– Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
They say when you are creative you have a big imagination, but what does that mean? To define Imagination: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Ultimately, it is through imagination that all things were built. No problem could be solved without it, no building, movie or accessory could be created without it. So why is knowledge more praised than creativity? Why isn’t creativity taught more in school as a necessity rather than a freebie sort of class? I believe that it is our imagination that makes us so different from animals. This is what puts us in a different class – makes us intelligent. The fact that we can come up with new ways to solve a problem that are unique to the individual; the fact that we don’t only care about solutions to problems, but create for fun. These facts make us human.
I hope by the end of this blog that I have convinced you that creativity is indeed greater than knowledge. Throughout this post I want to take you into a world without creativity. I want to talk about creativity being or not being a knowledge based process, in other words I want to answer the question – Can I create an artificially creative machine? I want to help you understand my view of creativity in the work place, and lastly, I want to explore the idea of a more creatively driven society and academic up bringing.
A world without creativity. A world without creativity looks like a world of animals. A world where we[humans] know what we know and don’t care about anything else. Much like a colony of ants, we work together and build homes we are wired to build, but never think of anything beyond. We never get “bored”. Always looking for food, never thinking about purpose, and are always okay with how things are. We may have a preference for how the world should be for us; but as soon as we hit that preferred state, we’d enter a another state of brainless roaming. What would it look like if a human didn’t have an imagination? I would argue this human would look and act like a monkey. An animal with certain needs to be met. An animal with a brain that doesn’t care about the act of creating, but one that just wants to feel good.
So, what happens when we force an animal to create? Say give a monkey a pencil hoping for it to draw. I’ve done some research on animal made art work and here’s what I found. In 2014, researchers published a paper of their behavior enrichment training in the Melbourne zoo (1). Elephants at this zoo were trained to draw, and they found that the elephants gain little enrichment from the act of drawing. They only enjoyed the positive enforcement they obtained from the zookeepers training them. These elephants also could only draw what they learned they never created or came up with their own ideas. Animals obtain no joy from creation only physical and “emotional” activities.
Now, I believe animals have emotions much like us, but they don’t have a sense of empathy to truly understand the consequences of there actions. I also believe empathy comes from the imagination, you can’t truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes unless you have imagined it, right? Imagination gives us the capability of becoming and understanding more than what is right in front of us because we can “play” with different outcomes of situations we are in.
Creativity in the workplace. Creativity is all over the workplace, it is the key to obtaining quality problem solving skills. All leaders need creativity to lead well. They must have empathy and planning skills, but the only way to have great planning skills is to “think through” or imagine different scenarios to prepare for. Many of the “tougher” jobs require more creativity to do well. What if these jobs are only hard because we weren’t raised to be creative but to be cookie cutters who only use our brains for more linear tasks. The leaders and people at the “top” know that creativity/idea generation is how you get to where they are at. So, why not teach this to others? Well if you are at the “top” you need workers. These workers need to do simple linear task to move your goal forward. Thus, it makes sense on why we are not taught to be more creative in the class room. This brings me to my next point.
Creativity in the class room. The class room has not changed for over many many years. I wont get into the history of schooling and education because this blog is already becoming lengthy. The moral of the story is creativity is undervalued in the class room because when the idea of school was first created. There was no need for people to be creative. No desire for students to have unique ideas, only to repeat what was given to them. Now we are in a society where “good” talent is scarce and I know many CEOs and Leaders whose number one problem is finding “good” talent. I personally think these talent can be created if school were to upgrade its methods a bit more. But again, thats a blog for another day.
I think that’s all I am going to write for this blog. I’ll save the question of developing an artificially creative machine for another blog as well. Hope you enjoyed the thought!
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