What’s Creativity and Who’s Creative

Rajesh links to the transcript from a TV program about creativity, with a roundtable discussion featuring people like Ray Kurzweil and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (There’s also a Real video stream available.) Here are some quotes that I liked:

Ray Kurzweil: “We’ve been talking about great individual contributors, but when you’re creating technology it’s necessarily a group process, because technology today is so complex that it has to be interdisciplinary. In my companies, for example, experts in speech, speech recognition, signal processing, computers, and linguistics all need to work together. And they’re all essentially speaking their own languages, even about the same concepts. So we will spend months establishing our common language [...].” (This made me think about team culture.)

Kurzweil: “Flow [as defined by Csikszentmihalyi] is hard enough to achieve for an individual, because our daily needs and problems distract us from connecting in that profound way with the creative task at hand. But it’s even harder to achieve flow in a group, because political issues often arise within the group, and people aren’t all communicating. To really achieve that kind of flow in a group, everybody has to be firmly connected to the project – to the point that when ideas arise from the group, you don’t necessarily know exactly whose idea it was. Groups form because they can accomplish things that individuals never can. There’s a blending of perspectives.” (Again, team culture.)

Csikszentmihalyi: “Practically all of the hundred people I interviewed in my study of very creative individuals – ninety out of a hundred – had pretty bad things to say about their formal education. They usually had one or two teachers who made a big difference in their lives and whom they remembered fondly. But the structured, mass-produced instruction that their schools generally provided was something they just couldn’t take.”

Kurzweil: “An important part of creativity is failure and one’s attitude toward it. My view of failure is that it’s just success deferred. But not everybody feels that way. If you’re afraid of failing, if that’s a devastating experience, then you can’t be creative. You have to see disappointment as part of the inner process of getting to where you need to go.” (Interesting in the light of the apparent popularity of “defensive” processes in software development.)

Csikszentmihalyi: “You can’t ever achieve much if you fear failure—because, as everybody here says, that’s how you learn.”

Csikszentmihalyi (in response to the question “Fast-forward a hundred years. Where is creativity making its greatest contribution to society?”): “Technological creativity is certainly going to continue and flourish, but I’m not sure that will be formal creativity’s most important contribution in the future. Humanity needs a creativity that can help us find our place in this evolving cosmos, so that we can respect one another, live together peacefully, and not destroy one another in order to feel good about ourselves.”