Last week, just before starting a mindmap workshop I asked people about their backgrounds. One of the participants said he had come to the workshop because the company he worked for had discovered he was creative. Well, actually he didn’t really say it, he admitted to it. When I raised my eyebrows, he immediately threw in an argument that was clearly of great importance to him to back his company’s findings: “I took a test and it showed that I was creative.” I said: “Interesting. And now what?” “Well”, he continued: “they told me to do something with it, like taking a mindmap course…and here I am.”
It wasn't so much what he said, it was the way in which he said it. It was almost like he just got his tests back from the lab, was diagnosed with creativity and had come to his first creatives anonymous meeting. You know… “Hi, my name is John and I’m a creative. I haven’t had a single creative thought since last Thursday.” Crowd: “Hi John!” (cheers, applause)
If anything, this proves once more our prevailing distorted view on creativity. Apparently people can contract creativity. Apparently no one notices your dormant creative potential until a test finds you are crea-positive. And apparently companies don’t know what to think of it and start sending you off on courses that should somehow deal with, well, with what exactly?
No wonder really. A day before the workshop I had picked up two hitchhiking students. They were two American youngsters on a mission to see as much of Europe as their budget and two months until next semester would allow them to. Judging from their stories their time was going to outlast their budget. But they were having a ball. Both of them were in college. They were doing majors in psychology and neuropsychology. When they asked me what I did for a living, neither of them had ever heard that there even is such a thing as deliberate creative thinking. They were oblivious to the fact that there are techniques to provoke creativity. Or worse still, they had no idea about anything related to our inherently human creative potential, let alone what this could mean to them or anyone else for that matter.
Of course it could very well be that I had – how shall I put this politely - two not so representative educatees in my car, but to have a man in my course one day later, still recovering from the first chock of his contracted creativity, just adds up too neatly to ignore.
We just don’t know how to deal with this ambiguous, formless, won’t-be-caught-in-an-excel-sheet thing called creativity. In case of my mindmapping participant the result is a stressed employee that is expected to do what now? Have creative break-through business ideas that his colleagues, whose tests came back negative, aren’t expected or even allowed to have?
And what about our two students? One of them confided to me he had a rather grim outlook on the future. He feared that one day “some North-Korean extremist would detonate a portable nuclear device on American soil and that would be the end of it.” Actually, to him, it wasn’t a matter of if, but when this would happen.
If our children are indeed our future, what future then are we creating when we leave their neglected imaginations to come up with imaginary terrorists that dictate their view on life? That too is the power of imagination at work, although I doubt it is the kind we had wished for our kids to mould their dreams and ambitions with.
The mindmap man did a wonderful job that day. Of course he did. He never needed a test of any kind to make sure he did. Trouble is, he doesn’t realize that, not really. So many people still don’t.
Take care,
Karl
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