How to create the ideal conditions for dialogue, creativity and feedback

I thought I would share in a little more detail about some of the different things we can do to positively impact on these topics.

Creativity Can Be Blocked

One of the most interesting areas to read about is the disposition it takes to be able to be creative.

In this context, I refer to creativity as the generation of novel ideas that add value. Much of the time we face a range of blocks that get in the way of this endeavour.

These can often be our own approach and self-censoring, even self-sabotaging. Or the environment around us sometimes has a negative impact through exuberant judgement or too much pace.

During the session, we will have a look at the different types of blocks and explore the ideal conditions for ideas to thrive.

Speak up!

Dialogue is no different and it can be a delicate experience, swayed and influenced by dominant voices or even culled by assumptions and an underlying threat.

Of course, we can control much of these issues through deliberate protocols and practices. Long term it is about establishing a core set of habits that work for you.

Dialogue is different to a discussion, the former being much more akin to building and developing ideas together in a highly supportive environment. Certain conditions will encourage this and some will detract from it.

Feedback, up, down, forward

Getting feedback right has been a focus for thousands of teachers the world over for many years now. And yet we still seem to spend too much time exploring how to give feedback.

Ultimately we might all be expert feedback givers, but unless the recipient is an expert receiver of feedback, and it is done in a supportive and encouraging space – little may change.

In the workshop, we will explore practical tools and activities for providing and receiving feedback effectively.

We will pay close attention to how we might design the ideal conditions for feedback conversations to take place and what we might do to ensure it is heard and acted upon in the most positive way.

Imagine each of these – Creativity, Dialogue and Feedback as three little seedlings, each ready to burst forth – we just need to carefully surround them with the ideal conditions to thrive and grow.

Join me on the 13th April in Melbourne for my keynote and workshop at TeachTechPlay.

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Neslihan Gunaydin on Unsplash

Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Togs on. I’m jumping into the swirling currents of Twitter chats.

Why

There is little in terms of coordinated Twitter chats about creativity in all of it’s wonderful complexity. I have decided to establish a new, regular Twitter chat for people to coalesce and gravitate towards.

#creativitychat

I want to help people become more creative. One of the ways I can do this is establish a chat that connects people, that inspires action, engagement and thinking about the subject. I hope the chat helps participants learn a little more about creativity.

For nearly ten years I have been using Twitter as my preferred tool for connecting with others and building a learning network. Whilst Twitter chats have their naysayers and their limitations, I still find them (and Twitter) a powerful and consistent way to organise a community, connect and learn from others interested in a topic.

When

#creativitychat will run every Saturday morning 7am-9am Melbourne time.

The inaugural chat is Saturday 29th Oct. Times below.

  • Melbourne / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 7am-9am
  • Auckland / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 9am-11am
  • San Francisco / Friday 28th October 2016 / 1pm-3pm
  • New York / Friday 28th October 2016 / 4pm-6pm
  • London / Friday 28th October 2016 / 9pm-11pm
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Have a look at this Worldtimebuddy link to add the event to your calendar.

I have decided to go for a longer chat because most chats I have experienced are just getting warmed up by the time their scheduled time finishes. With a couple of hours we give ourselves the best chance for meaningful dialogue.

Saturday morning in Australia, are you mad? Maybe a little, and certainly my younger self would have preferred a later time. This allows for family plans to still carry on and not to eat into a weekday evening after a long day of work either.

This is an international chat. I have always been lucky to have been connected to people on Twitter from across the world and so I wanted to go for a time that worked for the majority. Everyone will have a preference, I know, and which ever time I chose people would miss out. I think this gives us the chance to be able to share hemispherically diverse understandings of creativity.

What

Content

  • Weekly topics related to creativity.
  • Crowd-sourced set of questions and provocations, moderated (by me) into a short list.
  • Please send me a direct message on Twitter with your question or provocation suggestions.

#creativitychat / 0001 / Nailing jelly to a tree? Seeking a common understanding of creativity.

My background is in primary education and so I have a learning focus when I think about creativity. However there is so much to learn from others. I am keen for #creativitychat to have diverse participants.

