Creativity Myths

The 2021 study "Creativity myths: Prevalence and correlates of misconceptions on creativity" tries to separate facts from fiction on what creativity is and what it is not.

Psychology Today summarizes the 15 Myths About Creativity covered in that study.

This study examined the prevalence of known creativity myths across six countries from diverse cultural backgrounds and explored why some people believe in them more than others. Results revealed persistent, widespread biases in the public conception of creativity, such as attributing creative achievements to spontaneity and chance rather than persistence and expertise.

The researchers looked through the existing scientific literature to identify 15 creativity falsehoods, which they divided into four categories:

Creative Definition Myths

• Creativity cannot be measured
• Creativity is essentially the same as art
• Creative ideas are naturally a good thing
• Most people would not be able to distinguish abstract art from abstract children's drawings

Creative Process Myths

• Creative accomplishments are usually the result of a sudden inspiration
• Creative thinking mostly happens in the right hemisphere of the brain
• Creativity tends to be a solitary activity

Creative Person Myths

• Creativity is a rare gift
• People have a certain amount of creativity and cannot do much to change it
• Children are more creative than adults
• Mental health disorders usually accompany exceptional creativity

Creative Stimulation Myths

• People get more creative ideas under the influence of alcohol or marijuana
• Long-term schooling harms the creativity of children
• Brainstorming in a group generates more ideas than if people were thinking by themselves
• One is most creative when with total freedom in one's actions

“A ‘naivety’ conceptualization of creativity is problematic for two reasons,” say the authors.

First, relating creativity to childlike behavior and chance implies low appreciation for the hard work behind creative achievements. Second, it externalizes relevant factors in the development of creativity. Emphasizing the role of inspiration rather than active engagement may undermine creativity by suggesting we need to wait until creativity hits us with a ‘Eureka’-experience.

 

The authors contrast the myths with the following

Creativity Facts

1. To be considered creative, something has to be both novel and useful or appropriate
2. Teachers appreciate the idea of creativity but not necessarily creative pupils
3. Whether or not something is viewed as creative depends on zeitgeist and social norms
4. Creativity is an important part of mathematical thinking
5. Creative ideas are typically based on remembered information that is combined in new ways
6. The first idea someone has is often not the best one
7. Alpha activity (10Hz) in the brain plays an important role in creative thought
8. Creative people are usually more open to new experiences
9. Creative people are usually more intelligent
10. Achieving a creative breakthrough in a domain (i.e. publishing a successful novel) typically requires at least 10 years of deliberate practice and work
11. Men and women generally do not differ in their creativity
12. A man's creativity increases his attractiveness to potential partners
13. When stuck on a problem, it is helpful to continue working on it after taking a break
14. Positive moods help people get creative ideas
15. Getting rewarded for creative performance at work increases one’s creativity

Source:   Creativity myths: Prevalence and correlates of misconceptions on creativity - ScienceDirect
              Appendix B (.xls) references the research papers backing their claims.

The article Top Ten Myths About Creativity (futurefocusedlearning.net) lists 10 Creativity Myths mostly in line with the study's findings:

1. Creativity belongs to the geniuses
2. Creativity is making something from nothing
3. Creativity can’t be forced
4. Mental illness causes creativity
5. Drugs make you more creative
6. To be creative you need to be free
7. Creativity belongs to the arts
8. Creativity is a solitary activity
9. Extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity
10. To explain creativity is to damage it

Creativity

In a recent interview Dr. Deepak Chopra made the following statement:

"Creativity is a spiritual experience, not a mental experience."

which made me investigate the topic a little further.

I came across the 2014 book Modeling Creativity (arxiv.org) by Tom De Smedt who summarizes key insights in chapter 4 as follows:

Creativity refers to the ability to think new ideas. 

Creative ideas are grounded in fast, unconscious processing such as intuition or imagination which is highly  error-prone but allows us to “think things without thinking about them”.

Some of these near-thoughts can emerge without warning as an interesting solution: a moment of insight. This usually happens while tackling everyday problems. This is called little-c creativity.

Big-C creativity, eminent ideas that fill history books, develop gradually. They require interaction with slow, conscious processing. This requires effort and motivation, because consciousness is lazy and tends to wander off.

