What research actually says about who is creative

Before you begin, it is worth knowing that almost everything most people believe about creativity is wrong — and that this has been tested repeatedly for over sixty years. 

Eight myths, dismantled

Dawson, Andriopoulos and Pattinson open their treatment of creativity by clearing away the beliefs that get in the way. Among them: 

• "The smarter you are, the more creative you are." Above a basic threshold of intelligence needed to do the work at all, there is little evidence of a link. 
• "Creativity exists outside time and circumstance." It looks magical, but creative work is always rooted in a historical and social context, drawing on knowledge that is itself changing. 
• "The creative act is essentially effortless." We over-emphasise the moment of illumination and ignore the trials, dead ends and effort that produced it. 
• "Creativity exists in the arts." It is better understood as a human behaviour present in any activity — management, science, teaching, sport, community work. 
• "Coming up with new ideas is the hardest part." Generating ideas is comparatively easy. The difficult part is identifying which ones have value and can actually be realised. 
• "Creative output is always good." Novel ideas can be applied to destructive ends as readily as to constructive ones. 

Goller and Bessant add the most relevant one here: creative people are special people. Ask someone to picture a creative person and they imagine an artist, a wild-haired scientist or a programmer surrounded by pizza boxes. The research says otherwise — everyone is capable of creativity, and the useful question is not whether someone is creative but how to unlock and develop what is already there. 

Clapham and Meyer make the consequence explicit: because most people hold these misconceptions, they underestimate and therefore underuse their own creative potential — and leaders holding the same misconceptions underuse the potential of everyone around them. That is precisely the failure this course is designed to prevent. 

The 4Ps: four different things we call "creativity"

Mel Rhodes, analysing hundreds of competing definitions in 1961, found they all clustered into four areas. Goller and Bessant use his 4Ps model as a map of the whole field: 

This course works on all four: the person (this lesson), the process (Module 1), the climate a team creates (Lesson 7), and what gets produced (Lessons 4–8). 

Creativity is recombination, not conjuring

John Adair's foundational claim is liberating and slightly deflating at the same time: humans cannot make something from nothing. Your task as a creative thinker is to combine ideas and elements that already exist. What makes a combination feel original is the distance between the things joined — the wider the apparent distance, the greater the degree of creative thinking involved. Or, as he puts it via an old saying: the most original person is the one who adapts from the most sources. 

This is why Lesson 3 spends a whole lesson on where your raw material comes from, and why a team drawing on five European contexts has a structural advantage over a team drawing on one. 

What creative people actually do

Clayton Christensen and colleagues observed 3,000 executives over six years and identified five discovery skills: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and networking. The most powerful single driver was associating — making connections between things not normally connected. Every one of these five is a behaviour, not a trait. Behaviours can be practised. 

Goller and Bessant build their whole book on this logic. They argue that we already know the success factors for innovation, yet organisations keep failing to apply them — because factors only make a difference when they are translated into competences and observable skills that people can actually train. Their model divides these into four individual competences (exploring problems, being open, building up willpower, self-awareness) and four team competences (creating and sharing visions, practising psychological safety, supporting ideas, pushing the frontiers). Those eight names are, in effect, the structure of this course. 

Two modes of thinking

J.P. Guilford's distinction between divergent and convergent thinking underpins nearly every model you will meet here. Divergent thinking is expansive and generative — it moves away from the subject in all directions and is associated with metaphor, play, ambiguity, intuition and fantasy. Convergent thinking is analytical and focusing — reason, logic, precision, facts, sequence. 

Most problems need both, in that order. People differ in which feels comfortable, which is one good reason to build a team rather than work alone. 

Creativity is not innovation

Finally, a distinction that runs through the entire course. Dawson and colleagues define creativity as the process through which new and useful ideas are generated, and follow Bessant and Tidd in defining innovation as the successful exploitation of new ideas — translating them into things that are actually used. Amabile's formulation is the one to remember: creativity is the starting point for innovation, a necessary but not sufficient condition. 

This course covers both. Module 1 is mostly about generating; its later lessons and Module 2 are about what it takes to realise something.