Creativity Comes from the Basics

Popular notions of creativity include that idea that, to become creative, one needs to tackle many different things at once. Whether it's a creative endeavour or a creative bent to an otherwise standard solution, it's all about the number of approaches you produce.

If you've heard of brainstorming, then this might something you're familiar with. One session could consist of an original question, and a hour-long 'idea storm' where everyone contributes different solutions to the question. The only rule applicable to such an approach is that no idea shall be shot down and everything should be included. After the session, a list of ideas could now be rated and analyzed. The logic behind is that by having numerous options to choose from, one could come up with the best idea.

But one tends to forget that creativity is also a matter of synthesis. A creative individual not only juggles ideas and proposes divergent solutions to a problem, he should also be able to converge different and distinct ideas together to develop an original approach. This might be better illustrated by a particular principle in educational psychology.

In the 1950's, Benjamin Bloom created a way to represent thinking into three distinct categories-cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. These categories became universally known as Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives which in turn became the basis for educational planning especially in the classrooms. Revised in the 1990's by Lorin Anderson (a former student of Bloom's) to reflect more contemporary researches in cognitive psychology, the final taxonomy for the Cognitive Domain (or the Anderson Revised Taxonomy) looks like this:

1. Remembering
2. Understanding
3. Applying
4. Analyzing
5. Evaluating
6. Creating

What this tells us is that, for any domain of knowledge, we follow stages which reflect evolutions in our own thinking about a subject. Asking who, where, and when is a Remembering Task, while constructing the timeline of the story is an Understanding Task. Asking to explain the story in one's own words is an Applying task, while distinguishing the morals and values of the story is an Analyzing Task. Lastly, asking to judge the appropriateness of the story for different situations is an Evaluating Task while asking one to create a similar story with the same morals is a Creating Task.

Take note that the endpoint of the process is 'creating'. This leads us to know that to become creative, we first need to master the tools of the trade; we can never really know what's there to look out for unless we've already had a hefty sample from our own experience. We can compile lots of examples using the above illustration, and all would point out to the same thing: we must have to have the foundational expertise to turn a particular subject in on its head, inside-out and round and about to be able to generate an original, ingenious, and useful idea about the topic. Creativity is first a function of mastery.

Of course, we can create something new per se with only a modicum of skill - it isn't really rocket science to produce lots of results. But wouldn't it be better if the ideas we generate are useful in addition to being creative? Master the topic and creativity will follow.