My struggle with Creativity and what it means to be creative.

With the Cannes Lions festival on the go, I got started thinking about my own creative abilities, why don't I think of myself as a creative? Why would a corporate select an agency with a creative team, a creative director or even better 'creative' in the agency's name for a marketing campaign over a solutions driven agency, person or team? Why the fuck can't I draw and why is playing the guitar taking me so long to master?

Why the hell can't I be a creative? Perhaps the very word itself can help to halt the reliance on agencies which pitch themselves, via look, attitude and output as 'creative'.

Creativity comes from the Latin term 'cre?' and means "to create, make", therefore a pragmatic business decision, like the processes involved in selecting an accountant with a great track record could be considered creative.

To understand creativity however, we must look at those who imbued it with the attributes we now believe the word to possess.

Enlightenment era thinkers moved past the misgivings of early renaissance authors who'd suggested creativity wasn't a conscious act, so much as it was manifest due to divine inspiration, and instead began to see creativity a function of one's imagination. A unconscious cognitive process rather than a result of the divine.

The presumption that creativity is innate, not something you can practice and possibly even a 'gift' unfortunately stuck. Like a remora stuck to the underbelly of shark, it has fed on the scraps Culture ought to have ignored - feeding the myth that an outsider creative class exists and that to be creative is to possess an over active imagination, or an uncontrollable urge to think outside of what is known and not a skill.

The scientific paradigm has not ignored creativity, and has attempted to explain it as a separate cognitive function to intelligence, as part of a cognitive blend of processes and functions, as a direct result of a higher than average IQ, as a direct result of positive affect relations, a result of negative affect relations and lastly as a byproduct of schizotypal disorders. No conclusive model for cognition exists, nor therefore a complementary model for understanding creativity and the processes involved.

There are some pattern overlaps though at the individual level; a higher than average intellect, specialist knowledge, adequate REM sleep, and mood appear to be creative catalysts. Within corporates, and creative organisations, freedom of expression, an environment which rewards risk taking, incentivizes curiosity and allows autonomy appears to foster creative independent types at the expensive of corporate cohesion.

Whilst I have no conclusive evidence to show that creativity can be acquired or taught, I can argue that creativity isn't innate and therefore we can think of creativity as result of smart people conceiving of smart solutions to challenges in a domain in which they feel confident, and possess specialist expertise within.

I believe creativity then can be taught, can be given a space to flourish and you, like me, without the ability to draw so much as a stick man, can be thought of as a creative if you remain constantly curious about your field of interest.