Kreativitetens Filosofi

Two examples of frequently mentioned creative environments are Vienna at the beginning of the last century and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA, that enjoyed its heyday a few decades later. These two environments were characterized above all by the scores of well-known people who either spent research time there or were employed there. The fact, however, that the most renowned researchers are not always the most creative of people leaves us a little bewildered by the automatic choice of these examples. Authorities like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and Sigmund Freud held sway in Vienna and -- with the help of abundant financial resources -- Princeton was able to attract established and well-respected researchers fleeing Hitler. We hardly need pursue this discussion any further in order to understand the importance of finding some more genuine examples.

One thing I have always been wary of is navel-gazing. However, some of the most well known books on creativity have been written by people reflecting on their own life-work, or on environments of which they have had personal experience. I am now going to commit the same sin and draw on my own experiences in order to say something about what it is that characterises a creative environment.

An attentive person can sense the creativity that exists in an environment from the very moment of stepping through the door for the first time. I have had the pleasure of encountering a couple of genuinely creative environments. A characteristic of one of these two places was the warm laughter that spilled out onto the corridors, coming undoubtedly as both a surprise and joy to any visitor. It was laughter that was full of productive ideas and, more importantly, intellectual fellowship, mutual understanding and human warmth. The other environment I have in mind was very different, but equally creative. At this workplace, too, warmth embraced each and every person that crossed the threshold. Even if these two places, and many other creative environments I have been in, have their own very distinctive features, they nonetheless share some overtly similar characteristics

It is easier to recognise the successful environments when you can compare them with places that are less fortunate — and here I am ‘lucky’ because I have also had the more dubious pleasure of finding myself in environments of completely the opposite kind. The thing that really strikes me in retrospect, and this may be a retrospectively constructed impression or an accurate rendition of my experience, is that the very first thing I sensed upon setting foot into these environments was a feeling of being trapped. It felt damp and musty. A distinct and heavy academic smell of death hung in the air. One had a strong urge to open the windows and air the place out. No sooner had I arrived than the pointless, lifelong conflicts began to reveal themselves, as did the groundless complaints, jealous guarding of one’s territory and academic inbreeding.

What is it that creative environments possess that uncreative environments don’t? I certainly have no ambition to list all of the similarities and differences, but it would be useful to point out a few of the factors that I believe can influence an atmosphere. My recipe is very simple. It contains but nine basic ingredients.

generosity

Creative environments are generous environments. One of their prerequisites is the sharing of knowledge and experience. In the light of this prerequisite, the structure of scientific careers looks far from being conducive to creativity, with the young PhD student fiercely clutching onto his ideas so that no one else can beat him through the posts. And so it goes on. The hunt for newer, higher, and more prestigious positions makes the researcher unwilling to impart any of his as yet partially developed ideas. He is more than happy to discuss what he has already done, and what he has published, but is reluctant to reveal anything about his work in progress. This behaviour is completely understandable and rational given the circumstances, but it is nonetheless a serious impediment to creativity. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to do anything about the mechanisms that initiate the behaviour in the first place.

a sense of community

It would presumably be impossible to build a creative environment without a true sense of community. A colleague of mine likes to tell the story of two interdisciplinary research projects that he was involved in over a number of years.

He describes the first project in the following way. On day one, the project leader called together the research group and went through all the formalities, allocated rooms, gave out keys and security passes, and then wished everyone the best of luck with their work. The project never managed to achieve the results it was set up to produce. The researchers sat in their offices. They carried on chasing their tails over problems they had already studied without pursuing any contact with their colleagues.

The second project started off in a slightly different fashion. On day one, the project leader called together researchers, maintenance men, assistants and secretaries and took them all off on a weeklong bus trip. The object of the trip was to visit renowned medieval German churches. The project was to focus on the foundations and the history of statistics and probability, and the researchers’ interest in medieval churches was likely to be somewhat limited.After a couple of days on the road and too many churches already, some were ready to quit the project and others were discussing how to get rid of the project leader. But the real purpose of the trip was obviously not to enhance the scientific knowledge of the researchers, but rather to generate a sense of belonging in the group – to create a community. And the bus trip did that job. According to my colleague, the project is one of the most successful, productive and creative experiences he has had.

