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Capturing Your Creativity
| Article
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16179 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
3,420 Words |
| Author
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Steve Kaplan
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Many creative people approach their own creativity much as the Supreme Court approaches pornography: They cannot define it, but they can recognize it when they see it. However, the last few decades have witnessed the rise of group of creative people who believe that creativity is a skill that can be learned, exercised, and developed by people of all ages and occupations.
This concept has been warmly welcomed by people who would like to think more creatively. But nowhere has the teaching of creativity been more openly embraced and supported than in the business world. The creative edge can often mean the difference between a failed product and a resounding success. Take, for example, the case of the forgotten adhesive and the creative chorister.
Art Fry, a researcher for 3M, sings every Sunday in his choir at North Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fry marked the pages of his hymnal in the time-honored way--with scraps of paper. Often, though, the paper would fall out of place without his noticing. He'd get up sing only to find the marker gone, leaving him scrambling to find his place.
"I don't know if it was a dull sermon or divine inspiration," says Fry, "but one morning during services my mind began to wander and suddenly I thought of an adhesive that had been discovered several years earlier by another 3M scientist." That scientist had been attempting to find a strong adhesive product but instead had discovered an unusually weak one: It was strong enough to hold but could be easily removed. The product was considered a failure and was relegated to descriptions in the back pages of dusty files. In a burst of creativity, Fry realized that the failed adhesive would be ideal as a "temporary, permanent" bookmark.
By the time he took the idea to work with him the next morning, he had already made the mental leap to using the adhesive for notepaper. In a moment of inspiration Fry had created Post-its, the most successful new product 3M has had in the past decade.
With stakes so high, it's little wonder that business and education have taken a serious interest in the matter of creativity training.
In the early 1970s, studies began to suggest that creativity was not some special and mysterious force but a faculty inherent in all human beings. That great gift, though, begins to fade as children become socialized and learn to see the world as everyone around them does. Tests have shown that a child's creativity plummets 90 percent between the ages of five and seven. By the time they're forty, most adults are about 2 percent as creative as they were at five.
But some of what has been lost can be recovered. In 1975 psychologists began experimenting with creativity training, with overwhelmingly positive results. Since that time, creativity training has become a growing business in the United States. Much of this training is aimed at the business community, which has both the will to use it and the money to seek it out. The techniques taught by creativity trainers, though, work as well for homemakers and salesmen as they do for researchers and chief executive officers.
Creativity training comes in all shapes and packages.
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