We should encourage a broad representation from different fields. The chat should be a gathering of anyone thinking about how creativity impacts on our (professional) life.

Chat Structure

  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 100 minutes for reaction and dialogue about provocations and questions
  • Maybe some time to share next steps, what actions are we going to take? What have we learned during the chat? “As a result of the chat I am…”
  • 10 minutes for networking and sharing our own projects and blogs etc.
  • Close with the next week’s topic

I have been inspired by the #agchat founder Michele Payn-Knoper who outlined some of her lessons from running a Twitter chat over the last seven years. Thanks to Simon Owens for the great guide on running a chat, which outlines Michele’s thoughts. Highly recommended if you are looking to start something too.

A call to action

  • Check out your diary for the times above and consider joining me. There will only be one shot at being part of the first!
  • Share a tweet using the hashtag #creativitychat to encourage others to get involved.
  • Join and participate in the chat.
  • Direct message me on Twitter with your questions or provocations related to the chat topic (0001 = defining creativity)
  • Leave a comment inline or otherwise with any ideas or suggestions related to the questions I still have. I need your help.

More to consider

  • What is the most efficient way to archive the chat? Should we archive it? How much do people really use a chat archive?
  • I like the way readers can comment, highlight, and engage with content on Medium. Perhaps a summary post with questions / provocations and a curated set of tweets to continue the conversation.
  • How could we incorporate a slow chat element during the week, to allow others to participate?
  • What new ideas are we bringing to the Twitter chat arena? How are we helping to advance this way of learning and connecting? How might we connect Twitter with other tools to extend what we can do and mitigate against some of the known weaknesses?
  • Need to probably use the @creativitychat handle eventually. I have contacted the current account owners.
  • Find a merry band of buddies who can help moderate and facilitate.
  • Do we need some web property to gather resources, guidelines and ideas about the chat?
  • Develop some chat protocols and rules of engagement.

How our creativity is shaped by our culture

When you think of creative people who immediately springs to mind?

Da Vinci, Ive, Lovelace, Pelé?

Far from just an individual capacity, our creativity is also influenced by the environments that we live and learn in. Each of those memorable people were shaped by their culture.

our behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms.

Thomas Wolbers a Professor of Ageing and Cognition explains in his essay,”Three Pathways By Which Culture Can Influence Creativity”, that it can impact on our cognitive abilities, the creative process and the value we associate with the output.

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Creative Potential

Wolbers explores the concept that our application of creativity fits the domains that our culture values. If we are products of our cultural influences then we all carry a certain bias.

This bias is perhaps towards applying our creativity in domains that continue to affirm what our culture deems as important.

For example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using status and maintaining coalitions

Individuals may be more creative in some domains than in others because their cultural background values those domains and focuses the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.

I wonder what those domains are for me? I suppose in some way sharing content, thinking and understandings through my writing is a direct consequence of the culture my professional life started in.

When I say direct result, I mean I worked in the opposite direction. Much of the expertise, sharing and learning was in closed and stagnant systems. That was a norm I wanted to invert.

In what domains do you apply your most creative self? How are those choices influenced by the cultural cues you have experienced?

Creative Process

Most people don’t think that creativity has a process. It can be often viewed as a magical act of serendipity for special talented people.

This is a long way from the truth. Creative processes are much more rigorous than we think. Those processes can be clearly defined and described. Also true is the ability to describe the salient conditions for creativity to flourish.

Wolbers explains that creativity usually involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway.

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to a different approach or consider a different perspective, and cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort.

The reference to cognitive flexibility and agility here reminds me of the type of language we often see defining divergent thinking. Our ability to see a challenge from a different perspective is an important creative trait.

The cognitive persistence pathway refers to a more incremental, cautious, and analytical processing in an attempt to be incremental and cumulative.

Our cultural norms and cues will push us towards these pathways differently. What is valued in our society, in our culture, directs the process we apply in generating new ideas.

“inventions result more frequently from projects with incremental objectives in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”

It is one thing to look at inventions in the US, it is another to look at the professional culture of teaching in the UK or Australia. On reflection the professional culture that I spent ten years working in was a risk averse culture.

