What is a phase in creative decision making process which is concerned with the individual learning about the problem?

Beyond Survival – Self-Actualizating Creativity

Creative process can also be viewed as a humanistic force in ongoing growth and development – in actualizing one's potentialities. New research on creativity and health further underlines its value as a force in human wellbeing and development. Abraham Maslow, who spoke of self-actualizing persons, viewed self-actualization as a peak in his hierarchy of needs, and self-actualizing creativity (vs. special talent creativity) as linked to this. Maslow (1968) said:

SA creativity stresses first the personality rather than its achievements, considering these achievements to be epiphenomena… It stresses characterological qualities liked boldness, courage, freedom, spontaneity, perspicuity, integrity, self-acceptance… the expressive or Being quality … rather than its problem-solving or problem-making quality. (p. 145)

Hence self-actualizing creativity is almost a byproduct of a way of life that is healthy, open, more evolved, and attuned to what he called Being Values (e.g., truth, justice, beauty) rather than Deficiency Needs of the self-concerned individual. Maslow proposed that we are motivated to actualize our potentials and talents “toward fuller knowledge and acceptance of (our) own intrinsic nature” (p. 25). Celeste Rhodes extended Maslow's hierarchy to speak specifically of deficiency creativity – spurred by lower personal needs and wants – and beyond this, being creativity, that transcended more self-serving motives, toward universal themes, values, and altruistic motives. The first can indeed morph into the second, as in the author who writes of childhood traumas, first to heal, but later to connect with universal strands of pain, growth, and humanity

Self-actualizing creativity is often practiced, in more humble ways, “in the ordinary affairs of life … like a tendency to do anything creatively: housekeeping, teaching, etc. (p. 137) Under the right conditions, one can imagine everyday creativity providing spur to a higher path of development. For some people it could even contribute to a spiritual path, through the rich simplicity of deeper knowing, beyond ego, in the present moment, manifesting in one's life in a way more consistent with Eastern models of creativity, as Zen Master Loori and others have described.

Phases of Group Creativity

Creative processes tend to go through a series of stages. A preparation stage involves the acquisition of knowledge, information, or ideas. It may take some time to digest these and to come up with some novel perspectives. This period of incubation often involves being focused on other activities. Most creative people are engaged in a variety of activities that allow for multiple incubation opportunities and potential combination of ideas from different domains. The incubation period may be followed by an experience of insight or discovery. After new ideas have been generated they have to go through a promotion or elaboration process. The creator needs to persuade colleagues and other consumers of ideas or products of the value or utility of the new ideas. This may involve considerable feedback from peers and experts in relevant domains as ideas are sharpened or elaborated. The social judgment process can be influenced by a variety of factors. Groups may not be particularly objective in this process. The prior reputation of the innovator, the apparent novelty of the ideas, and the consistency of the ideas with prior conceptual systems will likely influence this judgment process. Groups may be wrong in their judgments if they simply focus on developing a consensus. However, if there is a full exchange of perspectives, group interaction may increase the likelihood of making correct decisions. Groups can be helpful in catching logical or conceptual mistakes, especially if these can be clearly demonstrated.

One phase of the group creative process is the selection of the best ideas from among the pool of available ideas for further evaluation and possible implementation. It appears that groups are not particularly good at picking the most novel ideas, focusing instead on the more feasible ones. Although it makes sense to focus on feasibility, it is important for groups and their leaders to make sure that the most novel or creative ideas get full consideration. Although they may not be feasible at present, they might be in the future. There are a number of guidelines that appear to enhance the effectiveness of the group decision processes. Groups should have sufficient time to evaluate all of the alternatives adequately. They should also have multiple meetings that may allow for the occurrence of unconscious processes, which may lead to better decisions in the case of type of complex issues that groups often face. Outside evaluators or experts should be consulted to make sure that group has considered all of the relevant issues.

