Creative Atrophy: Creativity Science • UConn / James Kaufman
Creative Atrophy
What happens to human creativity when AI begins doing more of the thinking for us?
In this episode of UnNatural Selection, Nic Encina sits down with renowned creativity researcher James Kaufman to explore the psychology of innovation, the Four-C Model of Creativity, and the evolving relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence.
Together, they unpack why creativity is one of humanity’s most democratic traits, why organizations struggle to foster innovation at scale, and how psychological safety, experimentation, and openness shape both corporate and societal evolution.
The conversation also dives into the risks of over-reliance on AI, the future of creative work, the hidden value of failure and persistence, and why societies that stop developing creative thinkers may eventually stagnate.
From education and neuroscience to corporate strategy and societal evolution, this episode examines creativity not as a luxury — but as a survival mechanism.
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James, welcome to a natural selection. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to have you here.
as we talked about the premise behind this podcast is really on corporate innovation and thinking about human creativity, especially if we think about it at a macro state, it's thinking about how human evolution has been largely, if not mostly shaped and increasingly so by societal evolution and cultural evolution than it has by biological evolution over the last like 100 years or so and as it continues, right?
Our genes only change so quickly, but culturally we've made amazing progress in healthcare and medicine all the way to athletics and in just the society that we live in. And so, you the topic that you specialize in, which is human creativity is at the core of that. And so I'm really eager to kind of like unpack that from an academic standpoint, especially as it relates to how we might use these
founding theories and premises that you work on to further human innovation and a in an organizational standpoint But before we jump too deeply into that I always give the guest an opportunity to tell us to tell us from their perspective What drives their work what motivates you and who do you think you impact? And so could you please let us know James what need or impact drives your work?
So my whole life I wanted to write creatively in some way to the point where I was planning on pursuing that. And kind of at the last minute I decided to go the more scientific route of kind of understanding creative writing instead of just throwing my hat in the rink of trying to do so. Although I did write creatively for probably the first
five to seven years of my PhD and subsequent career until at a certain point you can't really juggle everything. But that need to both.
tell stories, understand stories, and just kind of fascination with all aspects of creativity, from the arts to innovation and technology to more science and
getting the chance to kind of honestly just play with ideas for most of my career has been a bit of a luxury and privilege one of them I'm very grateful for. That's great. And so for the listeners who aren't cognitive psychologists, which are most of them, can you give us a quick overview of what your work focuses on and how the field of creativity research actually functions? Sure. So creativity
studies as a whole is actually, it's actually very multidisciplinary. So a lot of it's in psychology, but you have a lot of people who are in education. A lot of people in business has been growing people from neuroscience, engineering, computer science. And there's a certain core
body of work on creativity. To a certain extent, the field started kind of for real around 1950. And it's been having spurts ups and downs, but the last 20, 25 years, it's just greatly increased. And when we think about how we study creativity, some folks study the creative person. So what's the personality of people who are creative?
What are things that a person might do to become more creative? Other people will study the creative process. And so that is the kind of thinking that we'll do while we're being creative. A lot of the neuroscience work falls into this. So what's going on in the brain as we create? Then there's the creative product and a lot of the measurement-driven stuff looks at this. So how can we assess what is creative, what's not creative? How can we look at...
innovation would fall there in terms of, okay, we have a product and now how do we make it better? How do we make it viable? And then the creative press or environment, which sometimes is split into audience and affordances, but really is all the people impacted by creativity. So things like how people might work with others, how they might work within their environment, what resources they might have.
