‘The Cult of Creativity’ Review: Riders on the Brainstorm

‘Imagination, like muscle, can be built up by exercise,’ preached the ad man Alexander Faickney Osborn. Not everyone agrees.

'Divergent' and creative thinking have become widely recognised and proven as cornerstones of business success

Are you creative at work? Maybe you don’t compose sonatas, write poetry or design buildings. Still, whether you’re in banking, engineering, technology or any other nonartistic field, you might perform acts of creativity — and consider that a good thing.

After all, when it comes to hiring, we’ve been told creativity is a highly sought-after quality, alongside others such as integrity, dedication and global thinking. In 2020, the World Economic Forum identified creativity as “the one skill that will future-proof you for the jobs market.” Despite its outsized importance in the workplace, creativity as a job qualification is a relatively new concept. The first-known written instance of the word didn’t appear in print until 1875, and before roughly 1950 there was nary an article, book or lecture on the topic.

In “The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History,” Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, explains how an ensemble of psychologists, advertising gurus and other experts raised the profile of this personality trait by promoting it as a secret weapon during the Cold War. For these advocates, cultivating creativity accomplished two goals of national importance: ensuring scientific and technological progress in the face of growing competition from the U.S.S.R., and restoring individualism — a quintessentially American principle.

In the mid-20th century, the US workforce was undergoing a significant shift. With help from the G.I. Bill and heavy government investment in higher education, “between 1940 and 1964 the number of people with professional and technical degrees more than doubled.” By 1956, for the first time in American history, there were more white-collar workers than blue-collar workers.

But higher profits and wages would give rise to more than an affluent society, Mr Franklin tells us; it would spark fears of a “mass society,” characterised by alienation at work, passive consumption at home and the loss of social connection. To make matters worse, big corporations were turning would-be inventors into uninspired pencil-pushers — at a time when fighting communists required the best and brightest minds.

Some psychologists thought they had a way of finding men (and they were predominantly men) with the right mix of talent. Creative men — nonconforming, free-thinking and inventive — were the ideal hires, they claimed. At a 1950 conference of the American Psychological Association, its president, Joy Paul Guilford, decried the paucity of research on creativity. This prompted a wave of psychologists to address the deficit over the next decade.

“These researchers,” Mr Franklin writes, “were the first to systematically produce knowledge about creativity, define it, and quantify it, and in doing so they helped make it into the ‘thing’ it is today.” Creativity, these experimenters asserted, was distinct from intelligence. Whereas a person with a high IQ might figure out established answers to problems, a creative person had the drive to figure out the unknown. The beauty of creativity was its democratic nature: Genius was rare, but creativity could be found in nearly everyone. The challenge for psychologists was to figure out a way to uncover it in those who hadn’t done anything creative yet.

One promising testing method got its start in the 1930s, when the psychologist L.L. Thurstone, a former engineer who had worked in Thomas Edison’s lab, wondered why certain employees were more inventive than others. In a series of studies, he concluded that while most scientists could arrive at answers quickly, those who produced many possible solutions — a cognitive ability he called “divergent thinking” — ended up with the most patents. Creativity researchers eagerly embraced divergent thinking as a measure of creative potential in almost any subject.

No one deserves more credit for popularising divergent thinking, however, than Alexander Faickney Osborn, the co-founder of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBDO). In his 1942 book, “How to Think Up,” Osborn introduced a technique called “brain-storming.” In a typical brainstorming session, participants generate as many ideas as possible, regardless of how silly or outrageous. Osborn believed that creativity, unlike intelligence, could be developed through hard work and practice. “There is no genius in me,” he said, “but I have learned by experience that imagination, like muscle, can be built up by exercise.” Osborn retired from BBDO in 1954 to devote himself to the “creativity movement,” spreading the gospel of creative problem-solving at such American blue chips as Alcoa, DuPont and Kraft.

Soon, brainstorming was everywhere — and, in various permutations, it still is. But from the outset it had its detractors. A Yale study in 1958 compared the quantity and quality of ideas brainstormed by teams of four Yale undergraduates to those generated by students alone, and concluded that creativity was inhibited by brainstorming. William Whyte, in his 1956 classic, “The Organisation Man,” might have had brainstorming in mind when he wrote that “people rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create.” Others criticised brainstorming for reducing the creative process to a production line. Creativity, the graphic designer Saul Bass said, cannot be “turned on and off like a faucet every Thursday afternoon.” Despite their critics, brainstorming and other similar techniques intended to spur creativity, have continued to proliferate. Similarly, creativity research, despite the waning of the Cold War, has continued under the rhetoric that claims creativity is the only thing that can solve the world’s most intractable problems. According to Mr Franklin, that thinking is misguided. But he does concede that creativity advocates hit on a valuable truth — that “a sense of agency and constructiveness” was missing from industrial work.

“The Cult of Creativity” comes at a technological turning point. The emergence of generative-AI tools has given us the option of outsourcing our brainstorming, becoming prompt engineers to idea-spitting machines. Will this new development erode our sense of agency in the workplace once again? If large-language models are capable of creative acts, what will be our uniquely human contributions?

In Mr Franklin’s idealistic scenario of the future, we will redirect our energy away from producing more disruptive innovations and toward a thoughtful consideration of ” what should be produced in the first place.” World-saving ideas and technologies are still needed — whether they result from creative thinking or not — but “the space to question the goodness of the new,” Mr Franklin suggests, might be “the big idea we need right now.”

The Wall Street Journal