It takes time to get to know someone who comes from a completely different background. Scientists can share the same mother tongue, but nonetheless speak very different languages. My experience has taught me that genuinely creative environments are able to overcome the cultural differences that demarcate the world of science, without having to sacrifice a sense of individual identity.

qualifications

One thing characterising the creative environments I have been party to is the solid scientific qualifications of the researchers. Researchers display awareness both of what they do know and what they do not know. One thing that most definitely does not promote scientific creativity is the lack of scientific qualifications. In my experience, a person who is secure in his knowledge of his own specialist area is much better equipped to step out into unfamiliar territory. By the same token, it is difficult to generate a creative conversation with a person who is constantly striving to demonstrate his scientific qualifications.

cultural diversity

Vertical skills are necessary in a creative environment, but so too are horizontal skills. While uniformity can serve to promote productivity, it seldom promotes creativity. In one sense, then, all universities and institutes of higher education are organised in completely the wrong way. For the purposes of education, it is important to have separate departments of philosophy, mathematics and psychology. This facilitates the passing on of knowledge. But from the point of view of research, this kind of organisation tends to favour repetitive, unimaginative work. We let scientific space be determined by artificial boundaries that are governed by disciplinary boundaries, and as a result we become entrenched in mechanical research in isolated subject areas. The result is a fruitless departmentalisation of work.

Much has been written about cultural differences. One example is the awkward behaviour of Westerners when faced with unfamiliar cultures. But such cultural differences also exist in the domain of science. I have occasionally worked with psychologists and lawyers, as well as with researchers from other disciplines, faculties and scientific cultures. My experience is that it takes both a long time and goodwill to achieve an understanding of one another’s scientific idiosyncrasies, but that it is well worth the trouble. If we can enter into other traditions or activities with a little open-mindedness, we nearly always find that it promotes our own work. Cultural diversity is thus an indispensable ingredient in the creative environment.

trust and tolerance

Psychologists have shown that trust is an important commodity - particularly when issues concerning risk communication and risk management are at stake Among other things, it has been found that it takes time to win someone’s trust, and even then it is very easily eradicated by one or more foolhardy acts (Paul Slovic “Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics, and Science: Surveying the Risk Assessment Battlefield”, The University of Chicago Legal Forum, volume 1997).

There is also evidence showing that some of these trust-violating events are more “explicit” than others, and this is quite simply due to the fact that we are quicker to spot someone’s mistakes than we are to appreciate his achievements. We can carry out a hundred good deeds without anyone noticing them, whilst a single mistake is always eagerly noted. The argument concludes that one trust-breaking occurrence carries more weight than the trust-creating process itself. Given that bad news is considered more reliable than good news, the bad news carries enormous weight when it comes to the breakdown of trust. If you have been untrustworthy on one occasion, then, fairly or unfairly, you will be marked with the same untrustworthiness on another.

A creative environment must be built on foundations of reciprocal trust and tolerance. Trust-breaking mechanisms have to be controlled and their effects neutralised. If ideas are the bearers of creativity, then it is important to cultivate an environment in which people are open to alien thoughts and courageous enough to break the rules.

To generate trust is to safeguard against ridicule. The person who feels this security can afford to be bold.

equality

Another prerequisite of creativity is equality. This does not, of course, mean equality in its naïve sense, in which the need for a boss, a treasurer, a secretary or a maintenance man is denied. On the contrary, the creative environments I have experienced have had a very well defined structure of responsibility. A researcher’s time should be spent doing research and not making photocopies of reports, attending to administration and fixing computers – for the very obvious reason that more often than not there are others who are far better trained to do this kind of work. A creative environment cannot afford the waste of resources that this type of equalising requires. In any case, equalising does not necessarily produce equality.

In the creative environments that I have in mind, no one has ever been raised to, or given, the status of a guru. Everyone has worked with the same status, generosity, enthusiasm and power in order to reach a common research goal.

The environments in which I have seen a guru, on the other hand, have been characterised by signs of stagnation. The reason for this is very simple. Most of the energy in such institutions is spent on tributes to the guru. One prominent feature of places with a guru at their head is that the other people in the environment tend to be not much more than poor imitators. What you will be listening to is but a choir of epigons.

curiosity

Can an environment be curious? Of course not, but it is possible to generate an atmosphere that draws out curiosity between colleagues and co-workers. A critical element of creative environments is that every kind of curiosity between heaven and earth should be found and stimulated. It is impossible to underestimate the stimulation that radiates from colleagues who share a wealth of different interests. A genuine interest in film, cooking or animals, for instance, gives a greater scope of experience, which is extremely important for creativity and problem solving.

One striking difference between the creative and uncreative environments I have visited is the intellectual acuity and curiosity about life in general displayed in the former. In the creative environment, a traditional research seminar on human decision-making can quite easily end with an animated political discussion or the analysis of a film shown on TV the night before.

freedom of spirit

There is a story of a Finnish long distance runner who applied for supplementary funding in anticipation of a European championship. His letter of application was as simple as this: “I intend to win both the 5000m and the 10000m races at the European championship.” He received the funding and duly fulfilled his promise.

