The Fields

While the domains provide the architecture for creativity, the fields determine which innovation makes it through. Only a tiny percentage of creative ideas will make a lasting impression on the domain, and become part of that domain. Cultures need to be conservative, there are far too many good ideas, compared to what we can judge and implement without descending into chaos.

Members of the field are the cultural arbitrators of what information or skill is added to the domain. Fields vary greatly in amount of members, and their specialisations. It is not uncommon for several fields to interact, we've all heard of 'musicians bands' beloved by other musicians but with no great following by the music press or people at large.

Fields can affect the rate of creativity in three main ways:

• Being reactive or proactive - How engaged is a field in stimulating novelty? Are the members of the field actively seeking new ideas, spending in research and development, attending technology conferences, sponsoring prizes etc.
• The filter - How liberal or conservative is the field, do they accept a lot of novelty at once or only allow a few ideas to be deliberated over? Some fields move very quickly, like technology, others are more staid, like insurance, or accountancy (at least in popular imagination).
  
• Connection to the wider cultural systems - fields which have good connections to the greater society can channel resources into their given domain. This is why so many large organisations employ lobbyists. Connections can ensure legislation is conducive to the domain, additional funds are channeled into the domain, graduates are attracted etc.
  

The first objection I hear when discussing fields is usually, "but everyone is creative, we don't need other people to tell us we're creative." While to me the thought that ideas can't really be creative unless knowledgeable people say they are is stunningly obvious I seem to be in a minority, and I think there are powerful social and cultural barriers at work as well. The continued dominance of individual and personal views of creativity, (the lonely and suffering artist mentality), has come to dominate the idea of creativity as it is trained and disseminated in organisations. Unless some balance is brought to the study of creativity by examining the group and the systems, businesses will continue to waste funds and squander the good ideas already being generated.

The second major objection, is this idea of liberal and conservative fields. It is easy to think of the sexy pro-active organisations like Apple and Google, and think they must have the monopoly on being creative, while forgetting about the proactive organisations that failed in their field during the dotcom era, or the dozens which will no doubt follow in the current recession. There are excellent reasons for fields to be conservative, the market you are in, economic conditions etc. For instance I don't really want my accountant allowing too many creative ideas into my tax returns, though any executives of Enron reading this can feel free to differ. This may also explain why so many "creativity initiatives" of the blue sky thinking variety are so painfully dull, moribund, and unfocused.

Only by a thorough understanding of the domain and field your organisation operates in can you understand what the real value adding creative and innovative ideas are.

The Domains

Much of human knowledge is symbolic in nature, we understand the world through shared references, metaphors, cliches and other approximations. This symbolic knowledge is bundled into units called domains. There are millions of small and large domains, from Gregorian chanting to Accountancy, each with their own rules, notations, and intricacies. Shared domains add up to create culture, and as domains change so to does the culture.

We use domains as our primary means of making money, I will be an accountant, or a nurse, a social worker or an artist. For better or worse we structure our organisations around the domains, we have functional specialties in Accounting, Human Resources, Operations etc.

Domains are made of three dimensions

• Clarity of structure
  
• Centrality within the culture
• Accessibility to information / knowledge / symbols of the domain

Csikszentmihalyi gives an illustrative example of how domains can be used to predict the creativity of an organisation. Suppose we have two drug companies, each structured in similar ways and spending the same amount on research and development how might we predict which one will come up with a new drug first?

To answer the question we need to know three facts, Which has the most detailed data about pharmacology, effects etc? Which has the best way of disseminating information? Where is it easier to test hypotheses?

The organisation where knowledge is better structured, more central and more accessible will usually be he more creative and more likely to develop new drugs. The same is true for any domain within an organisation

A systems approach to creativity

So if individual creativity is only half the picture, what does the whole picture look like?

Csikszentmihalyi believes creativity can be seen in the relationship three interrelated parts, the domain, the field and the individual.

The domain is a set of symbolic rules and procedures, these can exist at more and more granular levels, for example biology is a domain, with genetics, molecular biology etc as domains within the broader domain. In business functional departments can be seen as domains, HR, Finance, projects etc.

The field are the gatekeepers of the domain, these are the "experts" who allow new information, ideas and products into the domain. In modern organisations the field/s could be senior managers, experts in a particular discipline, or even cohesive teams.

Individuals can be consideredcreative when he uses the symbols, rules and procedures of the domain to invent some new idea or product which is accepted by in it's field and becomes part of the domain. As new ideas become part of the domain new individuals use these innovations to make new creative discoveries and so the system moves on continually improving itself.

A systems definition of creativity then would be:

An act, idea or product which changes an existing domain into a new on. A creative individual is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain or establish a new domain.

What is creativity?

While the definition of creativity has changed over time, we tend -particularly as westerners, since the enlightenment - to view creativity as a process which happens inside peoples heads. Individuals are creative, and attracting and retaining these kinds of individuals builds creative institutions and organisations. A popular definition which most people would agree with would be:

'an idea or action which is new and valuable'

The problem with this definition is one of context, who decides what is new and valuable? The individual? Society? Institutions?

Organisations looking to attract creative individuals are only seeing half the picture, what if creativity is emergent from within the system? What if creativity is actually dependeant on the cultural boundaries of the organisation? What would the conditions for improving creativity be? How could organisations utilise these conditions to create more innovative structures and cultures?

The psychology of creativity

If like me you have attended or delivered creativity courses you have probably heard about brainstorming, goal setting, inductive and deductive reasoning, six thinking hats and the like. But none of the courses I have seen have much to say about creativity itself. How do we define it? What are the conditions under which creativity "appears"? Are some people born more creative? What can organisations do at a macro level to encourage creativity? What value does it actually add?

This is the start of a series of blog posts exploring the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist and business lecturer, leader in the field of positive psychology and in possession of one of the most unpronounceable surnames in modern psychology. His defining contribution (to date) has been the idea of flow: a state of concentration and complete absorption in an activity which leads to a perfect state of happiness.

Csikszentmihalyi studied creativity by interviewing hundreds of people who are considered creative in their field, including poets, novelists, and Nobel prize winners in various disciplines. Among his more interesting observations on the psychology of creativity include:

• Creative people tend to be happy and positive people not suffering artists.
  
• It is much easier to change the system or culture to encourage creativity than to make individuals more creative.
• People cannot be considered creative unless they are recognised as such by peers in their particular domain or specialty.

Future posts will expand on these points and explore the applications for organisational learning.