typically teachers don't get to learn to spend a lot of time exploring unexpected ideas, so kids as a result, they begin to fall in line with the material that they're teaching in a very stringent way and anticipating what the teacher wants to hear, as opposed to really taking that idea and showing it around in their mind and

um and exercising their critical thinking abilities. Yeah, they end up teaching the tests. They end up teaching the expected rather than celebrated the unexpected and the unknown. Uh. And and as we've touched on before with creativity, this isn't just a situation of all they're going to produce less English majors and failed musicians. No, creativity is a is an essential part of not only artistic endeavor, but scientific endeavor. Uh.

It's it's something that empowers just about any field. Um. And one of these children may go into or dream of going into when they reach adulthood. It's one of the cornerstone indicators that predicts future success for a child. So you look at this data and you'll say, okay, well SAT scores are rising in these couple of decades, but the scores on divergent thinking are tanking. And that divergent thinking is what makes or breaks the ability of

a child to really think about a topic. Not just with creativity, but but bring us sort of full three sixty understanding to it. Yeah, save the tooth, tiger and the bushes not a standardized test. The sciences, the arts not standardized tests. So I mean it makes sense. It's sad, but it makes sense. And again that the two study is not just a study, but a study of studies of the thousand different creativity tests going back to the seventies, So again she was pulling from a vast well of data.

Now it gets even worse. It turns out that kids creative students maybe discriminated against in the classroom. There's a paper called creativity Asset or Burden in the Classroom, and there are two studies that were conducted to examine teachers perceptions of creative students. Study one was based on earlier works that identified personality characteristics associated with creativity, so that created the baseline. The prototypicality of these characteristics as they

applied to creative children was rated by college students. Elementary school teachers were then asked to rate their favorite and least favorite students based on these characteristics. So what happened is that the teacher actually ended up favoring kids who were pleasers or satisfiers and more readily followed directions and did what they were told, which kind of makes sense when we talk about this environment in which you have very stringent requirements. Yeah, and just I mean also just

the reality of being a teacher. I mean, I don't have a big background as a teacher. I only taught for a very short period of time high school English. I was not I was not really all that trained. I was just kind of a warm body they could put in when a teacher left. But but and you know, with that brief experience, I can see you know you want you don't want the kids that are behavior problem. You want the kids that are gonna do what you you say, and and by other rules and perform well.

And as much as you might hate to admit it, you don't want kids that are gonna clog up the gear work of the classroom with too many questions. I guess yeah, But it's so sad because it's you know, those are the times when the child is really trying to grasp the topic by going outside of what you would normally perceive as the Okay, here's the answer, um, Because everybody knows that in a situation outside of the

classroom too. You could be in an office situation and someone to ask invariably we'll ask that question that kind of makes everybody have a headache. But the reason is because they are truly thinking about it and trying to wrap their brains around it. So there should be that space for students. But instead, if a student knows that they are being discriminated against, they might avoid creative thoughts

to better fit in and not feel socially ostracized. And I was thinking about, uh, this this idea of students in classrooms who are sometimes given empty praise. It's called the praise paradox. And there's this idea that if you give a kid empty praise, they perceive it is that they're not doing well. And so even that just these like little nuanced things that teach, these interactions to the teachers and students really make or break how that that

student is going to respond intellectually. Yeah, I mean, looking back on elementary school for myself, I mean that the classes that I was most into were the ones where we discussed stuff where there was like an open forum at least at the end of class, where you could just ask questions in order or discuss the the history you were you were talking about, the story you were reading. It certainly wasn't math class, but but yeah, science classes,

social studies, uh, literature. I can remember specific classes where there was that situation where you felt like those who were hungry for knowledge. We're going to be fit right and you know, obviously I'm not in it right now. You you're not in it right now. So we don't know the absolute environment. We can only talk in generalities that are painted in some of these studies. But here's the bright side of being an oddball and in asking those questions and creating at least. I guess you could

call it an intellectual problem. Um, if you fly your freak flag, it could be a good thing. There's a two thousand and twelfth study by JOHNS Hopkins University business professor Sharon Kim, and she found that social rejection can inspire imaginative thinking, particularly in individuals with a strong sense

of their own independence. I can I can definitely relate to that, and having had virtually no friends throughout junior high like that was the time of a lot of creative development for me, I think, well, yeah, I mean, the paper is basically saying that this rejection effect can liberate creative people from the need to fit in, and

then then they can go and pursue their interests. Like I remember specifically thinking it's like, all right, it kind of sucks when I'm at school, and my whole social environment, you know, like you know, my family is great, I don't have any friends at school, so I'm just gonna read as many like Stephen King and J. R. Tolkien books as possible, and and I just retreated into those. So are just retreated into uh, into fiction and into

you know, creative thought. Yeah, I know, there's a there's a sort of aha moment where it's like, I'm never gonna be able to please these people. Therefore, I'm going to go be my freaky self and it's gonna be

fun because this weekend I'm going to self hypnotize folks. Well, I mean, I guess one of the tragedies too, though, is that we were talking, we talked about the teenage brain, and I feel like we're I often will think back on my my my Maize in high school and junior high and I think, if I had to relive that all again, it's some sort of weird sci fi scenario happened, and I found myself with my current mind in my junior high uh, existence, like what would I do differently?

And it's really a false situation to try to imagine. Because our hormones are coming out a totally different cocktail at that point, and our brains are hardwired to want these people to like us. Uh. So there's there's a big hurdle there in being the you know, the the just forget all you people, uh, freak flag flying creative individual. Yeah, and you have the other problem that underscores at all

is that that social rejection, the pain of it. And we talked about this in the teenage brain that feels like actual pain. It is so ramped up in the amygdala at that age that you can't ignore. It's like a siren going off. So it takes a very strong constitution to get past that point to say it's okay that I'm working outside of the norm and you know this, it's liberating and I can now go and do the thing that makes me happiest and that I'm really passionate about.

All Right, Well, there you have it. Uh, just a little more insight into creativity itself, and especially into the war and creativity, if you will, the stone cold fact that as awesome as creativity is, as important as creativity is in all these various sub fields from the arts of the sciences, we have a built in aversion to it and uh, and it makes a lot of sense from just an evolutionary standpoint. Yeah, and some of you

may be relieved to find this information out. If you've ever been throwing out some ideas and you feel like people aren't listening to them, just know that, you know, it may be that their their thought forces are so clouded by the cognitive load of it that they truly cannot understand what you're talking about or see it. Because it does there's this element of uncertainty. So there's there's a worth in understanding that perspective and maybe being able

to repackage it. Yeah, all right, If you want to check out all the creative stuff that we're up to, various episodes, to all the podcast episodes, all the blog post, all the videos, you can find them a stuff to blow your mind dot com that's our mothership, our homepage that's constantly update who all sorts of cool content. And you also find links there to our various social media as such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, SoundCloud, you name it, find us on the one that you use,

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