All things like that. Although my trainings in cognitive psychology, to a certain degree, I've used a lot of these different perspectives. A lot of what I do is kind of individual differences. So what makes different people either be more or less creative or pursue creativity in different domains? What motivates us to be creative? What types of people are creative?
all this stuff I find fascinating. And more recently, been really interested in the positive outcomes of creative. That's really interesting. And so you alluded there to innovation. It's a buzzword in many ways, across boardrooms, but and often in companies, it means like a new gadget. But from a cognitive perspective, what does innovation actually mean?
often, so I'm gonna take a step backwards in that creativity is often defined simply as anything that is novel or new and also task appropriate. And that task appropriate, it can mean useful, it can mean valuable. If we're talking lower level, it could just mean personally meaningful. Innovation is interested not just is something creative, is it new?
and test appropriate, but is it useful? Is there a value to it? Can it be operationalized? So creativity would value an idea that maybe never leaves your head. Innovation, less so. Can it work in the real world? And you were talking there about the different ways of being creative, right? From something that's uniquely interesting to you to something that's
scalable and something that's valuable to other people. I believe you also coined and work on the four C's of creativity, right? And so I think that captures a little bit of that. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is? Absolutely. So along with Ron the ghetto, we developed this model. So initially when people would study creativity, they tend to do one of two things. Either they'd be talking about the creative geniuses, know, Mozart.
and Einstein, people like that, or everybody else, which is a lot. What Ron and I did was we split it up a bit. So we start with what we call mini-C. And mini-C is the kind of personal creativity that is personally meaningful to the creator. It's new to the creator, but
There's a chance you might have an idea, you might share it and the person might say, this is terrible. Or, this isn't even that creative. As long as it is meaningful to you, it still counts as mini-C. To a certain extent, mini-C honestly is probably a lot less relevant to innovation as in it's a building block and it's needed, but...
whether companies would necessarily want to invest in Miniseed would probably be in a more limited way. If you share your idea to other people and you know, it could be friends, it could be families, it could be your local community. As people respond to it, they give you feedback, you work on it. At a certain point, other people recognize it as creative.
And this is what is little C for everyday creativity. And this is the stuff you see whenever you go to like a county fair. You you'll still, you'll see people selling their art or, you know, they'll be cooking different foods or their homemade hot sauce and all of this stuff counts.
It's required as this component of innovation. But again, if it's just little C, it's probably not enough for companies to really care about. It's this next level pro-C. And that's where many people have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, or this is the idea you need to put in about 10 years of deliberate practice to be an expert. Pro-C is when you put in that work and you've tried and you've failed and
Finally, you're at this point where you're able to really make a contribution that can impact the domain and the impact might be small. Like again, we're not talking to Bill Gates here, but you're at that level where you're getting produced, published, manufactured, distributed, recorded, regardless of your domain. And at some level, other people are.
And then to a certain degree, that's where creativity in our lifetime ends.
after, for years and years, sometimes some ideas are so good that they're still influential. They still have impact, even after the creator is probably long gone. And that's where Big C, creative genius, the kind of things where they still are impacting fields after years and years and the kind of changes and impacts are just very high level, enormous and continuous.
And that's just kind of big, huge genius level. That makes sense. Yeah, and I definitely can relate to that structure. And I can see, mean, those elements are necessary across a society and they build on each other too, right? I mean, it almost seems like if we want to instill creativity in future generations, you start by trying to teach children.
how to value the, the first one was mini C or little C? Mini. Mini C. So it's like, you want to start with the mini C's, know, have them come up with something truly unique that appeals to their interests or something that's pleasant to them. And then as they get the value of that and they start enjoying that, they start sharing it with their parents and other people, they start getting feedback. And so it almost seems like a progressive layering of value creation.
The initial one, the smallest one is value to you. If it's not value to you, it's not going to be valuable to anyone. So you start with that. And then after that, it's like your nearest concentric circle, which is like, it valuable to your aunts and your cousins and so on? And then after that, you start becoming a professional. Is it valuable to the next concentric circle, which would be maybe like your, your, your local environment, maybe your business or your school or wherever you are. And then very few people then break beyond that, which is the fourth one.
which is the big C, I believe, and that's the one, is it valuable to society? And society and the future, to a certain extent, because there are people who've been worldwide celebrated for their creativity, where 100 years later, nobody had any idea who they are, what they did. It just happens.
