Pyschologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the act of creating a “painful, risky, difficult” activity that “stretches the person’s capacity” and “involves an element of novelty and discovery,” resulting in “an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.” [1]
Csikszentmihalyi differentiates between two types of creativity— personal creativity, and creativity that impacts a culture or domain.
Personal creativity, he writes, “refers to people who experience the world in novel and original ways. These are individuals whose perceptions are fresh, whose judgments are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about.”
The second type of creativity, he writes, produces work that “changes a culture in some important respect.”
An organization—whether a large company, a library, or a hospital—is concerned with producing both types of creativity. First, where all individuals feel valued, motivated, and capable; and second, where business results are produced through collaboration and innovation. There is no way to be certain which individuals will produce this year’s groundbreaking insight or body of work. The key is to become the kind of place where such breakthroughs can occur.
As Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain. The next generation will encounter that novelty as part of the domain they are exposed to, and if they are creative, they in turn will change it further.”