Anyone can be trained to be creative
New program shows early success with U.S. Army, others

Date:
March 14, 2022
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
Researchers have developed a new method for training people to
be creative, one that shows promise of succeeding far better than
current ways of sparking innovation.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Researchers have developed a new method for training people to be
creative, one that shows promise of succeeding far better than current
ways of sparking innovation.


==========================================================================
This new method, based on narrative theory, helps people be creative
in the way children and artists are: By making up stories that imagine alternative worlds, shift perspective and generate unexpected actions.

The narrative method works by recognizing that we're all creative, said
Angus Fletcher, who developed the method and is a professor of English
and a member of The Ohio State University's Project Narrative.

"We as a society radically undervalue the creativity of kids and many
others because we are obsessed with the idea that some people are more
creative than others," Fletcher said.

"But the reality is that we're just not training creativity in the
right way." Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, also of Project Narrative,
discussed the narrative method of training creativity in a just-published article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.



==========================================================================
The two researchers successfully used the narrative approach to train
members of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. Fletcher
wrote a publicly available training guide based on his methods that was tailored to officers and advanced enlisted personnel.

They have also worked with the University of Chicago Booth School of
Business, the Ohio State College of Engineering and several Fortune 50 companies to teach creativity to their staffs and students.

The current foundation of creativity training is the technique known
as divergent thinking, which has been in use since the 1950s. It is a "computational approach" to creativity that treats the brain as a logic machine, Fletcher said.

It works through exercises designed to, among other things, expand
working memory, foster analogical thinking and promote problem-solving.

But divergent thinking hasn't delivered the results that many hoped for, Fletcher said. A major issue is that its computational approach relies
on data and information about the problems and successes of the past.



========================================================================== "What it can't do is help prepare people for new challenges that we know
little about today. It can't come up with truly original actions,"
Fletcher said. "But the human brain's narrative machinery can."
The narrative method of training for creativity uses many of the
techniques that writers use to create stories. One is to develop new
worlds in your mind.

For example, employees at a company might be asked to think about their
most unusual customer -- then imagine a world in which all their customers
were like that. How would that change their business? What would they
have to do to survive? Another technique is perspective-shifting. An
executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking
like another member of their team.

The point of using these techniques and others like them is not that
the scenarios you dream up will actually happen, Fletcher said.

"Creativity isn't about guessing the future correctly. It's about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities," he said.

"When you do that, you can respond more quickly and nimbly to the changes
that do occur." Fletcher noted that the narrative approach of training creativity through telling stories resembles how young children are
creative -- and research shows that young children are more imaginatively creative than adults.

But the ability of children to perform creative tasks drops after four
or five years of schooling, according to studies. That's when children
begin intensive logical, semantic and memory training.

The narrative approach to creativity can help people unlock the creativity
they may have stopped using as they progressed through school, Fletcher
said.

One advantage for organizations that train employees to be creative is
that they no longer need to strive to hire "creative people," he said.

"Trying to hire creative people causes problems because the people
that leaders identify as creative are almost always people just like themselves. So it promotes conformity instead of originality," Fletcher
said.

"It's better to hire a diverse group of people and then train them to be creative. That creates a culture that recognizes that there are already creative people in your organization that you aren't taking advantage of." While this narrative method of creativity training has already been
received positively, Fletcher and his colleagues have started a more
formal evaluation.

They are conducting randomized controlled trials of the creativity
curriculum on more than 600 U.S. Army majors who are part of the Command
and General Staff College.

They are also continuing to work with new organizations, such as the Worthington Local School District in Ohio.

"Teaching creativity is one of the most useful things you can do in the
world, because it is just coming up with new solutions to solve problems,"
he said.

Fletcher said this new method of training creativity "could only have
come from Ohio State's Project Narrative.

"Project Narrative is all about how stories work in the brain. It is the foundation that helped us put together this new way of thinking about
and training for creativity," he said.

"And Project Narrative is itself proof of the power of creativity. It's something that Ohio State created, something that would not have existed otherwise."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Jeff Grabmeier. Note: Content may be edited for style and
length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Angus Fletcher, Mike Benveniste. A new method for training
creativity:
narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, 2022; DOI: 10.1111/nyas.14763 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220314095702.htm

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