The majority of breakthroughs and shifts in education are incremental, cumulative, glacial.

I may have a preference for more significant, higher-risk ideas as part of my process, but I think the culture around me wants me to slow down.

What do you think? Does education covet the paradigm shift, but really just wants slow change?

Creative Output

The value we place on ideas can be vastly different depending on the perspective we have.

Creativity is often defined as generating ideas that have value. Wolbers points out that this can be very subjective and wholly dependent on the culture of the beholder.

A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie, presumably because they had seen many similar movies before.

Over the years I have spent countless hours talking with different groups about how we might judge different ideas as part of the process of design thinking.

All of this time perhaps our cultural preferences have been influencing what we consider has value. Wolbers explains that Chinese culture values usefulness more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty more than usefulness.

individuals with an Eastern background may be more concerned with usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights than their counterparts with a Western background.

As a primary school teacher I certainly had both in mind. I think the culture around me, in the schools I worked in and the wider education system valued usefulness over originality.

Original ideas were entertained on the fringes.

How does our definition of value influence the emphasis we put on certain ideas? Do you think you value originality or usefulness, or both?

Takeaways

A few key takeaways for me have been the three areas highlighted by Wolber. It is a succinct collection of elements we might consider in our own contexts.

  • Creative Potential — where we apply our creative capacity
  • Creative Process — how we go about generating ideas
  • Creative Value — what we value most about our ideas

As I have been exploring this work I have also been thinking how school culture might influence creativity. However you could replace school with company, organisation, club or whatever you like. When I say school culture I mean the implicit and explicit values, beliefs, and norms that surround each student.

Some takeaway questions spring to mind to ponder on further:

  • How might school culture influence each student’s creative potential and the domains in which they apply their creative capacity?
  • How might the culture at school dictate the type of creative process that is adopted by teachers and students (all learners)?
  • How might we explore what value systems we use to judge creativity in our schools?

Download the essay here: “Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity” by Thomas Wolbers.


This is the first in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

Schools want students to be creative, but only on a Thursday afternoon

Right off the bat I just want to say, that this post will likely pose more questions than give you solid answers. In many ways though pursuing those questions on creativity and pondering on what they mean in our schools is a worthy call to action in itself.

Fascinated by anything related to the research on creativity, I stumbled on this post from Fast Company about some of the pointers we can get from science.

Admittedly there is some good stuff there amongst the usual mix of “daydreaming and trying new things is good”. What struck me was the parting shot about the resistance to unconventional ideas and the public reaction to non-conformist concepts.

Some of the best ideas are widely ridiculed before they’re revered.

My radar for this sort of stuff is heightened as I recently wrote about the bias against creative ideas we might hold if we are feeling high levels of uncertainty. Creativity bias as a real thing.

The article elaborated further, but started to stray to a slightly different path to close:

Research suggests that whatever nonconformist tendencies we may have as children are often driven out of us by the rote learning and direct instruction utilized in schools, which may counteract our more exploratory and creative modes of thinking and learning.

We are on different track now. These last comments are about the characteristics of those who are creative — not the ideas themselves. It also, obviously, draws in the impact of how we learn and the environmental influence of school — not the ideas themselves.

A final reference to the resistance to those “creative types” points the finger at teachers: “teachers have been found to display a clear preference for students who show less creativity.”

Which led me to a stream of questions:

  • How strong was the influence of school on how creative we are at school?
  • What long term impact does school have on our levels of creativity?
  • How can teacher education help deepen the understanding around what creativity is and how it might manifest in the classroom?
  • How creative is the teaching profession?
  • What are the ideal conditions in school for creativity to flourish?

The body of research referred to here does indeed reveal that:

One of the most consistent findings in educational research into creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority.

The commentary on this sort of research points to the futility of the alternative. Suggesting that if we did have a group of 30 young expressive, creative thinkers it would be some version of chaos.

This (preference for non-creative students) shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn’t designed for impulsive expression — that’s called talking out of turn. Instead, it’s all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.

Just to answer the questions posed here: yes, yes and absolutely yes.


For me this all points to the education system and not the individual teacher who has become a product of that system.