A creative environment does not define the finer details of an activity. There is a goal. The way to the goal is not determined in advance. The very idea of finding a creative solution to a problem implies that one has the freedom to reach that solution in ways that have not yet been travelled – that is, to solve a problem with methods that have yet to be invented and tested.

One common argument is that one cannot simply dish out research resources or funding so haphazardly. But why not? If you want to reach a goal, win victories, or gain new skills, then you have to be willing to take risks. If you back the wrong horse and fall short of your own or others’ expectations, you are under no obligation to back the same horse the next time.

Applications for research or training funding that require one to describe the way to the goal in detail, setting out exactly how the training will be approached, or showing how the experiment will be carried out, do not encourage creativity. Such a system may guarantee results, but sadly it also guarantees repetition and lack of imagination.

small scale

A creative environment should not be too large. My experience suggests that a group of between 10 and 15 people is perfect. The environment must be big enough to give it a critical mass, but not so big that the colleagues lose contact with each other. This is why a university or a larger company can never generate a creative environment across the board. It is possible, however, to create small islands of creativity within large organisations.

For obvious reasons, it is difficult to pursue research on creative environments. At least, it is hard to undertake the type of research that delivers not only indirect knowledge but direct knowledge based on well-designed experiments. In studying creative environments, we are largely thrown upon resources such as comparative historical studies, anecdotal evidence, and what we know from experience.

There are, however, studies that either directly or indirectly support my observations. Evolutionary psychologists have found that grooming is an important cement of society. The function of grooming is to strengthen social bonds – bonds that are crucial for survival and reproduction. We see this clearly in primates, but all social animals groom. However, grooming takes time, and that means that the groups cannot be too large. There must be time for other activities – for example, the finding and eating of food. And there is a limit to what you can accomplish with a beak, a couple of claws, or two feet and two hands.

Among monkeys and apes, social grooming is known to be used to strengthen individual relationships. And the amount of time spent on grooming is proportional to group size. That means that in small groups you have time for other activities. In larger groups (50 animals or more) you must spend as much as a quarter of your day grooming. In practice this makes it hard to keep groups of around 80 individuals together, and it makes it almost impossible to have a cohesive group of 150 (because then you will be spending approximately half your day grooming).

But humans live and function in much larger groups. 150 individuals is not an unusual group size. It is well known, for example, that companies of between 150 and 200 employees have an optimal size, and that problems start to emerge when they grow larger. Evolutionary psychologists such as Robin Dunbar (Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language, Faber and Faber, London 1996.) argue that we can operate in larger groups (despite our limited physical resources: two feet and two hands) because we differ from other animals in having language. They point out that that conversation is but a vocal form of grooming.

Creativity is a demanding activity, a special type of problem-solving, requiring you to be, among other things, imaginative, ready to take risks and willing to break rules. To be creative, we need an environment offering trust, tolerance, generosity and fellowship, and one that allows for mistakes. This, of course, demands a particular type of time-consuming grooming. The grooming mechanisms have to be extra sturdy, creating at one and the same time pliant and hard-wearing ties between individuals. My observation that when it comes to creative environments there seems to be an upper threshold at around 15 individuals seems to be both supported and explained by evolutionary psychology.

My observations are obviously based on my own personal experience of universities and research institutes. This raises the question whether there are any important differences between the way in which creative research environments function and the way in which creative environments function in other areas. As far as I can see there is no evidence to suggest that there are.

It is also easy to see that creative environments are fragile – fragile, in the sense that even the smallest change can lead to the collapse of its structure. In order to maintain its structure, a creative environment needs to recruit people who will “fit in”. Recruitment should be carried out on a holistic basis, rather than by allowing publication lists and CVs to dictate decisions on their own.

why are there so few creative environments?

What I have said can be read as a kind of recipe for the generation of a creative environment. The ingredients are as simple as they are self-explanatory. Yet despite the artlessness of the recipe, there are very few genuinely creative environments. Why is this?

The answer is not very pleasant: We are driven by pride, greed, gluttony, envy, lust, anger, all shot through with an arrow of sloth. We have all met them – the peccata mortalia hooligans. They act among us, but still worse, they act for and within us.

This is a translation of the final chapter of Sahlin, N.-E., Kreativitetens filosofi, Nya Doxa, Nora 2001. The translated was prepared by Linda Schenck. The text has for this purpose been rewritten and edited by the author. It is published with the kind permission of the publisher. If you want to buy the book I suggest: Adlibris or Nya Doxa.

creative environments:a simple recipe