Afterthoughts on creative personality
Just in case you missed this week’s afterthoughts on creative personality...
Creative personality is like a trout fisherman’s fly box
Seasoned fly fishers have to consider a lot of information when selecting the ideal fly for a specific lake or loch on a particular day if they are to catch their prey, the elusive brown trout. First, there is the local insect activity. What flies are hovering around the water, and what creepy-crawlies are skimming its surface? What are their sizes and colours? How are they behaving? Then there’s the light: bright and sunny through to dull and overcast. And the transparency of the water: clear through murky. There’s also the behaviour of the fish when they rise: a splash, a swirl, a dimple or a wake. Seasoned fishers take note of all these criteria in the blink of an eye, and are already reaching into their fly box to select the best fly, while a novice would still be working out where the wind is coming from. If they have chosen well, they might encounter success. If they have chosen badly, they reassess and go again.
Creative personality is exactly the same. For each act of creativity, we chose the specific set of attributes we believe will help us achieve our creative objectives. This selection similarly rests on observation, experience, assessment, and decisiveness. The main difference is that our choices are infinite whereas the poor fishers can only use what’s in their fly box that day.
Be a clever clown
Another noble profession that has a binary stereotype is that of being a clown. In the right context, everyone loves a clown. Slapstick never grows old. And circus clowns intentionally set themselves as a target for laughter and humiliation. No harm done. Indeed, being a clown in a creative situation can sometimes be very productive. On the other hand, in the wrong context, being a clown can be a dangerous choice. “This is serious business. Why are you fooling around?”
One time, I was asked to anchor a management conference in the UK for a French multinational: 200+ senior managers and leaders in a big, posh room for two days. I got things started with my characteristic rockstar welcome (see post #7 on changing beliefs). I wanted to signal that this conference was going to be different. 200+ suited and booted people hooting, shouting, whistling, and clapping was a sight to behold (in a very good way).
At the morning coffee break, as I was setting up for the next session, the Global People Officer returned to the empty room and strode purposefully towards me. He came right up close and whispered in my ear, in his wonderfully French-tinted English accent, “You’re a clown!”
My heart sank.
He let the pause lengthen for two or three seconds too long, and then said, “A very clever clown.”
He smiled and left.
The conference was a success.
Our creative comfort zone
There is a strong correlation between our (creative) personality and our (creative) comfort zone, because personality guides behaviour.
The idea of many creative attributes, each on a continuum with a ‘positive’ at one end and a ‘negative’ at the other and differing degrees of comfort operating between extremes, suggests that we each have a unique profile, a comfort zone within which we are confident about being creative.
There is no one right way to be creative. Indeed, this perspective suggests that there is an almost infinite number of ways of being creative.
And whenever we have an opportunity (or are forced) to work outside our comfort zone, growth follows, and our comfort zone extends.
Context is everything
My research focused on the idea that we bring a different version of ourselves to every social interaction and creative expression.
We consider the circumstances, think about what we want to achieve, consider the other players, and construct (or retrieve and adapt) the transient identity we feel will best serve us in that situation. We do this in real time, sometimes under duress.
It’s an amazing feat, considering all the information that we have to juggle in the blink of an eye and in parallel with dealing with whatever we’re doing.
No two creative endeavours are the same. Even when they look identical, it might be a different day, we might be in a different mood, the composition of the other players might be slightly different, or a thousand other aspects might be subtly or substantially different.
Consequently, each version of ourselves is different. It’s just a matter of degree.
So, context is everything. Equally, each new mini-me is an act of creativity. It didn’t exist before we constructed it, and it did exist afterwards. We have brought something into being. That’s creativity!
Feedback: bah, humbug!
Think about some feedback you received recently, especially if it’s about performance (at work, in sport, whatever).
Almost certainly, somewhere in there, you will have been told, for example, “You need to be more thorough,” or, “You need to be more organised.”
Just reflect on this for a moment. It’s not particularly helpful.
First of all, prefacing feedback with “You need to...” is almost certain to turn us off, aggravate us, and make us less susceptible to guidance. Having someone help us to get to “I want to...” is harder but smarter. Discussion for another day.
From the perspective of creative personality, being more thorough or more organised will inevitably only be part of the solution. Attributes do not operate in isolation. The version of ourselves, our personality in the moment, is a complex mix of many attributes which operate in unison to guide our behaviour.
If you’re on the receiving end of the feedback, you might think about asking, “What else might help?”
If you’re on the offering end, take a moment to think about some more nuanced feedback.
Dealing with attacks on our (creative) personality
The insults we receive are, by definition, personal. They are an attack on our person, and therefore on our personality and our identity. They are often delivered in front of an audience with the dual objective of putting someone down and simultaneously humiliating them.
If the insult is associated with creative expression, the memory of the experience gets added to the pot labelled “All the reasons why I’m not creative,” and our creative lights dim a little.
This thought comes with a warning to take care.
Whenever I am insulted (which, thankfully, is a rarer occurrence nowadays), I smile broadly and say, “Thank you!” This confuses the living daylights out of the perpetrator, because this is not the response they expected. If I’m interested in digging deeper, I then ask what led them to make that statement. This shifts the power dynamic. Power always lies with the interrogator. If I’m not, I exit stage left and leave them wondering what just happened.
Instead of dimming our creative lights, this alternative response results in a flicker, like there’s been a brief power interruption, and then they burn brightly again, and the memory has positive emotions attached to it.
If you decide to test drive this thought, be careful with delivery tone and body language.
The domain-general/domain-specific debate
Like all fields of research, creativity has its unresolved debates. One that has raged for years is whether creativity is domain-general (applicable across any field of human endeavour) or domain-specific (applicable solely to a particular space).
The critical failure of this debate is that it characterises creativity as a uniform entity. If, instead, we portray it as having three dimensions, the knowledge, skills, and attributes associated with creativity, we see that creativity is both domain-specific and domain-general. Knowledge and skills can be highly domain-specific. A person might regard themselves as highly creative in, say, packaging design. However, that won’t make them highly creative in, say, hydrodynamics. However, that same person can be equally inquisitive, challenging, persistent, and any number of other creative characteristics in either domain. Attributes are highly transferable. Knowledge and skills sometimes less so.
One (creativity) skill I possess, which is highly domain-general, is the ability to ask stupid questions (because sometimes they’re not).
PS Many Nobel Prizes have been awarded to people working outside their own domains. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002. He integrated psychological research into economic judgment and decision-making. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors. They are biologists. I rest my case.