Creativity - appropriated by business and sold back to us

 The term “creativity” is now used so liberally and defined so broadly in job advertisements, corporate flyers and on university websites (where it's usually married with “innovation”) as to be meaningless.

The colonisation of “creativity” by everyone from real estate agents to government spin doctors is not surprising. The great advantage of emphasising creativity instead of “commodification” in the current economic climate, is that it makes commodification sound natural.

British sociologist Frank Furendi says in Where have all the intellectuals gone? that creativity has become a feel good term, intended to make us all feel a little bit better about what we do, whether its about stocking shelves at the supermarket or playing piano in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

"The promiscuous designation of the label 'creative' overlooks the fact that achievement involves hard work, painful encounters and personal development. Creativity is not a personal characteristic but the outcome of inspired, hard earned achievement," Furendi says.

We need to take a “reality check” on the instrumentalist and functionalist use of the term “creative”. I suggest that the benefits of the new economy - or the information economy - is wildly blown out of proportion. And it's not the first time we've made such a mistake.

One of the reasons we had the Dotcom crash in 2000 was that companies who bought in to the online information revolution realised that it lacked content. It wasn't exactly a South Sea Bubble. It was more a case of lots of froth but no bubble. The only difference is that today we have a lot more hardware.

But the spin is still there and that's where most of the hard work is being done. It's the appropriation of one perspective of creativity by business as a catch-all term to lure both buyers and sellers in to the marketplace. And we're not even too sure what bag of goods we're being sold. I believe we're being sold more electronic mediums rather than content.

Organisations market creativity like this:

1. Creativity is an essential human attribute.
2. Creativity is the key to economic prosperity - the engine of the market.
3. Therefore, the market is simply an extension of the fundamental workings of human nature.

It's a false and invalid argument but to suggest otherwise may be elitist - and didn't we get rid of all that elitist arts stuff in the 1980 and 1990s? Yes and no. We produced a lot of students who couldn't spell and didn't know the apostrophe rules but they could write long critical essays deconstructing The Truman Show. But I digress.

The guys in Enron and HIH thought of themselves as creative too and they didn't want people snooping around asking a whole lot of questions. It's time we asked some hard questions from people who propound creative solutions. What do they really, really mean?

Some years ago I was a programs leader helping to run a raft of creative writing and communication programs at a large university. We taught creative writing under the umbrella term “creative media” (whatever that was).

About 50 per cent of my job was selling the programs. My motive was solidly economic. If I didn't make the targets for the local and international students, we were all unemployed. I have a strong background in PR so I marketed and advertised the programs until I was blue in the face. I thought my media strategies and branding techniques were, in themselves, creative.

I was using creative thinking to hunt for prospective creative students to produce creative works. You can't get much more creative than that. Thinking makes it so. It was good for the students, good for the university and good for the nation, or so I thought.

But in the back of my mind I had doubts about this creative revolution. I certainly cannot say that all of the students got jobs but then again, that may not have been their objective. I taught the students the value of parsimony and elegance in expression and that's as far as I got.

I like to believe that the 1,000s of students who studied with us were interested in writing without the functionalist expectation of getting a job. That the process of studying and learning in a group, gave a sense of cohesion of purpose. Indeed, it was the experience of group learning that gave them the confidence to push themselves. Creativity (whatever that was) seemed to come from that. We didn't teach creativity, we taught the mechanics of writing. We didn't teach creativity in multimedia. We taught students how to operate software.

One film writing program which has been running for the past 10 years, at a cost of $1.5 million to the government, has not had one feature film script turned in to a feature film. The students were highly educated and the teachers were excellent, it's just that there was no demand for film scripts. Note also the nasty sting in the tail by marrying creativity with functionalism. “Creativity” looks bereft when it doesn't make money.

A writer with an international reputation once said to me that creative writing or photography schools were all very well but she had not, as yet, heard of a curriculum based around creative thinking.

One of the dangers of putting so much functional bias or spin on the term “creative”, and then applying it to almost every field of human endeavour, is that one runs the risk of self parody or mumbo-jumbo. The authors of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Awaken the Giant Within, Elizabeth 1 CEO: Strategic Lessons in Leadership from the Woman who built and Empire and The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun used creativity as a lure for gullible executives hunting for magic in the workings of the market.

The majority of corporations are not really looking for “creatives” as such (they'd fail the psychometric tests). They don't want a lot of divergent thinking people running around with no understanding of the bottom line. They're looking for people who can put business strategies in place - deal makers at the cutting edge of new capital creation.

I understand why universities appropriate the term “creative”. It has social caché - it's good to be creative, like the way my mother used to say that it was “good” that I learn to play the piano as a child because I would be popular at parties (but I added, to her chagrin, only if there was a piano at the party).

In his essay On Creativity, US physicist David Bohm argued that creativity is difficult to achieve and consequently rare. In Bohm's view, most of what we do as humans is fairly humdrum and routine. For most of us, only occasionally is life marked by flashes of creativity. He did not regard this as a failing of individuals, but of a society that encourages us to conform and think in mechanical and repetitive ways.

It's a small paradox that a society that places such a high premium on creativity, forces people to sit in an office all day shuffling paper around or staring at a computer screen. For all the cant spruiked by HR management, most organisations still operate in quasi-military hierarchies. These are not the fecund fields were creativity will bloom.

While I've been critical of the functionalist appropriation of the term creativity, there clearly is some form of phenomena where our life is marked by flashes of deep insight. It's those flashes that interest me.

Why should a woman walking down a street suddenly formulate in her head, from a complex juxtaposition of memory and sense perception, an idea for a painting that will one day be hailed as a masterpiece? I have no idea.

Why should a young man flying from Sydney to Hong Kong on holiday in the year 2010 make an astounding discovery about the pattern of prime numbers? Beats me.

Creativity is something we all have but we don't know very much about it. I think it's time we called big businesses bluff about their appropriation of creativity. For a truly creative nation to evolve, we need to study the wild mutability of the creative process. That would truly be a revolutionary step.