Meta Creativity

On the changing nature of creativity and the role schools play to foster it.

Take 20 pieces of spaghetti, a foot of masking tape and build the longest cantilever you can off the end of your table. The longest one at the end of 30 minutes will get a prize.

This was how we greeted students at Stanford’s Introduction to Visual Thinking. No course introductions. No syllabus. We didn’t even share our names as lecturers till after the competition.

This course was the foundation for all product design, mechanical engineering, and urban studies majors. It taught you basic design methodology along with the skills for how to think through drawing and building. Created in the 1970’s by Bob McKim and Rolf Faste, it was the foundation of what grew into today’s d.school and the Design Thinking methodology. 

The course was made to break students out of the supposed patterns of achievement that had brought them to this place. The thinking was they had learned the lessons of our system of education to the fullest and they needed to unlearn a few of them to be creative, especially the fear of failure.

But this experience also taught me something. It didn’t take much teaching on our part, and I often felt like I was just along for the ride. With limited guidance, these students were creative, and wildly so. Their self-awareness, their ability to engage themselves and adapt their thinking with flexibility, led them to pick up design methods quickly. This was humbling and expanded my understanding of human creativity. 

In the late 2000’s as YouTube emerged and TED Talks became popular, I watched the narrative that schools kill creativity erupt online. It was hard, as a designer, not to get caught up in it. But my own teaching experience led me to quietly question these claims.

Do tests of creative thinking actually capture the complexity of creativity?

Reasons to Question

And the more I looked into these claims, the more questions I had. 

There are a variety of methods used to measure creativity. The ones most commonly noted are the test developed by George Land at NASA in the 1960’s, and the sophisticated Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) created by Paul Torrance in the 1950’s.

What fueled the “Creativity Crisis” was what these tests revealed. Both indicate that as we age our test scores decline. In particular, our test scores for divergent thinking decline. And in the case of the TTCT, it has shown a decline that is increasing in severity starting in 1990 and again each decade thereafter. 

That schools cause this decline is not established beyond correlation. How our prefrontal cortex develops by reducing synaptic density - a point Robert Sapolsky makes in his book Behave - is rarely discussed. And the ways culture has changed outside of school - namely the emergence of the internet, games, social media, etc - is rarely noted as a factor, if at all. 

It would seem more than anything, the impulse to blame schools for our problems is a strong one. 

Whether the tests actually capture the complexity of creativity is a question. The fact that 98% of 5 year olds score at the genius level on the Land test, and 98% of adults don’t, raises the concern. Yes, children are creative in their own way - don’t get me wrong - but they don’t create breathtaking works of art, cure disease with breakthrough therapies, create world changing companies, or launch rockets into space. This is what peak human creativity really looks like. And also whether creativity is stable enough over time through cultural changes is a question for me, too.

The fact that it is a test, taken in a school or clinical context with a facilitator, is what gives me the strongest doubts about the results. Observers change the observed. And even more so, creativity is extremely context-specific. It can be extinguished or flourish depending on the context. This is why company culture makes such a huge difference in how creative and innovative they can be. 

Arrival of Automated Creativity

Now there’s a new cultural development that we haven’t begun to grapple with.

When GPT3 was announced in 2020 it came with a surprise: it was creative. That wasn’t supposed to happen! The thinking at the time was that automation was supposed to be for repetitive and low level tasks, not higher order human functions. Later versions of GPT have proven to be even more creative. I suspect if you gave GPT4 a creativity test it would score at the genius level, too. 

One immediate takeaway from this technological breakthrough for educators could be to calm the debate about how to teach it. Memorization has been given a bad reputation as of late. But the way AI is trained - by statistically finding connections in large volumes of training data - looks awfully similar to memorization. The fact that these statistical connections output what we’d objectively consider creativity is both fascinating and, I think, explanatory as to what creativity is. It can support the idea that humans likely need “training data” to be basically creative, too, as traditionalists have argued for years. 

To grapple with this breakthrough in AI beyond this takeaway, we need to explore the definition of creativity in more depth and what could be its changing nature.

We are likely at a substantial disadvantage to AI when it comes to both convergent and divergent thinking.

Changing Nature of Creativity

Most definitions of creativity center on the ability to express original ideas. 

If this remains our definition, I would suggest that we should be questioning our creative future. AI can be trained on dramatically more information than we can. It can and will make more and better creative connections than any individual or team can. This likely leaves us at a substantial disadvantage to AI when it comes to both convergent and divergent thinking on any problem where there is relevant aggregate data to draw from. 

So we have an imperative to evolve our definitions to higher orders in order to stay relevant and plan to work in symbiosis with AI moving forward.

Design Thinking is a higher order form of creativity, which is what has always excited me about it. It gives you a narrative to embody: think like a designer! It gives you a routine with specific stages or modes of thinking to help you stay flexible. And it encourages forward motion and radical collaboration. It is purposely made to help you handle the hardest parts of being creative.

What are some of the hard parts of creativity? Managing the impulse to give up when confronting failure or when your ideas are ignored or criticized. Avoiding attachment to your ideas and staying flexible in how you develop them to improve chances of success. 