It's rare for the opposite, like the people who were never recognized and then is discovered 100 years later. We like to think about, I'm just a genius and nobody recognized me. That's really rare. yeah. Yeah, it's typically something like a...
like in Einstein, where you come up with that seminal paper and people recognize the value of it right away, as opposed to a Van Gogh that you die in obscurity, but then you become world famous a hundred years later. And if you take away Van Gogh's sister-in-law, nobody knows him. Like most of the people where they have that weird, fluky thing, it's because usually it's something a little random.
And usually somebody who saw their work, like one of my favorites is Vivian Meyer, who worked as a nanny for most of her life. She was always taking photographs, but she never even developed them. It wasn't until she died and her entire body of work was just in storage. Somebody happened to buy, know, unseen this lot, he developed the pictures. He thought these are really good. And so she was discovered posthumously.
but it is hard to emphasize how rare these things are. for sure. Yeah. Usually when somebody passes, their body of work goes with them as well. You mentioned something earlier about the type of person that's creative. And I'd love to unpack that a little bit without, and I'm sure it entails books and chapters and chapters of stuff, right? So we don't have two days to unpack it fully, but at a high level, is there a trend to the type of people that are creative or is it something that
Like what's the balance between nature and nurture there? Is it something that you're somewhat inherently born with and then you refine and you enhance over time? Or is it something that you can kind of just teach anybody to do?
I think if we're talking something like genius level, I feel like anytime you're talking about that, it gets difficult because it's so rare. In terms of creativity, at least at this mini or little level, I think that's almost completely teachable. I think some people will have certain benefits, but to a certain extent, both nature and.
in terms of if you have parents who are really creative and most likely they also value it and you're being introduced to things and kind of have these values instilled in you. Certainly the most dominant personality trait is being open. And this can be open to new ideas. It can be open to trying new things and new experiences. It's not being rigid. It's being flexible. It's being able
These are all kind of related, being able to tolerate ambiguity, being able to tolerate not knowing for certain something, being willing to take moderate sensible risks. All of these things build to a certain creative personality that has been consistently shown to, know, this openness relates to creativity at all levels and across all domains.
which is definitely not true of most things when we study with creativity. That's interesting. And yeah, and I guess I'm focusing more on like that third level, the pro, because, you know, I think everybody should have the first one, which is the mini. You can definitely, you can nurture it to become a little, see, the...
the big C, you that's, you can't necessarily make an Einstein, you know, that's a combination of things that happen. But everybody's aspiring for that pro C and especially within organizations, they want to embrace that even more. They're recruiting people with that. And it's not very common. I mean, at the professional level, when you go to an organization that's 50,000 or more people, the larger organizations, you definitely have some creative types, but
a lot of people just kind of fall within a category and maybe they create a little bit within their domain. You know, they improvise and they do certain things, but the ones that really get recognition for being creative, they have a special, it could just be opportunity. Maybe it's just, you know, the right place at the right time. But also I think to your point, they are open in some ways. They're open not only in how they share, but they're also open to new ideas and how they absorb those.
maybe they're more divergent thinkers than others and they have ways of making connections that other people just don't naturally do. And to some extent, there is an element of risk taking, right? Because being open to doing something new and like you said, embracing that ambiguity, it takes a special someone to do that because it's inherently risky and more times than not, you're gonna be wrong.
both being able to personally tolerate failure, but also having a job where you won't get fired at the first failure. I mean, do I think everybody can be pro-C? I mean, who knows? I think a lot more people could be than might consider themselves just because of circumstance and things that might be out of their control. I mean, certainly I think there's a lot of...
motivation involves a lot. mean, so much of creativity is the boring stuff, practicing over and over again and revised and all this stuff that tends to not make the headlines. I what makes the headlines are the quick and easy things, usually environment. if you paint your walls green or, you know, go for a walk first. And I mean, whether these things help, I mean, it's inconsistent, but the stuff we know helps is the stuff that isn't sexy because nobody wants to do it.
