George Land's Creativity Test

In 1968, George Land conducted a study to test the creativity of 1,600 children between the ages of three and five who were enrolled in a preparatory program. This was the same creativity test he had developed for NASA to help select innovative engineers and scientists. It did so well that he decided to try it on children. He retested the same children when they were ten and again at fifteen. The results were amazing. 

Search results for 5 year olds: 98%

Search results for 10 year olds: 30%

Search results for 15 year olds: 12%

The same test was performed on 280,000 adults: 2% 

"What we have found," Land wrote, "is that uncreative behavior is learned."

Can creativity skills be taught?

Yes, creativity skills can be learned; not by sitting in a lecture, but by learning the processes of creative thinking and applying them. Here is a summary of research on the effectiveness of creativity training:

Over the past half century, many training programs have been proposed that focus on developing creativity abilities, and this study conducts a quantitative analysis of program evaluation efforts. Based on 70 previous studies, it has been found that well-designed creativity programs usually induce improvements in performance. An examination of the factors contributing to the relative effectiveness of these training programs suggests that many successful programs are likely to focus on developing cognitive skills along with the skills of experimentation and reasoning when applying the skill, and to use realistic exercises that are appropriate to the domain at hand.

                    

The three components of creativity:

Creative thinking:

• المهارات

•  Degree of flexibility

• الخيال

Experience:

Technical, procedural, and intellectual knowledge

Motivation:

Internal: affected by the work environment                    

External: Tangible Rewards

              

   

Creativity is a skill that can be developed and a process that can be managed:

 Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a branch of it, and mastering a way of thinking. We learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, thinking about the validity of hypotheses, using imagination, and gathering information.

Teaching Creativity at IBM

Every great leader is a creative leader. If creativity could be taught, how would it be?

In 1956, Lewis R. Mobley realized that IBM's success depended on teaching executives to think creatively rather than how to read financial reports. As a result, the IBM Executive School was built around these six insights:

First, traditional teaching methods—reading, lecturing, testing, and memorizing—are actually anti-productive. Most education focuses on providing step-by-step answers, and Mobley realized that asking radically different questions in a non-linear way is the key to creativity.  

Second, creativity is more about asking questions than learning creativity skills. The goal of the IBM Executive School was not to add more hypotheses, but to overturn existing hypotheses.

Third, we must not learn to be creative, but we must become one. A Marine does not learn to be a soldier by reading a manual; he becomes a soldier by experiencing boot camp. 

Fourthly:

The fastest way to become creative is to be around creative people. IBM's executive school was unstructured and unstructured, so most of the benefits came from interacting with people informally.

Fifth: Creativity is closely linked to self-knowledge. It is impossible to overcome biases if we do not know they exist.

Sixth: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, allow for mistakes. Every great idea grows out of hundreds of imaginative and seemingly illogical thoughts. The single biggest reason we can’t reach our creative potential is our fear of making mistakes.

Research on creativity

Learning to be creative is like learning a sport; it takes practice and training to build the right muscles, along with a supportive environment for them to flourish. Prolific research has shown that everyone has creative abilities, and the more and more you practice, the more creative potential you have. Research has also shown that quantity equals quality in creativity, and the longer the list of ideas, the higher the quality of the final solution, with the highest quality ideas often appearing at the end of the list.

Creative behavior is like the surface of a fast-flowing river, it is by nature continuous and renewable... Behavior flows and never stops changing, and creative behavior is constantly generated, but it is considered creative only when it carries within it some of the distinctive values ​​of society... Creativity is the basic process that drives all behavior that we have acquired to be classified as creative." Robert Epstein