I live in a world that exposes me to some of the – in theory at least – most creative minds on the planet. For this I feel extremely fortunate. Or rather, ‘mostly fortunate’. I say this because I’ve begun to become acutely aware that some of the people (insert image of drum-banging ‘creativity consultant’ here) that purport to be the most creative are actually amongst the least creative people I’ve ever met. For some time the dawning has caused me a deal of strife: how can people who earn their living by teaching people to be creative turn out to be so un-creative? As is so often the case, the problem centres around a poor definition of what we mean when we talk about ‘creativity’.

My five year old niece was, in classical terms, ‘being creative’ when she found a new place to store one of her crayons. The fact that she subsequently spent four hours in the Casualty department at the local hospital having it removed was a pretty strong hint that, though it certainly came into the category of ‘novel’, it wasn’t a particularly effective solution to the crayon-storage problem. At least in terms of, I’ll bet she’ll never do it again. So, we might ask, has she now learned to be less creative as a result of the experience?

The question is an important one since there is an unfortunate modern trend in which any suggestion that one individual is more or less anything than anyone else is deemed politically incorrect. While it may be the case that everyone is born with exactly the same creative potential (‘nature’), it is surely also true that the manner in which we are raised (‘nurture’) plays a significant role in whether someone is viewed as actually ‘creative’. This article is about the fight between nature and nurture, but also, more importantly about the need not just for ‘creativity’ in the classic interpretation of the word, but rather for ‘effective creativity’ – creativity that delivers a new and demonstrably useful outcome rather than merely a new outcome.

Our fifteen year programme of research into ‘effective creativity’ (also known as ‘innovation’) has revealed a number of critical insights into the creative process. From that research we see a need to separate two important aspects of intelligence: firstly there is what we might think of as our ‘creative intelligence’; second is the more traditional interpretation of the word, which we might define as ‘knowledge intelligence’. In simple terms, ‘knowledge intelligence’ is how much stuff we know, and thus how well we perform in school exams and general knowledge quizzes.

Our hypothesis is that, as we all live our lives there is an innate transfer of intelligence from one of these types to the other:

Figure 1: ‘Creative’ Versus ‘Knowledge’ Intelligence

Thus, when we are born, we are all fundamentally born with lots of unconnected neurons inside our brain. Because they are unconnected, we have many, many ways in which they can be connected. Our creative potential – and therefore, we propose, our creative intelligence – is, in this state, at its peak. Never again will we experience such plasticity and flexibility. And a good thing too, since, as we quickly learn, having a certain amount of knowledge about the world is useful for our survival (‘don’t put your hand in the fire’). Certain neurons get connected to others and get reinforced into immovable, concrete pathways as our knowledge increases. But there is a definite trade-off occurring when this essential advance happens: the more knowledge we acquire, the more neural pathways we make rigid, and hence the less creative potential we have…

…until, ultimately, after, say, finishing a PhD in ‘high Nusselt Number, particle-laden supersonic aerodynamics’ (insert image of one of my best friends here) we have an awful lot of really useful specialised knowledge and very little potential to create new supersonic aerodynamic solutions.

The knowledge-versus-creative-potential trade-off is inherent. Inherent, but, fortunately, not unsolvable. ‘Effective Creativity’, then, is about solving the contradiction:

Figure 2: Solving The Creative-Knowledge Intelligence Contradiction

And it is a contradiction that really has to be resolved: the designers of Concorde, for example, were stuck when it came to reducing noise because their excess of domain knowledge prevented them from seeing out of the box. Conversely, while I’m pretty confident my niece would be great at generating brand spanking new ideas for a supersonic aeroplane, I don’t think any of us will be setting foot inside one of them anytime soon. What is needed here and everywhere else are ways and means of thinking that successfully combine the best attributes of both high knowledge and high creative intelligence.

This article is first and foremost about identifying a good contradiction to solve. Being aware of the (inherent, remember) trade-off between creative and knowledge intelligences represents a solid step towards generating viable – ‘effective’! – solutions. But then again, articles that don’t offer any kind of solution are often criticised for leaving people hanging in a don’t-know-what-to-do-next no-man’s land.

The central problem that now leaves us with is that an actual answer to the problem depends on the actual context present. For a start, we know from our research that it is highly connected to Spiral Dynamics and the Level at which a person is thinking.

That issue aside (!), let’s have a quick look at what the Contradiction Matrix has to say on the subject, and let me take the example of a project I worked on with a group this month on stacking and un-stacking sheets of paper.

Here was my attempt to get to the root contradiction, which for me gets us right into a neuron-level look at the brain and the simultaneous problem of wanting both fixed and ‘plastic’ neural connections:

Figure 3: Mapping The Knowledge-v-Creative Intelligence Contradiction

And here’s how I mapped the problem onto the latest version of our Contradiction Matrix tool, now a tool containing over 3.2 million data-points relating to how other people have already found step-change solutions to conflict and trade-off problems like ours:

Figure 4: The Knowledge-v-Creative Intelligence Contradiction On The Matrix

Available time in the session was limited (we were there to generate answers to the actual problem not indulge me in my desire to solve a creativity contradiction!), the search for solutions was limited to the ‘most likely’ suggested Principles. As it happens, the very first one performed the trick we were looking for…

…a trick that represents a subtle variation on what SI is trying to do all the time. My ‘Intermediary’ in this case was asking the team with all of their collective knowledge about stacking and un-stacking paper (which, across the groups totaled around 100 person- years) to help me with the problem of picking up single sheets of aluminium in an automotive body-panel press shop. All I had done here was give the group an analogous problem (‘separate sheet’), but one that deliberately forced them to think out of their usual box, because all of the solutions they had traditionally used to solve the paper version of the problem no longer worked. At the precise same time, the team were now both domain experts and domain newcomers. And within thirty minutes we had a host of previously unimaginedsolutions to the aluminium problem, several of which, later on had an awful lot to tell us about solving our actual paper problem. And, hey presto, a definite step towards ‘effective’ creativity. At least for this group.

The – your – real challenge now is to solve the same (inherent, remember) conflict in your next problem solving context.