Compliance and conformity only gets us so far and they certainly don’t rank highly in environments that encourage creativity and innovation.

I recently re-discovered and re-read this lovely essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, in which he suggests some ideas for creating the conditions for others to generate ideas which I have paraphrased below:

  • Daring cross-connection
  • Free of responsibility
  • Thoroughly relaxed
  • Deep knowledge
  • Discussing something of interest
  • Being by nature unconventional

Take a moment to consider each of these in relation to “school” and places of learning.

We suffer the fallout and collateral damage from too heavy a focus on explicit teaching, direct instruction, conformity and compliance, let’s throw in high stakes assessment whilst we are at it.

That damage is the marginalisation of the conditions for children to be strongly creative little souls and the conditions for innovative teaching.

In what ways might we expand these conditions from the margins? How might we establish a common understanding of the key environmental and cultural conditions for innovation and creativity? In what ways might we learn about creativity and use that to inform our teaching practice?

Escaping old ideas and the bias that erodes your creative culture

I recently discovered the above quote from John Maynard Keynes, an influential English economist, about the challenge of thinking creatively.

It got a bunch of attention on Twitter and seemed to really resonate with people, as it did with me, so I thought I would spend a little longer considering what he is saying.

The creative process continues to be a passion and fascination of mine. What that process continues to rely upon is a creative culture within an organisation. When strong it is supportive of new ideas, when weak it erodes them.

John Maynard Keynes points us to the challenge of “escaping” old ideas, a direct reference in my opinion to two things. (1) The creative culture those new ideas are born into, (2) the mindset of those attached to existing ideas.

A 2010 study by the University of Pennsylvania points to an underlying negative bias towards creativity when we feel uncertainty. New ideas may often be generated in times of change and when things are in flux, and the sense of uncertainty may actually be getting in the way of being open to new ideas. As Maynard Keynes states escaping old ideas is harder and the bias research sheds some light on this.

Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.

Back to thinking about culture. If there is such a bias, implicit or otherwise, we have to mitigate against this within our schools and organisations. Familiarity with constant change and development is key, creating a new norm. If we can reduce the negative bias by increasing our level of collective comfort when faced with uncertainty we might recognise and encourage more creative thinking.

This makes me think of Dear Mr Judgy Pants, my open letter to those judgemental types who shoot down ideas too soon. Those people, and I know many of us have encountered them, are showing a fear of the wider uncertainty that is in fact forcing us to think creatively in the first place.

I just wanted to let you know that there are thousands of idea headstones carved because of people like you. We mourn those precious little sparks, those little glimpses of something new, different and unexpected. We still think about those ideas and the fleeting moments we had with them.

James L. Adams refers to the “Inability to tolerate ambiguity; overriding desire for order; ‘no appetite for chaos’” as one of a number of emotional blocks to creativity. When it comes to complex development and problem solving the ability to tolerate some chaos is vital.

You must usually wallow in misleading and ill fitting data, hazy and difficult-to-test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

 The key thing I have been pondering on, since I shared that tweet, is about better understanding the people in our organisations and so better understand the creative culture.

Perhaps if we were to extend the research to create a measure of people’s tolerance of ambiguity <a> and compare this with a measure of their propensity for divergent thinking <b>, we would have an interesting +/-differential <c> that we could explore further.

If we were able to gather individual or collective measures we might be able to better understand the collective creative culture and make plans to support and encourage positive change.

Of course we can easily hypothesise that those individuals who are able to generate new ideas and have a high level of divergent thinking, coupled with a high level of tolerance for ambiguous and uncertain developmental states, may prove to be the most innovative.

Across an organisation these values may be carried by different people at different times and the make up and balance of our teams is something else to consider.

As much as it may feel odd to attempt to measure the artful design of innovative culture, I think there is huge value in exploring the science of it too.

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Maybe a further thinking matrix or framework might look like this.

I am grateful to have had the provocation from that quote this week to think more deeply about the individual contribution we make to a creative culture. As always, let me know what you think and how you help yourself and others “escape old ideas”. I think that is the next step to consider, what are the practical tools that allow us to escape.