you which is you work and you work and you practice and you experiment. And then if you fail and screw up, then you keep working and you keep trying. And that's not what people want to hear. They want to hear, I just need to like wear my, my lucky red shirt and I'm good. And unfortunately that won't work. Yeah. Yeah. You know, as, as you're saying these things, you know, I'm reflecting on my career and I've helped
start companies and departments at Harvard. So much of the work that I've done is that unsexy boring stuff. Just like when you're in academia, I remember being in grad school and you put out a paper on stem cells or something and everybody's like, that's amazing. What you do must be so exhilarating. You're like, well, mean, two years in a lab of constant failures and every once in a while something works out and you publish it.
The paper sounds great, but the work that went into it was anything but exhilarating. It actually took a long, long time, a lot of sleepless nights. yet at the same time, I almost feel like that level of work and the grinding that happens, the persistence, the perseverance, it teaches you too. You pick up...
small little details and information along the way that may seem inconsequential at the time because like, okay, it didn't work because of this, but now it works because of that. But those things add up into you as a person, your character, and then what you think that allows you to then solve that higher order problem later on. And so I bring this up because now we're seeing this transformation of society with the latest versions of AI, right? With the LLM version.
which is extraordinary. I mean, I use it all the time. And I think from my perspective, when I use it, it definitely is a force factor. It enhances what I do, but I also have the fundamentals beneath that to understand what's happening. And I know how to ask the questions to get the right answers back because I already have a framework in my head of what I'm looking for. But if we project forward to society where that is in a way filling in that gap, the mundane work that is boring, that...
takes a long time, AI is becoming really good at doing that stuff. From your perspective, from a professional, from an academic standpoint, I'm sure you guys have had conversations about this, but is it that human society evolves in a way that maybe they don't need that mundane stuff anymore? Because I guess in a certain way, when I write code, I'm not thinking at the lowest level, bit level, I'm thinking more.
libraries and I'm thinking functions and more abstract logic. So I'm not really thinking about processors and things like that. So there's an element that has gone away and it doesn't affect my ability to being a developer, but does that map necessarily to strategic and logical thinking as a society? How do you cognitive psychologists think about how this evolves over time at a society level scale?
It's a little worrisome because of how fast everything's going.
Some of it is that AI is always changing. like there was a recent study by David Cropley that was trying to pinpoint how creative is AI? And he kind of concluded it's somewhere between little C and pro C. It's high little C, low pro C. And I think some of this also kind of checks where if you are medium to high pro C,
then a lot of AI's output seems fine, but not impressive. It's when you're not in the area that you ask AI to do something that you get impressed with. If you're Minicee and you're seeing this high literacy responsible, that's impressive.
It's the same way. I'm not going to recognize hallucinations of random psychology papers. Honestly, I might not recognize it as a feeling for creativity papers. I'll definitely recognize that if it's hallucinating my paper. It's the other worry I have is that ultimately AI is a product and business people want to make money.
And at certain point, the current AI that we have, I mean, I'm sure it'll get much better, but that will be money. That will cost money and the current version may well have ads or just get worse. Which I think my worry is that students who really are outsourcing their thinking, so to speak, to AI.
I think there's a decent chance that two years, five years, I don't know, at some point when AI is another big shift, it'll get much better for some people, but I think it's gonna get notably worse for other people, which if you already have that foundation, I think it may just be annoying. I think if you're somebody who doesn't have that foundation, who doesn't have, as we're saying, just the
boring moments of revisions or stumbling around making mistakes trying to program or code or draft something out. A lot of these things are a lot easier to learn when you're a teenager than when you're 30 or 40 or 50. And if you never had to go through that process.
I think we're doing some people who are not going to be well served if they're not being careful. Yeah. And I also think about, regardless of the field, AI currently, the LLMs are really good at generating seemingly human thought in the form of writing. They're becoming much better in graphics as well with diagrams and drawings and photos even still.