Homo Creativus: The Economic Agent for Endogenous Growth

The creative process, at the heart of endogenous growth, is conceived as a function of the resources (in particular, human capital) devoted to research and development (R&D). The relation may be linear and continuous, or discontinuous with research effort leading to occasional leaps in change and innovation. Creative ideas may result from a combinatorial discovery process; new ideas are combinations, hybrids of existing ideas or elements. This view is specially appealing to endogenous growth theorists because the combinatorial dynamics of possible new ideas evolve faster than the exponential dynamics of potential diminishing returns of the two other production factors – capital and labor. However, only a fraction of potential new ideas is transformed into useful, actually implemented ideas, and resources are required for this transformation. Thus the growth residual depends on resources devoted to generating possible idea combinations, selecting the best among them, and then developing and implementing them.

Based on psychological studies of creativity, we can postulate that certain cognitive, conative, and affective resources will foster the generation of new ideas, the selection of potentially useful ideas and the development and implementation of these ideas. For example, Isaac Getz and Todd Lubart found that emotional information is a key resource in the preconscious process of concept combination; furthermore, task-specific, domain-relevant knowledge will help a person to recognize and use chance combinations and events as sources of ideas, and perseverance will contribute to implementation. Thus, Homo Creativus possesses a set of specific characteristics, a psychological profile, with an economic value that can vary from one sector of activity to another, and over time. These individuals include those whose economic activity involves, by its nature, creative thinking, or more generally designing. Examples are writers, scientists, engineer-inventors, musicians, artists, designers including industrial and architectural designers. Richard Florida proposed that this creative class prospers under conditions that provide a diversity of fields of creative activity (talent), access to technology to exchange and develop ideas, and tolerance (to reduce the psychic costs of novelty production). However, according to Isaac Getz and Alan Robinson, any individual, in any profession can be creative provided the appropriate organizational environment.

Some evolutionary economists have suggested that the societal value placed on creativity and the development of creative people is part of an evolutionary need for growth and change and, at least in the technological sector, a desire for convenience (reduced physical labor, enhanced quality of life). Thus, novelty becomes a goal in the economic action plans of individuals, organizations, and institutions. The individual agent who introduces the novelty into the economic system is the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs may be Homo Creativus themselves but more often they connect novelty generated by another Homo Creativus to the economic matrix, leading to a market reaction, incorporation of the novelty in the economic sphere and the following evolution of the market.

Overall, the availability of such psychological resources as well as physical and financial ones means that people can engage in the creative process of developing new ideas, not necessarily that they will select and pursue potentially creative ideas. The engagement of resources will depend on individual's perceived costs and benefits of pursing creative work, including opportunity costs of other uses of their resources. However, not only societal level but also organizational level economic theories can be useful to illuminate the phenomenon of creativity.

Concluding remarks

Experiencing the creative process is fundamentally positive. Even when struggles plague the process, performers willingly continue to grapple with the problems in an effort to realize a performance that is aesthetically compelling and meaningful for the audience and for them. Performers have unique talents and years of training that facilitate this process. In the words of actor Tom Hiddleston, “Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other’s, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility” (www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/acting).

The creative process is a rich opportunity for performers. They have the opportunity to derive meaning and purpose that can be expressed in their careers and their lives. Performers attempt to realize that which looms just outside of our grasp. This effort propels them to actively explore themselves and the work they are to perform. In great performances, the audience and the performers are acutely aware that they share in the creation of an illusion, a shadow of reality, and yet, it is also an experience that is vibrantly alive and real. As Artaud claimed, the creative process in the performing arts is one that produces “the theater and its double” (1958).

Abstract

The chapter focuses on the creative processes in rock bands. Based on biographical information about rock bands, I develop a theoretical model of the processes in rock bands that lead to a collective musical statement of a band. Furthermore, I discuss factors that enhance or impede the creative processes in rock bands such as the lineup of the band, the team climate for innovation, the use of particular strategies (e.g., constraining), team reflexivity, internal and external competition, and previous commercial success. Finally, I outline opportunities and methodological requirements for future empirical investigations of creative processes in rock bands.

How does innovation work?

