In the previous two articles, I explained the Western social and economic landscape in which creativity had a chance to become a valuable ability. This week and next week, I will virtually walk around in your offices and explain some of the ‘creativity talk’ you hear and maybe speak of yourself.

Joy Paul Guilford (Westside)

In California, we meet Joy Paul Guilford (1897-1987). Guilford from Nebraska became an elementary school teacher after high school for two years. Then, after one year at the University of Nebraska, he joined the Army. After being discharged he went back to the same university and obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in psychology. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University in 1927. Later he moved back to the University of Nebraska to become a Professor of Psychology and gained an international reputation. In 1940 he moved to the University of Southern California, where he stayed until retirement (Comrey, 1993).

The ‘start’ of creativity research

Creative thinking according to Guilford

• Divergent thinking in which one has to consider many options that break with the past (breaking with the past is a notion that was born in the Gestalt Theory on creativity, this will return in chapter two).
• Convergent thinking in which one considers what the best option is.

Measuring creative potential

• ‘Fluency is measured by the number of responses;’
• ‘Originality is measured by the number of responses not mentioned by other participants;’
• ‘Flexibility is a measurement of the number of different categories that that responses group into; ’
• ‘Elaboration is a measurement of how descriptive each response is’.

The higher you score on the four factors, the higher your creative potential. You can ask yourself all kinds of scientific questions about the validity and reliability of these measurements. That discussion I leave to the psychometrists experts. Nowadays there are many divergent thinking tests. The most famous one is the Torrence Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), created by Torrence who bases his test on Guilford’s work. The TTCT is still the standard to measure creative potential.

Please note: Guilford said creative thinking exists out of two parts diverging AND converging.

Diverging AND converging: judging is part of creativity

Walking around in your offices and talking to creative professionals or ‘creative leaders’ I conclude that the general assumption is that creativity=divergent thinking=ideation like I said in the introduction of the article. A worse variant on that is: ‘you need creativity for divergent thinking’. It is more like the opposite: you need divergent thinking for creativity.

You, in the general term, maybe not you as the reader, seem to think that creativity happens in the diverging part and judging happens in the converging part. This is WRONG. The judging is part of creative thinking and should not be separated from it.

There are even scientists that disagree with Guilford’s assumption that diverging is even part of creativity (Weisberg, 2006). But I cannot find any literature (and of course that could be me) that argues that convergent thinking, judging, is NOT part of creative thinking. And it makes perfect sense. If you want to create, you have to make a choice. That is part of the creative thinking process.

Why do we think that only diverging is part of creative thinking?

The simple answer is that Guilford was focusing on the diverging part of creative thinking. It is a misunderstanding, also among scientists that divergent thinking tests measure creativity (Runco, 2010). So we are not alone in our assumption.

But why I think we, as practitioners of creativity, have this assumption doesn’t have its foundations in science. This is where we need to leave California to take the train to Buffalo, New York. I hope it’s Summer.

Alex Faikney Osborn (Eastside)

In Buffalo, New York, where we shake hands with Alex Faikney Osborn. Nice, the sun is out, Springtime.
Alex Osborn (1888-1966) is a typical case of The American Dream. Scraped his way through college (psychology), fired at his first job and later became the director of advertising company BBDO from New York City, employing over 1000 people at that time. Then he created a business from his hobby: imagination. He says it is all because he saw the value of ideas that he became so successful (Osborn, 1948). And what do you do when you are successful? Exactly, you write it down. Osborn has written four books on creativity:

• 1942: ‘How to think up’. Only 38 pages, at least according to Google Books. Looking inside the book he mentions brainstorming once but doesn’t explain it as far as I can tell. I tried to buy the book but I found it impossible to find. Let me know if you have a copy!
• 1948: ‘Your Creative Power’. First ‘real book’. He tells us his own creative journey. And very important for history and for us, it is the book in which he explains brainstorming. He sets the rules, and he gives the criteria for the situations in which brainstorming could be a good method to use. The rules survived through history, the criteria did not. The latter is making brainstorming a misunderstood method. More on brainstorming in chapter 7.
• 1952: ‘Wake up your mind’. And the subtitle: ‘101 ways to develop your creativeness’. How is that for a word: creativeness. I don’t know anything about this book. The title suggests that it is one of the first tool books with creativity techniques.
• 1953: ‘Applied Imagination’. It is a bit similar to Your Creative Power with loads of examples from governments, households, marriages, education, raising children, and business. The Cold War obviously influences his drive to educate people in creativity. Oh and women are also very creative, they have to think up something new to cook every evening… This book differs from Your Creative Power in the way that it gives more tools for brainstorming and also exercises to practise your creative thinking.

If you want to know more about brainstorming you should read Your Creative Power. If you are looking for quotes, read any of them. They are filled with good ones. For example, the ‘Aluminium Company coined “imagineering”: ‘you let your imagination soar and then engineer it down to earth’’ (Osborn, 1498: p5).  Imagineering, what an awesome word.

After writing these books Osborn was not done. He founded the Creative Education Foundation in his hometown Buffalo, New York in 1954. And together with an organizational psychologist, Sidney Parnes, he created Creative Problem Solving (CPS) as a method to enhance creative thinking and solve problems. More on CPS in chapter 5. Whatever we think is true on creativity came from Buffalo (and it still does).

Creative thinking according to Osborn

Osborn says in his books (1948, 1953) there are two kinds of thinking used to solve problems:

• Creative thinking: the type of thinking in which you have to use your imagination and generate ideas (ideation).
• Judgmental thinking: the type of thinking in which you have to analyse and criticize.

The first is about creating options, the second it about choosing options. In his opinion, we need more of the first type of thinking to solve pressing societal problems. And to stimulate imagination and thus creative thinking in groups Osborn invented  ‘brainstorming’. And one of the rules in brainstorming is that ‘quantity is wanted. The more ideas we pile up, the more likelihood of winners’ (Osborn, 1948, p:269). So, more ideas are better than fewer ideas.

Difference between Guilford and Osborn

Now it becomes tricky, pay attention. What Guilford calls divergent thinking, Osborn calls creative thinking. Osborn’s definition of creative thinking is lacking the convergent part Guilford attributes to creative thinking. Osborn says that choosing the options is not part of creative thinking, while for Guilford that is part of creative thinking. Osborn’s language made us believe that creative thinking equals idea generation. Maybe the picture below helps. To summarize in a picture:

To summarize in words: 

• Guilford: Creative thinking = divergent thinking + convergent thinking
• Osborn: Creative thinking = imagination = idea generation

Why do we also think ideation is the same as divergent thinking?

• Ideating without diverging is about coming up with as many ideas as possible (fluency)
• Ideating with diverging is about coming up with as many ideas as possible (fluency) but also that are different from each other (flexibility).