And so, and companies are using them to create video games and simulations and all kinds of stuff. And so in a way, we're almost transferring some of the authorship that has historically been human. You know, if we think about just as the evolution of society where we had man created the first tools like the hand axe, or eventually created the cuneiform tablets to be able to
transfer knowledge across generations and eventually started building on things that were more than just one mind, one processor at a time. It was now multiple processors over time building on the knowledge base. But at the core of it has always been the human being as the author of these tools and the byproduct of these tools, what they created with those. Now we're starting to see this creation of a tool by virtue of innovation, AI, that now there's a certain amount of transference of the authorship.
to this tool and along with that, some of the creativity, right? Because now you can almost like, I could literally, if I frame the question properly, AI could write a whole chapter or a book for me. And so I'm transferring some of that into AI. Does that, and you obviously you're right smack at ground zero of creativity and humanity. So how does that?
shape your thinking around like this transference of authorship around creativity to AI. And you even mentioned there for a second, it's kind of like little C to pro C. It's somewhere in between there and I feel that, right? But it's gonna get better and it's getting better by the month. It's not something we, within our lifetime, we're gonna see tremendous amounts of progress in that space. And yet at the same time, until they come up with AGI, it is largely regurgitating human knowledge.
Right, so it's actually just taking in a much better way than we can because now you're looking across the entire base of human knowledge and then putting something together that makes a lot of sense, but it's not necessarily creating something from scratch yet, but that potentially could change as well.
And certainly...
Like if we think about what are different creative thought processes, you know, you have divergent thinking. So I you have many different things. have associative thinking, thinking of how things that might not seem to be related can be related. These are the kinds of things that AI is good at because ultimately, like if you're thinking of associative thinking, if you can simultaneously compare every single permutation of 400 different things.
and look one and two, one and three, one and four and just do that like that, then you're gonna be able to out associate any human. And that I think, okay, that's a good use.
It's question of
You don't get the paradigm shifting ideas or even the really, really good pro-C new knowledge ideas without mini-C, without little c.
I mean, to a certain extent, think people, at least some people like being creative. And I think we're gonna have people, regardless of field, still be wanting to do it, at least human co-authored, if not sole authors. So I think to a certain degree, I don't think we're gonna get rid of human creativity that easily. But I also think we're gonna be reducing that, that.
population of people who are used to thinking creatively on a regular basis. And I mean, I tend to be a little more pessimistic because I see it as AI is drawing on this core base of human knowledge. And that core base isn't going to be getting as bigger as it has been if people aren't not just allowed, but kind of expected to be creative.
I a lot of, I I often think of the arts, a lot of the jobs that people in the arts do to support themselves as they take off, those are the ones being taken over by AI and eliminated. And I understand this from a business's point of view, of course.
But I worry we are not really thinking long-term thought. And in general, people are terrible at that. We think short-term. We don't think long-term.
But I worry that AI, it's easy. And I think a lot of people use it because it's easy for it use fewer resources as opposed to really thinking it'll be more creative. People tend to underreport the degree to which they're letting AI make the decisions.
A lot of people will say that it's co-creation, then you, if you're actually looking at the keystrokes, than you might think. It's even just stuff like a lot of times AI output looks more creative because we're used to language being a good proxy for content. Usually when you read something, if it's written well, then the ideas are good.
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early research is not necessarily supporting this for AI, which means I'd be curious how much of the stuff where people are going, yes, AI is really creative and just as good as humans, how much of that is because we're using heuristics to rate or assess things even informally that just don't work as well with AI. Yeah, I can definitely see that. I tend to be
More on the pessimistic side as well. Just as we see the potential side effects. I mean, there is an element of relying so much in AI that we do start transferring the authorship, the creativity process. And if we do that too much at scale, number one, we really kill that middle layer of people that are doing the little Cs and then eventually mini and pro.
to become the big Cs, right? Because it's like AI is filling in that gap. And unless you're somehow magically in a position to leap from little C to big C, you have to have that training ground to get up to big C. And we're kind of doing away with like, that's the space that AI is kind of eating away at. And if we do that whole scale for a society, there is such a thing as like atrophying.
eventually, like does that skill go away? And then do we have a wildly despair society where we have people that are just kind of like doing menial work, and there's maybe an elite that rises to the top that can still do the big C's, but now you have a much harder way for the people to progress and have greater access to becoming big C practitioners, if you will.
