Can creativity be measured?
An interesting question is whether or not creativity can be measured. Are there metrics by which we can assess our creative output?
The answer depends on whether our creative product is already out there in the market, or whether it’s still in development.
If it’s out there in the world, the answer is pretty straightforward. Assuming that today’s market demands products and solutions
that it considers creative, we can measure creativity by traditional means: sales results, client retention, ROI and the like.
In short, it’s only creative if it sells.
However, assessing our creativity before we put something out in the market is trickier.
At the moment, I can think of no quantitative measurement that could be useful during the creative process itself.
But there are questions we can ask ourselves as we create, which can help us assess whether or not we’re moving in the right direction:
1) Am I repeating myself? Have I done or seen this before? Does this feel a little too easy, too comfortable, or am I pushing myself out of my comfort zone? Is my solution novel?
2) Does the solution make sense? Have I just generated a jumble of ideas or are they organized in a coherent and meaningful fashion? Is there a single overarching concept that holds everything together?
3) Do others understand my creation? Is it simple? Meaningful? Is it answering a real problem, or is it merely novel but lacking utility?
4) Does my creation have an emotional component? Does it satisfy an emotional need? Do I feel something when I use the product or engage the service? What is that feeling?
These are just a few of the questions you can ask. And although the answers may not be able to be plotted on a graph, they can be a huge help in keeping your creative work on the right track.
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All good points. One thing I would ask is how many ideas come from the team? When a team gets stuck in ‘one idea’, they may not be looking at the whole picture. That picture is complex with touch points in everything from market readiness, financial conditions, to social moray and popular opinion. We always talk about thinking ‘outside the box’. It’s probably more apropos to say ‘thinking like a jigsaw puzzle’. I’d feel better with a team that had twenty bad ideas and then settled on one. Can you measure that? Not really, but you can get a sense of depth of though and discussion that it took to develop an idea.
You’re right, Marc. Creativity is indeed like a jigsaw puzzle, but one in which you create the pieces as well as the final picture that the pieces reveal.
As for idea generation, it’s very easy to get attached to a single idea. In the “Make a Mess” section of our method, teams learn to get comfortable with generating many ideas, or better said, generating half-ideas, quarter-ideas, eighth-ideas and idea fragments. To continue your analogy, these become the pieces, or potential pieces, of the jigsaw puzzle.
During this generation phase, there is neither analysis nor judgement of these fragments. There are no bad ideas, because at this stage there are no good ideas either. There’s just material which you will then organize during the “Clean up your Mess” stage of the process. That’s where you turn fragments into real jigsaw puzzle pieces, and then try to make them fit into a useful solution, momentarily setting aside those which don’t fit.
This organizing activity also helps you generate new idea fragments, which you can then organize into a new solutions or an improved version of your original solution.
As you see, you go ’round and ’round, alternating between Making a Mess and Cleaning Up your Mess. That’s why we call the process The Circle of Creation™
Separating the idea-generation activity of creative work from the organizing activity leads to more ideas and more potential solutions overall. Moreover, it helps keep the team avoid getting too attached to a single idea and becoming blocked in the process.