Innovation is a creative process that needs space and freedom to thrive, but it is also a collective process that needs engagement and dialogue to mature. In a report on public sector innovation, the Sunningdale Institute (Bessant et al., 2010) points out that the ‘lightbulb’ moment of having a good idea is only the first step; a good idea may not necessarily work in context, and working through the issues of development and widescale adoption is the most powerful determinant of success or failure. Although the vocabulary varies with the definition, the three broadly agreed stages of innovation are:

invention: the generation of a new idea or approach, that often challenges current assumptions, understanding and accepted wisdom, which can come from frontline staff, partner organisations, service users, suppliers, external researchers or professional colleagues;

translation: scaling up an initial idea within a particular social, technological and organisational context, turning it into a practical plan for implementation;

diffusion: adopting the innovation in practice, replicating and spreading that practice across the relevant sector.

To which best practice adds a fourth:

evaluation and learning: feeding reflection and assessment of successes and failures back into the creative process.

It is clear that both knowledge and records are relevant to all four of these stages, from providing knowledge inputs in the initial creative phase through to implementation and communication of lessons learned. The knowledge and records professional has unique skills to offer here: an ability to map the whole landscape of information and knowledge-based activities and expertise across the organisation, and link them to categories of records; an understanding of which information is important and which less so, and of its currency. She has the ability to connect people and knowledge in different parts of the organisation that are unaware of each other, to stimulate the synthesis of explicit knowledge and potential learning in new ways, and to design diffusion systems.

The Sunningdale report suggests several different models of how public sector innovation happens. Innovation can be:

R&D-based: developing and promoting new product and service ideas externally, particularly deploying new technology; relatively small scale in the public sector;

incremental: small-scale changes driven by frontline staff developing and adopting new ideas locally, based on insights gained through direct experience;

collaborative: by networks and communities (e.g. professional groups) working across and between organisations;

radical: thinking the unthinkable; the equilibrium of continuity is punctuated by periods of rapid change which overturn and reshape accepted practices;

entrepreneurial: particularly involving social enterprises, both for- and not-for-profit, and social investment funds;

transfer: adopting and adapting ideas from other similar organisations, often other governments, as part of a continuous learning process; but with pitfalls if differences in context are insufficiently understood;

co-production: user-led innovation, enabling service users to make independent decisions through choice, and participate by voice, working collaboratively with professionals in developing new approaches.

Innovation in UK central government

In 2009, the UK National Audit Office investigated innovation practice in central government (NAO, 2009). It identified several key barriers:

Confusion about the purpose of innovation, and where it fits with priorities and business plans, prevents uptake of opportunities.

Few agencies have thought strategically about where they need, and how to support, innovation.

More needs to be done to develop ideas from the front line, suppliers and service users, not just those generated internally.

There is difficulty in overcoming cultural and structural barriers by giving access to support and expertise.

Examples of praised innovation included:

the Environment Agency’s Innovation 4 Efficiency Team, which acted as an ‘ideas broker’, connecting those with a new idea with others in the agency who could help develop it, encouraging knowledge-sharing and the flow of information, and cutting across functional and geographical boundaries;

Luton and Dunstable Hospitals’ initiative to reduce the local stillbirth rate, which was above the national average; review and analysis of cases, augmented by follow-up work with patient groups, identified a number of trends and innovative solutions, which led to a reclassification of all cases as ‘avoidable’ and ‘unavoidable’. Avoidable cases dropped significantly over a three-year period.

Understanding of the innovation process is changing from seeing it as a linear production process which progresses from initiation through development to implementation, to one in which a web of connecting flows of knowledge and information through social networks generates each of these stages. Innovation is essentially a social process, in which the bright ideas of individuals are only one part.

Ideas generation may start with an individual, but many others will be involved in its evolution to maturity. These range from participants in a knowledge transfer programme engaged in science-based work, through collaborating practitioners (for example, social workers and healthcare staff jointly working on adult social care), to the recipients of services themselves. The most far-reaching innovations have a multiplier effect, acting as a platform from which many variants can be launched.