Design Thinking was not conceived with the arrival of automated creativity in mind, though. This brings several new, hard things into the equation, like learning how and when to work in symbiosis with AI. And fostering even greater self-awareness to manage our impulses on both the hard and mundane aspects of creativity. 

If AI’s strength is on original thinking, especially on problems where there is relevant aggregate data, AI’s weakness is in the anomaly. It’s not made to spot possibilities from a single datapoint or observation very well. It also isn’t great at anything that hasn’t yet been measured or turned into aggregate data. 

This is where the comparative advantage of human creativity likely remains: original thinking on anomalous opportunities we observe. 

It also could mean a shift in the balance of our strengths from originality to what’s been called appropriateness. This can also be thought of as the effectiveness of ideas. As an aside, I’ve wondered if this shift wasn’t already happening naturally with the arrival of the internet. With access to so much information, perhaps our creativity has already subconsciously started to shift from originality to appropriateness in response. I believe this is a much stronger hypothesis of the changes in TCTT test scores since 1990 than anything that happened in education.

The ability to observe and spot anomalous opportunities is an established human skill, just not a widespread or reliable one. It takes strong self-awareness to do well. It requires intentionally setting aside your impulses for the conventional and procedural approach, and doing the hard work of observing, listening and tinkering. Coincidentally, this is why ethnographic research has always been an important aspect of Design Thinking. But it has historically only been done by someone trained in it - trained to have the self awareness needed to avoid the bias humans can often introduce. Now we all need to train and strengthen these skills to be creatively relevant.

The more mundane challenge that also emerges is that we have to do this while having quick and easy access to creativity at all times. Having a creative AI copilot will feel great. No more creative blocks!  The impulse to keep using AI for all our creative needs will be strong. But this can create a dependency that leads us to avoid the harder parts of creativity. 

To deal with this, we’ll need to have stronger awareness and routines to engage ourselves in those hard parts and to do so mindfully. After all, the anomalous opportunity can very often appear boring and uninteresting, at least initially. You need to be able to engage despite your impulse towards more stimulating, more interesting or perhaps even just seemingly safer paths. 

We must foster even greater self-awareness to manage our impulses on both the hard and mundane aspects of creativity. 

Meta Creativity

All this points to the need for a higher order definition of creativity to help us guide skill development in symbiosis with AI. To remain creatively relevant, we’ll need to strengthen our self-awareness, adaptability of thinking, and impulse control in our creative pursuits. And we’ll need routines that help us engage fully with the hardest parts of creativity. These are all really meta-cognitive functions. So in short, we need something like meta creativity. 

This is why as a company we make reflective tools for education. We want to help elevate creativity and other important human skills to even higher orders so that everyone thrives with AI. 

Which brings us back to the role schools play in the creativity equation. 

Despite the questions raised about creativity tests, I can accept the idea that schools are one of many factors in diminishing basic creativity test scores over a person’s early lifespan. Their contribution is inseparable. But what if what schools have always developed - and the reason for why we have seen such societal creative flourishing since the arrival of compulsory education - is the capability for higher order creativity? Meaning, schools provide constraints that build up meta creative capabilities that get unleashed when the constraint is removed? The end result being that we get more meta creative people in society driving progress than we would otherwise? If true, this would be a worthwhile kind of short term pain for long term gain.

For sure, this is what I saw from my students at Stanford. With just a few brief lessons on design they were on their way. Even their fear of failure - a very real byproduct of traditional education - was something they could overcome with the right guidance and cultural support at the right time. 

And I find it compelling to consider that it could be the contrast between our creativity constraining system of education and our rebellious, fiercely independent culture where our country’s secret to innovation has always come from. 

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The Optima List

The best possible list of opportunities 

📝 Engageable in the School Day: Increased Awareness

Working on self awareness directly impacts our ability to manage our attention on what matters most. This is an increasingly important skill to develop at a young age, and the most intentional way to do that is by embedding it into the day.

A second new blog by Greg Kulowiec answers the question: what does it look like to adopt and embed Engageable into your day at school? From class periods, transitions, breaks, and meetings, here is Greg’s suggestion for building a meaningful whole-school application of the only tool that will help us find increased self awareness and better engagement.

🗣️ Resilience Coaching on The Optimalist Podcast

Resilience is at the core of the creative mind, and this is only going to increase in the future. “To remain creatively relevant, we’ll need to strengthen our self-awareness, adaptability of thinking, and impulse control in our creative pursuits. And we’ll need routines that help us engage fully with the hardest parts of creativity,” writes Brian Lamb, creator of Engageable.

So we wanted to draw attention to a recent episode of The Optimalist Podcast featuring psychotherapist and performance coach, Tara Miller. Tara draws from her experience in clinical practice, trauma therapy, and the neuroscience of advanced level Self Regulation to coach us on nervous system strategies for resilience.

You can listen to Tara at the Spotify player below, right here in our Substack, or anywhere else you like to listen to podcasts.

💭 What Do Highly Creative People Do Differently?

To complement our creativity issue, we wanted to include this 2017 HuffPost blog that highlights the things many of the most create people do - some things purposely, some innately. You might see some connections between what’s outlined here and what we are talking about when we discuss traditional creativity and meta creativity, as well as some behaviors we are encouraging with the use of Engageable.