Can you measure creative talent?
Can you measure creative talent?
The world is split between those people who believe themselves to have a high creative abiilty and those who believe themselves to have none.
Whenever I run creative skills workshops I ask if anyone in the room believes they will be bad at the exercises we are about the attempt. Half of the room put up their hands. The other half relish the opportunity to grapple with a creative challenge - inventing a product, designing a new department, envisioning the future business strategy...whatever it might be.
So, does self-perception and actual ability tend to coincide?
Well, there are two conventional ways to answer that question...both of which I agree with.
The first is that everyone has creative ability given the right situation. By the end of a session like that, if it is well designed and facilitated, everyone has been able to contribute ideas or contribute to the generation of ideas, which is equally vital.
The second is that just as some people have a natural preference for structure and some people have a natural preference for introversion, some people have a natural preference for creative work. And they tend to be the ones with a gift (we tend to enjoy what we are good at).
But that still doesn't address whether they all recognise their gift. Creativity is often misunderstood when it manifests itself in early childhood. Children who ask a lot of questions, draw disturbing pictures or cause disruption are often thought to be suffering from behavioural problems. These days in some parts of the world they are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. Elsewhere, even if they are not drugged up, they are often labelled as problem children, punished by having to carry out repetitive, meaningless tasks such as lines, and assumed to be "least likely to succeed".
However, such behaviour could be evidence of a highly creative mind and research at the University of Georgia by E Paul Torrance and the Torrance Center has shown that many of these "problem" kids are hugely imaginative and innovative given the opportunity to express themselves.
Because creativity has been so misunderstood, many adults do not recognise their own innate creative talent. They only know themselves to have struggled at school, to have been in trouble as a child, to be misfits in the corporate world or to struggle with tasks that other people seem to do with ease.
And because of this misunderstanding, employers often miss the signs of creativity too.
This is not to say that all creative people are unsuccessful, troublesome misfits. Far from it! They often use their creativity to find ways to succeed in the world. But consequently they may blend with the rest of the workforce and be hard to identify.
As a result of the 40 years of work done by E Paul Torrance and the Torrance Center there are now a number of tests to establish innate creative talent and rate the participant according to the norms of the rest of society. The test can be carried out on anyone from a small pre-school child to a senior executive. It's the same test...just measured in a slightly different way.
And the results can be very valuable in business:
• A good result can boost an employee who wondered where his place was in the organisation.
• It can help recruiters and leaders select and promote a fair proportion of creative individuals up the organisation.
• It can help managers form rounded teams.
• And it can help explain some behavioural issues which may have been hard to explain before.
As I meet business professionals I often hear the claim that there is a shortage of creative people in their business. I have written a great deal already about how companies tend to suffocate creativity at the very same time as trying to encourage it (this is not intentional but comes about partly because the sheer size of many organisations makes it hard for ideas to survive, and the culture of decision-making doesn't allow for a free flow of ideas). However, with the ability to test for creativity and measure individuals against a set of norms, I believe many companies could discover they have a huge untapped resource already inside their business. All they need to do then is figure out how to release it!