One of my pet peeves is when I hear that AI is democratized in creativity, because it's not. I mean, it's making it easier for anybody to be creative. And I guess if somebody thinks they're not very creative and they're impressed with the output, that's one thing. But creativity itself as a human trait is incredibly democratic. We all have this chance to be creative. It's something where if you look at
measures of intelligence, academic achievement and creativity, it's the creativity measures that tend to show the least differences by SES or race or gender or culture. Like we all to a certain extent have this capacity and possibility to be creative no matter what. And this is the thing that as you're saying, we're gonna be losing a large chunk of people
being creative. And I mean, being creative is one of the few things that does let people rise regardless of background or opportunities when they're younger. It's the other thing is that
Being creative is enjoyable. It's fun. mean, people tend to like their jobs a lot more if they can be creative and if they feel autonomy in being creative. There's all this work by Theresa Madre about if we feel that what we do is meaningful and that we're making progress in that, particularly by being creative, that is incredibly good for our mood and for our motivation. And this is glorious.
Mm-hmm.
There are all these intangibles about creativity that we're not necessarily thinking about in terms of, you okay, you can outsource all this AI and your employees therefore won't have to be creative, but most employees will like being creative. makes them more loyal, more engaged. more satisfying. Right. And we're now decreasing that or even eliminating that. I mean, at a
mind a more global level, there's all this stuff about finding meaning in life and well being and all these being connected with other people that a lot of this is rooted in creativity. And so I guess when I see all these solutions that means, humans don't have to be creative anymore. I mean, I don't want to have to wash my dishes. I don't mind being creative. I'm not looking
to fast forward through that part of what I do. Yeah. So if we think about, know, a big part of what I've always done in the organizations that I've helped start is trying to create an environment of creativity and innovation. And I founded an innovation lab for Perkin Elmer, now Revity. So it's a public company. And so there are elements that go into it. You can go way back to Lockheed Martin and Skunk Works.
to pick up some clues on like, does this work? And then there have been many labs since and creating innovation labs or even just fostering innovation within an organization. A lot of it has to do with the culture that you build to the environment that you foster, creating a space of psychological safety for risk taking and for being able to have a way of pushing each other without and challenging each other, but in a respectful way so that you you feel safe to throw out a seemingly naive question or a thought.
and then have teams work with that because most ideas start in a foolish way and then it takes some shaping before they become something real, right? So you don't want to snuff them out before you give them the opportunity. So there are different ways of doing this. So if we transition to that and kind of from your perspective, creating an environment for creativity, especially with respect to innovation, which is creation of value, what...
What are your perspectives there when it comes to organizations? I think it's easier said in a startup environment where you're like small, three people and a dog in a garage. You can create your own culture, but if you're thinking about a multi-billion dollar company with 50,000 people and you have a CEO that's thinking, want to be able to create an environment where people become more innovative, position ourselves for the future and maybe become AI native. So we embrace this.
but also balance it with what you just said, which is we don't want to see too much of the creativity component to AI because then people's jobs will become less fulfilling. And what you want to do is you want to create an environment where people want to work there. Like this is one of the best companies to work in because we do modern, cool, innovative stuff. And yet I go home feeling good about myself. I know that I just said a lot and there's no silver bullet, but if I'm going to ask anybody this question, I think it would be you. If you were in...
that position as let's say CEO of that company, where do you start? Like how do you think about transforming your company for that future state where you're enabling and empowering with these modern technologies, but then also allowing people to fulfill themselves from the human side that makes us love what we do.
Good question.
to a certain extent.