2 Type II

A second position on the creative process also proposes that the same basic activities are involved in creative and routine problem solving. The difference lies in the amount of time devoted to each step or in the number of times that each activity is performed. For example, consider the problem-definition phase. Many problems are initially ill defined; it is unclear exactly what the problem is or what the features of a good solution would be. The creative process may involve spending more time on problem definition than in routine problem solving. As described earlier, one study found that art students who produced highly original still-life drawings spent more time formulating their compositions than low-originality students (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). Creative artists also distinguished their working process by the number of times that they engaged in certain activities, such as manipulating and exploring objects. To take another example, suppose that most people use analogies once or twice when solving a problem. The creative process may involve multiple uses of analogies. The analogical process is the same but it is used more often in the creative process.

The “Process” Dimension

The study of the creative process is described, most of the time, as an iterative sequence of stages (Howard, Culley, & Dekoninck, 2008). The majority of the models consider that the creative process starts with a formulation of the problem, continues with a phase of preparation, and finishes with an evaluation and a refinement of the outcome.

Nevertheless, models vary regarding the process of emergence of ideas. Some authors describe it as sudden and intuitive. For example, Wallas (1926) highlighted an illumination stage, in which the individual experiences an insight by creating a new combination or transformation of ideas. Similarly, Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1996) suggests an insight phase. In contrast, other models move toward a more conscious process of idea generation (Howard et al., 2008). For example, Mumford, Mobley, Uhlman, Reiter-Palmon, and Doares (1991) highlight eight processes involved in creative thought: (a) problem construction (understanding the situation and providing some structure for interpreting the framework); (b) information gathering (collecting information which is relevant to the situation); (c) concept selection (organizing ideas into concepts and selecting those which are pertinent to the situation); (d) conceptual combination (taking the relevant notions from the concept selection stage and combining them in new and unique ways); (e) idea generation (generating new workable ideas deriving from the new reorganization); (f) idea evaluation (considering ideas regarding the potential outcomes and resources needed for their implementation); (g) implementation planning (considering practical details); and (h) monitoring (monitoring the implementation of ideas to collect feedback). In addition, the componential model of Amabile (1983, 1996) describes a sequence of five stages: (a) problem or task identification (becoming aware of the task to undertake or the problem to solve); (b) preparation (building up or reactivating information which is relevant to the task at hand); (c) response generation (generating solutions or response possibilities by searching through available pathways and exploring features of the environment that are relevant to the task); (d) response validation (evaluating the response possibilities or solutions); and (e) outcome (communicating the outcome, which is evaluated). Besides being widely acknowledged in the field of creativity, Amabile’s model understands the creative process according to a multidimensional approach, which considers the influences of the other dimensions (i.e., person, press, and product) of creativity in each stage, in order to make explicit the process of emergence of useful and novel ideas.

Creative Nightmares: Honor, Power, and the Love of Women

Many successfully creative individuals have frequent nightmares that they use in their work. This is but one of the findings from our work with Sundance Institute actors, directors, and screenwriters (31). Individuals in creative roles had a higher frequency of nightmares and were more likely to use their dreams and nightmares in their creative process than either the general population or the individuals on the film crew with non-creative roles. Some of these individuals had nightmares as a symptom of PTSD. For certain individuals, the incorporation of trauma-based nightmares into the creative process may be a functional therapeutic strategy for addressing the symptoms of PTSD, particularly since other approaches to treatment have proven to be of limited value.

Freud suggested that the psychological origin of creativity was in childhood trauma. This trauma was most likely to be the kind of separation and/or family relationship transition that we all experience (32). Post-Freud, a series of studies based on a review of historical records as well as retrospective psychiatric assessments of artists’ work suggested that creative success was often associated with significant psychopathology. Both depression and bipolar disorder (manic–depressive illness) are quite common among successfully creative artists (33). This work has been critiqued and the findings may or may not be real. Psychiatric illness is very common: in the United States, more than forty-nine percent of the general population will have symptoms of a major psychiatric illness during their lifetimes (34). Creative artists are more likely than other individuals to leave detailed autobiographical information that, years later, is still available for retrospective interpretation. That said, among poet laureates of England, more than fifty percent had a history of suicide attempts, alcoholism, and mental breakdowns. Eighteen percent successfully completed suicide (35). Some suggest that creativity can be a form of compulsive madness that drives artists to contact their dark, demonic, and usually unconscious selves. Conversely, creativity can be an approach utilized to promote psychiatric health and even happiness (36).

