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“Why Thinking of Others
Improves Our Creativity“

David Burkus
cSchool Faculty

Imagine you’re locked in a tower. Better yet, imagine someone else is locked in a tower.

Besides perhaps savoring the moment of schadenfreude that comes with locking someone in an imaginary tower, such visualization also yields some insights into how to our own creativity works. It turns out, we’re more creative when we’re solving the problems of others rather than our own.

Professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich asked 137 undergraduates the following riddle:

“A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?”

They asked half the participants to imagine themselves as the prisoner locked inside the tower and the other half to imagine someone else trapped in the imaginary prison. In the first group, those locked in the tower, less than half (48%) the participants solved the riddle. In the second group, nearly two-thirds (66%) found the solution. Polman and Emich had similar findings in related studies. In one they asked participants to draw an alien for use in a short story that either they or someone else would write. In another they asked participants to come up with gift ideas for themselves, someone close to them or someone they barely knew. Across the three experiments, Polman and Emich found that participants generate more creative ideas or better solutions when focused on someone else rather than themselves.

This isn’t just the creative power of altruism. The results strengthen an the theory that when we think of the situations we are in, we tend to think more concretely and can struggle to generate new ideas, whereas when we think about the situations others are in, especially situations distant from our own reality, we tend to widen our perspective and generate ideas that are a little more abstract – more like the creative ideas we might need.

Lisa Bodell, the CEO of the global consulting firm futurethink, runs an idea generation exercise that leverages the efficacy of this other-directed creativity called “Kill the Company.” Bodell asks the teams she works with to imagine a competitor that looks exactly like their organization, with the same strengths, weaknesses and the same market conditions. The teams then list all the ways they could seize opportunities that would put the other company out of business as well as all the environmental threats that would force them to close their doors. Bodell finds that encouraging this perspective produces much better ides than traditional strategic exercises.

Like the tower puzzle, the “Kill the Company” exercise benefits from taking a real situation and making it more abstract, which might free the mind to generate more abstract solutions. Both are powerful reminders that if we want to make better and more creative decisions, it helps to broaden our perspective and get beyond our own problems.

In case you’re still trapped in the tower here is the solution: the prisoner split the rope in half lengthwise, tired the two halves together, and climbed down.

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                     “Creativity and Maslow”

Kathy Goff, EdD
cSchool Program Director

Existing research on adults’ everyday cognition, in general, has not yet shown that traditional measures of intelligence are good predictors of real world outcomes (e.g. self-confidence, persistence, physical and emotional well-being, life- satisfaction, courage). The intelligence testing movement originated in attempts to predict academic competence, and so concerned itself with the prediction of school performance. Using familiar situations with prior knowledge and reasoning may be sufficient to solve some problems or dilemmas. However, there are many instances in everyday life in which new and different problems and dilemmas emerge and require some cognitive bridging or creativity.

Since creativity has been a term ordinarily reserved for exceptional individuals and extraordinary accomplishments, recognizing it in the practical, problem solving activities of ordinary people introduces another perspective for investigation.  Research on the adult development of creativity and related mental abilities has not been nearly as extensive as research conducted on intellectual abilities.

American psychology has busily occupied itself with only half of the picture of life and has neglected the other and perhaps, the more important half.  Maslow (1971) declared that science must account for all reality, not just the tidy, sequential portions of it. Maslow mischievously said that science could be defined as a technique whereby noncreative people can create.

Maslow distinguished between “special talent creativeness” and “self-actualizing creativeness.” Most creativity research has been conducted on “special talent creativeness.” Very little research has been conducted on “self-actualizing creativeness.”

Creativity and Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow was a pioneer, philosopher and foremost spokesman for humanistic psychologies. He questioned and explored human psychology. He created a positive and whole view of human nature. He discovered that human functioning was different for people who operate in a state of positive health rather than a state of deficiency. Maslow was one of the most influential psychologists and important contributors to our modern view of human nature.

Maslow developed the concept of self-actualization and defined it as an ongoing process of making growth choices. Self-actualization means experiencing life fully, vividly, selflessly with full concentration and total absorption.  Maslow theorized that the concept of creativeness and the concept of a healthy, self-actualizing, fully developed human may be one and the same.

Self-actualization may be described as the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities and the like. Such people seem to be fulfilling themselves and doing the best that they are capable of doing. They are people who have developed or are developing to the full stature of which they are capable.

Maslow studied the creativity of people who were positively healthy, highly evolved and mature, i.e. self-actualizing. He identified the following characteristics of self-actualizing creativeness (1987):
• Perception – fresh appreciation and wonder of the basic good of life; live more in the real world of nature than the verbalized world of concepts, expectations and beliefs
• Expression – ability to express ideas and impulses spontaneously and without fear of ridicule from others
• Childlike – innocence of perception and expressiveness, natural, spontaneous, simple, true, pure, uncritical
• Affinity for the unknown – open to experience; positively attracted by the unknown, the mysterious, the puzzling
• Resolution of dichotomies – ability to synthesize, unify, integrate; able to engage even opposites together
into unity
• Peak experiences – fearless, wonderful, ecstatic experiences which change the person and her/his perception of life

Maslow found that creativity is a universal characteristic of self-actualizing people. They are more spontaneous, more natural, more human than average. The creativeness of self- actualizing people seems to be kin to the naive and universal creativeness of unspoiled children.  Maslow believed that all self-actualizing people are always creative. Self-actualizing creativeness stresses these qualities :
• boldness
• courage
• freedom
• spontaneity
• integration
• self-acceptance

Self-actualizing people are very strong people with strong ethical and moral standards. Self-actualizing people infrequently allow convention to hamper them or inhibit them from doing anything they consider very important or basic. Their codes of ethics tend to be relatively autonomous and individual rather than conventional. Their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of people around them.

Self-actualizing people look out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise. Self-actualizing creativeness is “emitted” like a vibration, and it hits all of life, regardless of the problems. It is emitted like sunshine; it spreads all over the place; it makes some things grow and is wasted on rocks and other ungrowable things.