Some of the techniques that are in play when you have a group brainstorming session, some of them are done because you will often have people who are very outgoing, extroverted, verging on aggressive. And so some of these techniques are in play to make sure the shy people get a chance to contribute to. Things like having people write down all their ideas first and have a facilitator be in charge.
To a certain extent, I would almost treat AI as the loud, aggressive extrovert. In terms of once you have that person be in charge, all the people who are quieter are just going to zone out and be quiet. I think having certainly.
Obviously access to AI, course, but trying to figure out how do people want to use AI? So.
You can bring, can co-create with AI by brainstorming with AI. You can have AI help you evaluate and select your ideas. We do know some things. We know that AI is frankly better at brainstorming than at evaluating. It's better early on. But I think letting people have a bit of a say in how they use it. Where
If you accept that at a certain point, everybody didn't have access to AI.
Even if it's okay, here's what AI would suggest. But now can you brainstorm things that are better, whether you're taking these ideas and making them better, finding new things that AI didn't think of, but
by being aware AI exists, it's here. And although it's always changing, we should just say to known quantities. Like if this is the assignment, you know what AI will say, cause you can ask it. And letting the workers in essence show their creativity and their value by choosing, when do I work with the AI or have it be part of it? And knowing that if they never use it, that's fine. But if AI had an idea that would have been amazing,
that's going to be on them if they don't come up with it. But whether they want to do their creative thinking and then, okay, AI, here's what I thought of, what am I forgetting or how can you make it better? Or if they want AI to do the initial brainstorming and then they work on that, putting their creative magic to it, I think that would at least keep some of the employees able to be creative.
able to still reap the benefits that do exist for AI, but still feeling in control and that still feeling a certain amount of ownership of their ideas, their work and their creativity. Yeah, it sounds like formulating a logical process by which is incorporated into the workflow and giving people enough freedom.
while also maybe applying some constraints, right? You don't want endless freedom. You don't want endless constraints because then you stifle innovation, but also too much freedom is directionless. And so having a way of being able to create an environment to foster the appropriate use of AI and the educated use of AI while still trying to tap into maybe some of the elements that still keep us human.
So some of the uniqueness that AI hasn't been able to replicate yet, which is that original thoughts or making connections that seemingly aren't intuitive, that logic may not necessarily be able to replicate with code alone. Are there elements for creating environments that you've seen that foster innovation more than others?
Certainly.
I mean, it sounds simple, but if you think about what does an organization do if they value creativity, they allot the most precious things, which is time, money, resources.
It's easy for companies to say they value creativity. Are they allowing their employees some time, some time where
they had a certain amount of freedom, where they have the ability to fail, they have the ability to experiment.
how do they react when people get things wrong? Obviously, there's different reasons to get things wrong. And then if somebody just doesn't do their work, obviously, that's not what I mean. But if somebody has taken a big swing and they fail, is it a culture where, well, they're out?
This whole, you were mentioning earlier, psychological safety. You're not going to be creative.
If you're so fixated on what are the consequences of me doing this, what happens if I say this? What happens if I submit this? What happens if I tried this?
the way they handle failure, way, but even more than failure, just allowing.
a little bit extra time, resources that goes along. And model, model, you know, have, you know, if the boss and the CEO are also taking some level of risks, obviously, you know, not putting all the assets on red 32, but you know, some level of risks, some level of
being creative, trying new things, being open, again, with sense. mean, something's creative if it's new and useful or task appropriate. It's not just a novelty aspect. having a big clear as to the value at end then, putting literally your money where your mouth is. How does your propulsion theory apply to this?
In the space that I'm in, also it tends to be healthcare life sciences, a lot of it boils onto trust. There's a lot of regulation in the space. You're dealing with people's lives. so if we think about your propulsion theory, if you could tell us a little bit about that, but then also with respect to how would a large legacy organization move from incremental improvement to true redirection, such as becoming AI native, without breaking trust quality,
or regulatory compliance.