Freud suggested that the creative process could be therapeutic. He proposed that beyond psychoanalysis, art offered an alternative therapeutic path for the artist:

For there is a path that leads back from phantasy to reality – the path, that is, of art … It is well known, indeed, how artists in particular suffer from a partial inhibition of their efficiency owing to neurosis … A man who is a true artist has more at his disposal. In the first place, he understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them … Furthermore, he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it becomes a faithful image of his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a yield of pleasure to his representation of his unconscious phantasy, that, for the time being, at least, repressions are outweighed and lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all of this, he makes it possible for other people to once more derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy – honour, power, and the love of women.

(Freud, 1980) (37)

Associates and followers of Freud developed this approach, and creative therapies became quite popular during the mid-twentieth century. Psychoanalysis as therapy is a one-on-one process that can be provided to only a few individuals. Art therapy and psychodrama can be conducted in group settings under the overall purview of a therapist and used to treat a far larger number of individuals. Some psychoanalytic therapists excited by this approach proposed that through the use of mass media the psychoanalytic approach could be used to treat and alter the whole of society. J. L. Moreno, in 1934, asserted, “A truly therapeutic procedure cannot have less an objective than the whole of mankind” (38). While this assertion seems a bit grandiose, today psychoanalytic perspectives have achieved their greatest distribution and resonance far away from the therapeutic couch, when used in film, print, and media to develop plot, character, and storylines (39). This concept will be addressed further in Chapter 8. However, in this twenty-first century, creative therapies such as art and psychodrama are used far less often than in the past for the treatment of psychiatric illnesses such as PTSD.

Cognitive Theories

Cognitive theories emphasize the creative process and person: process, in emphasizing the role of cognitive mechanisms as a basis for creative thought; and person, in considering individual differences in such mechanisms. Some cognitive theories focus on universal capacities, like attention or memory; others emphasize individual differences, like those indexed by divergent thinking tasks; some focus on conscious operations; others, on preconscious, implicit, or unintentional processes.

One classic cognitive theory, by Sarnoff A. Mednick, argues that creative insights can result from associative processes in memory. In this view, ideas are chained together, one after another, and more remote associates tend to be more original. This perspective argues that more creative individuals tend to have flatter hierarchies of associations than less creative individuals; in other words, more creative people have many more relatively strong associates for a given concept, rather than only a few. This is thought to provide greater scope for the simultaneous activation of far-flung representations, which many believe to be an important engine of creative thought.

Along similar lines, another cognitive theory focuses on how concepts are combined to generate novelty. Research suggests that conceptual combination – bringing two different sets of information together – is often involved in creative ideation, that original insights are more likely when two disparate features are brought together, and that connections between these concepts might only be seen at a very high level of abstraction. This kind of thinking has been called metaphoric logical, the idea being that something like ‘angry weather’ is only comprehensible in a nonliteral fashion. Such processes may suggest creative alternatives to well-worn lines of thought.

More generally, research in the ‘creative cognition approach’ tradition, another important contemporary view of creativity developed mainly by Ronald A. Finke, Steven M. Smith, and Thomas B. Ward, has likewise emphasized ideas drawn from cognitive psychology (e.g., conceptual combination, conceptual expansion, creative imagery, and metaphor) to understand how individuals generate ideas and explore their implications in laboratory-based invention and design tasks. Such processes are thought to play out in two fundamental regimes of thought: generating ideas and exploring their implications. In practice, the two are strongly interleaved and combined in the ‘geneplore’ model of creative thought (from generate + explore).

Finally, metacognitive processes (thinking about one's own thinking) are also frequently tied to creativity. Many tactics for increasing creative problem solving have been proposed and popularized, including ‘think backwards,’ ‘shift your perspective,’ ‘put the problem aside,’ and ‘question assumptions.’ Tactical thinking is especially useful for programs designed to facilitate creative problem solving since they are a function of conscious decisions and can be employed when necessary.