A Crisis of Creativity
Going into this research I had a lot of Hunches, or a lot of things that I thought to be true. Imitating a good designer or researcher, I jotted those things down. These questions and statements would give my initial research a starting point, some things to start looking into that I could prove or valid or invalid.
One of the first thoughts, gut feelings, or intuitions that got me started on this road was a general feeling that the world is flat out less creative than it once was. I wrote a little about it in my first post, broadly defining what I saw as a crisis of creativity. I saw it pop-up in so many places. For one it seems like we’ve been trying to solve the same 3-4 fundamental issues in society for the last couple of decades without much process. Also, in talking with colleagues in creative fields (and from my own experience), work provides very little time and support for creative thinking and output – only monetizing and commodifying every moment of your time, leaving nothing left for thinking, exploration or learning.
All of that to say, my upfront hunches were mainly based on experience. But in my two months of research, not only is the feedback in the conversations I’m having generally supportive of the concept (with the caveat that I have very nice, supportive friends and colleagues that were perhaps just being polite), there is also data to support my theory.
Declining societal creativity
It’d be one thing if jobs, the polycrisis, and all of “this” *waves hands generally at the world* were causing us to have less time and mental energy to be creative. But there’s data to support that we've been in the midst of a societal creative decline since the ‘90s. In the past few years, researchers have been studying overall individual creativity and have seen a stark reduction in aggregate scores on the “Torrance Test,” sometimes called the IQ test for creativity, or at least divergent thinking. The primary researcher, Kyung Hee Kim, states the implications of their findings in the paper titled, Creativity Crisis (!!!), “The results indicate creative thinking is declining over time among Americans of all ages, especially in kindergarten through third grade.” But wait, it gets worse! They updated their findings in 2021 and the rate of decline is increasing…how fun!!
The world is a less colorful place
In one conversation where I brought up my theory about a crisis, the person I was talking to asked if I had heard that the world is less colorful than it used to be. Completely surprised, I immediately dug in. Lo, and behold, a study conducted by the Science Museum Group used a computer vision tool to analyze the images of their collection and concluded that “everyday objects may have become a little greyer and a little squarer over time.” Which is a very polite (and quite British) way to say we’ve designed a world where the objects in our lives are less colorful, albeit potentially more creative in their function (i.e., phone in 1950s was colorful vs. an iPhone, but an iPhone does a whole lot more), but their form has become far less interesting, kind of just these gray little boxes we carry around.
What’s going on?!?
It's hard to pin down one specific cause, as it’s a complex problem with interconnected causes that span across multiple disciplines and areas of modern life. From how we run schools and modern work, to healthcare and social safety nets, to modern media and technology, there are causes and blame to be shared in all of them. The broadest brush to paint across all of those things suggests that we’re simply “overstimulated and overscheduled.” The documented decline coincides pretty neatly with the western world becoming extremely efficient, but also very time consuming. A paradox that says we both never really have to be bored, but also never really have the time to be anyway.
What can we do?
Individually, the principle is pretty simple, if a little difficult in execution (I even wrote about it!); prioritizing ways to get uncomfortable and time being bored is kind of the whole thing. Meaning getting away from the slow drip of mild stimulation of our devices and trying to go do something new or even, and maybe especially, absolutely nothing.
On a societal level, that gets a little trickier, and starts to scrape at some of the ways we’ve decided to design or not design aspects of our society. In Adam Grant’s new book, Hidden Potential, he talks about how Finnish Schools embrace play based learning and early interventions for students who fall behind. Helping to inject creativity and ensuring that students have the support they need to be successful in school. At work, there are fundamental decisions that need to be made around the value of creativity. For creativity to work in an organization there are many factors (a piece that is coming soon!), but a large piece of the creativity puzzle is prioritizing safety, time, space and autonomy. Which doesn’t fit very neatly with a constant drive towards ever increasing productivity and profit.
As you can imagine, those are seismic shifts for a school or workplace to make. And trying to think about other societal interventions to allow for more creativity, gets to some of the bigger and stickier problems that exist in our world. Research after research says that psychological safety is the biggest determinant of how innovative and creative a group of people can be. Extrapolating that concept to a societal level, the world right now doesn’t feel particularly safe for a lot of folks. And, unfortunately, those solutions are outside the purview of this creativity researcher (for now, at least).
If you have any questions, would like to chat more about creativity or any of the other topics discussed here, I’d love to hear it. Send an email or a note on LinkedIn and let’s start a conversation. Also, a few folks I’ve spoken to missed the last few posts, so I’ve also added a section below to follow along in your email inbox.