So the propulsion theory, is Robert Sternberg and then myself and Gene Krebs helped develop that and worked through different iterations, it's the idea that is looking at how does any specific contribution impact the field? So it could be basic replication. It could be redirection or redefinitions where you kind of just shifting perspectives. It could be.
incrementations, both small or bigger, it could be complete, what is called re-initiations, totally changing how things are done. I think one is that different companies need different things. So not every company needs to literally reinvent the wheel every single time. Sometimes being able to do
a replication of existing work for less money and resources. That's a perfectly viable do this plan. The same way, smaller incrementations, again, we can look down on them as quote, lower forms of creativity, but they're still creative. And a lot of the reinitiation or what is called advanced forward incrementation, that comes with a lot of risks. And
a company may not want that risk. I think...
having these different types of contributions, understanding what's the company doing? What's the goals? What best fits it? What different departments? Because sometimes you'll have some departments just replicate what's been done. This isn't what we're going to innovate, just make sure there's no major safety concerns or issues there. Other times you won't.
Okay, let's take the big swings. Being able to really map it. Okay, this is where we want the major innovation here. Great if possible, but it needs to be functional and serviceable first and primarily. It's the same way. I mean, I think about domains a lot too, where you can be pro-C in one domain.
doesn't transfer. Like if you know a tremendous amount about one specific area and you're very creative in it, if you're trying something very different, a lot of people assume they'll still be experts. Usually you're not. And so recognizing
I mean, just in general, the value of expertise, the fact that, and yes, there's a stereotype that if you know too much, then you're not going to be creative, but that's over, that's overstated. I whenever I teach this stuff and I was asked how many people think that children are more creative than adults, most people raised their hand. And like, I mean, I get what they're saying, but if we think of creativity as actual, are we talking like,
Proceed no kid almost no kid is proceed I mean it requires knowledge and expertise and all this stuff and to value that and
the fact that, and again, this is something that AI, you just gotta be careful because you wanna make sure you have the humans with the expertise working for you and happy. Yeah, no, I see that. I definitely recognize that what you said in the beginning of this, which is kind of like taking a portfolio approach.
Right, in some cases you want to go for the moonshot, in other cases routine innovation works just fine. You know, it's not like you need to say, okay, we're just going to take this 50,000 organization and reinvent it from scratch and just start from the beginning. You have to be much more proactive and practical about that and say, okay, in some cases this is good enough. In other cases, this is where we take the big shots and then there's stuff in between. Right. And so you try to take a strategic approach, but
This has been fascinating. I know we're approaching the end of our talk. So with that, I just want to really finish with a closing question. Just you're obviously nowhere close to being at the end of your career. But if you can project forward and just zoom into the future, we're at a place where you can reflect in your career and the body of work that you've created up to that point. What ⁓ what would a best case scenario look like that would make you feel you achieve your full impact? You know, what changes in education or organizations?
or how society treats the creative mind would make you feel the proudest and give you the deepest sense of fulfillment over what you've accomplished.
That's a good question.
There are a lot of things going on in the world that are impacting human creativity, sometimes for good, often for not. And when I was younger, I had these ideas about how I wanted education to change and this could change. I guess the older I get, I feel like what I can influence is the people around.
If I can look back and the students I've mentored, the students I've taught, and the wide variety of colleagues who I've again worked with mentored.
If the day of throng
That's the one thing I knew.
What happens to the US education system, et cetera? I can be shouting until I'm hoarse and it won't necessarily matter.
but I know I can impact the students I teach. I can impact the scholars I work with and who I, in many cases, try to mentor. And if I can keep that going, I mean, one thing I love about studying creativity is I honestly think it's one of the nicest fields. I mean, I've studied different areas and not all fields are filled with nice people. I love the fact that it's pretty welcome.
if that can be consistent as much as possible. if we can keep.
the people who I know I can impact, if they can do well, to me that would be successful. Well said, like a true mentor and educator. And with that, I commend you. Thank you, James. This has been a really interesting conversation. Congratulations on the extraordinary work that you've done. And thank you for spending some time with me on a natural selection. Thank you so much.