Flexibility to switch between styles of thought – from unconscious to conscious, from goal-oriented to open-ended, from combinatory to explorative and transformative – is key to creativity: an agile mind.

Another Chopra quote summarizes the above:

"To harness true creativity, you must silence the conditioned mind."

How to Misuse and Abuse DORA DevOps Metrics

In the How To Measure Software Delivery Using DORA Metrics (YouTube) presentation, Dave Farley, author of "Continuous Delivery" and "Modern Software Engineering" describes how one can apply DORA measurements to drive software development to deliver on this state-of-the-art approach, but also explores a few of the common mistakes that can trip us up along the way.

I found the reference to Bryan Finster's October 2021 presentation How to Misuse DORA DevOps Metrics especially useful.

Bryan contrasts common pitfalls & fallacies with pragmatic and realistic advice.

He also points out that the 4 prominent DORA metrics constitute only the tip of the iceberg.

My earlier blog article on Software Productivity Metrics provides further details on these additional metrics.

Slide #29 in Bryan's deck puts these metrics into perspective ("To improve flow, we must improve CI.") and makes the case for a set of balanced metrics (#34):

Summary ("Closing Thoughts")

• The 4 outcome metrics are only the tip of the iceberg.

• Product development is a complex interaction of people, process, and products. There are no simple metrics.

• Measures require guardrails to avoid perverse incentives.

• Metrics are a critical part of the improvement toolbox, but…

• We cannot measure our way to improvement.

• We use them to monitor and inform the next improvement experiment.

• Don’t measure people, invest in them. They are our most valuable asset.

[July 26, 2022 -- Update:

Abi Noda discusses Finster's recent article in the The DevOps Enterprise Journal | Spring 2022 (itrevolution.com) edition on the same topic:

Common misuses of the DORA metrics

• Focusing too much on speed.
• “Measuring deployment frequency without using quality metrics as guardrails will result in poor outcomes.”
• Setting goals around DORA metrics. 
• “The goal isn’t better DORA metrics… OKRs should be focused on desirable business outcomes.”
• Choose goals, then choose metrics that align with those goals. 
• Mistaking measuring DORA metrics as a way to improve. 
• “[DORA metrics] don’t fix things.
  If we simply get a dashboard and do not buy into using it to identify improvement items, then nothing will get better.” 
• Using DORA metrics as vanity metrics. 
• “[DORA dashboards] are often used as ‘vanity radiators’ instead of information we can use to help us improve.”
• Not including other signals in addition to the four key DORA metrics.
• “The four key metrics DORA used to correlate behaviors of high-performing organizations are a small subset of the metrics recommended in the book Accelerate. They also represent only one aspect of the health of a system…”

]

[January 25, 2023 -- Update:

In his LinkedIn article, Abi Noda summarizes 

Common pitfalls of the DORA metrics, according to Nathen Harvey who helps lead DORA at Google:

1. Comparing teams to each other based on the four key metrics. Different projects have different needs, so we can think more critically about whether a team's metrics should fall in the low, medium, or high performance category given that context.

2. Setting goals for improving the DORA metrics, and in turn creating the wrong incentives. Instead set goals to improve the capabilities or factors that drive the DORA metrics.

3. Spending more effort on pulling data into dashboards than on actually improving. 

4. Not using the metrics to guide improvement at the team level. When the teams doing the work aren’t using the metrics to improve, this defeats the purpose of the metrics.

5. Using "industry" as an excuse for not improving. Even companies in well-regulated industries can focus on improvement.

6. Assuming you’re already world-class, so your organization doesn’t need to focus on improving. If software delivery is no longer the constraint, then what is? Identify what is preventing teams from making progress and focus on that.

7. Fixating on the four DORA metrics (which are outcomes) and forgetting about the capabilities. “We don’t get better at those outcomes by focusing on the outcomes. We have to focus on the capabilities that drive those outcomes.”

The big takeaways:

• the DORA metrics are outcomes not goals,
• context matters, and
• a team must look to understand and improve the factors that drive the DORA outcomes.

P.S. I like the "You might also deliver wrong things 10x faster" statement in the "Fantastic Facts and How to Use Them" presentation referenced in one of the comments.

]