Brief clip from my talk at Georgetown University on “The Creative Mind and Process”. IQ and creativity–“CQ”– are not related. Here I discuss the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and the analysis of over 50 years of data.
Torrance
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Brief clip from my talk at Georgetown University on “The Creative Mind and Process”. Here I discuss how creativity is still needed in medicine.
“One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something— your dream, your image of the future.”
-E. Paul Torrance
According to a recent survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, “creativity” was deemed to be the most important leadership skill for the enterprise of the future. So what are the characteristics and traits of creative people? What sort of folks do they tend to be, if any, and how can they be identified, if at all?
Paul Torrance was the creator of the eponymous Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a validated instrument that does a good job of measuring divergent cognition, serves as an additional tool for gifted program placement (beyond IQ tests), and has shown to have predictive ability in measuring future creative achievement and output, as I have blogged about in the past.
Near the end of his career, he re-examined his data and also his decades of interviews with students, and ended up with what he called the Beyonders Checklist that described traits of creative individuals. These are:
- Love of work
- Tolerance of mistakes
- Feeling comfortable as a minority of one
- Well-roundedness
- Persistence
- Purpose in life
- Diversity of experience
- High energy
- Creative self-concept
- Risk taker
- Open to change
- Deep thinking
A fifty year follow up analysis by Mark Runco et al. found that the first four traits in particular showed significant correlation to either professional or personal creative achievement.
Separately, Nancy Andreasen, an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist, has written about her findings in years of interviewing highly creative individuals. She found that:
- Creativity tends to run in families, with both a possible nature and nurture component. (e.g. she found half of her subjects came from very high-achieving backgrounds, with at least one parent who has a doctoral degree, and the majority grew up in an environment where learning and education were highly valued.)
- These subjects are adventuresome and exploratory. They take risks and must confront doubt. Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection.
- Many creative people are polymaths (people with broad interests in many fields). The classic example is Da Vinci.
- They tend to be autodidacts. She wrote, “Because their thinking is different, my subjects often express the idea that standard ways of learning and teaching are not always helpful and may even be distracting, and that they prefer to learn on their own.”
- Her creative subjects and their relatives have a higher rate of mental illness (the most-common diagnoses include bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or panic disorder, and alcoholism.)
It strikes me, that taken together, both Torrance’s “checklist” and Andreason’s observations give a very similar sketch of creative archetypes, and allows for a heuristic of sorts to help identify them:
Creative Heuristic #1
These are passionate and intensely curious individuals, self-motivated and taught, that often come from a family of “creatives” (and, unfortunately, may suffer disproportionately from some forms of mental illness.) Furthermore, I would posit that these characteristics are also those found typically in Generalists, as discussed previously.
Given the importance of creativity and innovation to organizations today, using this heuristic as part of a broad strategy of hiring and recruitment should be helpful.
-Mark HT Ridinger
When discussing the state of education in America, most talk today revolves around measuring intelligence and trying to improve standardized test performance. IQ tests (which attempt to measure convergent thinking) are frequently used to try and find our brightest students and to place them in gifted programs. Intelligence is of course an important part of the equation but what of creativity, of identifying and measuring divergent thinking, and fostering its development? What of Creativity Intelligence (CQ)? Our future problem solvers and innovators, be they entrepreneurs, inventors, authors, or researchers will rely on creative intelligence, and identifying and fostering them early in their education is paramount for America’s future. Unfortunately we are failing at that endeavor.
The paradigm of merely equating IQ with the skills needed for success is outdated. Current research shows that there is little correlation between intelligence and creativity, except at lower ends of the IQ scale. People can in fact be both highly intelligent and creative, but also intelligent and uncreative, and vice versa. But how do we identify CQ? Dr. E. Paul Torrance has been called the Father of Creativity, for his work that began in the 1960’s. His standardized test, the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking (TTCT) is considered to be the gold standard for measuring and assessing creative thinking, and can be administered at any educational level—from kindergarten through graduate work.
Several recent comprehensive reviews of Torrance’s data—spanning decades—have been published. The bottom-line is the TTCT not only identifies creative thinkers but is also a strong predictor of future lifetime creative accomplishments. In fact, Indiana University’s Jonathon Plucker determined that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment (e.g. inventions, patents, publications etc.) was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity (as measured by the TTCT) than childhood IQ. Having a validated instrument like the TTCT is so important because alternative means to identify CQ don’t work so well. Expert opinion and teacher nominations have been used, but these methods are prone to errors and biases. For example, students who are already achieving or who have pleasant demeanors or have already ranked well on conventional IQ tests tend to be selected, while researchers have shown that highly creative students and divergent thinkers are typically shunned and are at risk of becoming estranged from teachers and other students. In fact, the odds of dropping out increases by as much as 50 percent if creative students are in the wrong school environment.
What else has the review of Torrance’s data shown? Unfortunately, that America seems to be in a CQ crisis. Kyung-Hee Kim, an assistant professor at William and Mary, analyzed 300,000 TTCT results and has determined that creativity has been on the decline in the US since 1990. The age group that is showing the worst decline is the kindergarten to sixth grade. The factors behind this decline aren’t known, but may be due to a mix of uncreative play (escalating hours spent in front of the TV or video game console for example), changing parenting and family dynamics (research suggests a stable home environment that also values uniqueness is important), and an educational system that focuses too much on rote memorization, standardized curriculum and national standardize testing. Are we stifling divergent thinking in our children for conformity of behavior?
The rest of the world seems to have woken up to the need to foster creativity in the educational process, and initiatives to make the development of creative thinking a national priority are on going in England, the EU and even China. The United States needs a similar national initiative if we hope to stay competitive on the world stage. What is needed is a new approach to learning that still has children mastering necessary skills and knowledge, but through a creative pedagogical approach. We know that creativity can be measured, managed, and fostered; there is no excuse to not implement such a strategy in our school system. Let’s see the creation and deployment of creative exercise classes for our students and the use of creativity tests as additional inclusion criteria to gifted programs. Surely “CE” is at least every bit as important as PE.
-Mark HT Ridinger
(Note: This article was originally published on the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies website)
The Evolved Generalist 