SIXTEEN OF US HAD SPENT two days talking about innovation and design thinking at the Stanford d.school in March 2009 when the Executive Director of Stanford’s design program, Bill Burnett, framed one of the great challenges of our day. It had been the third Summit on the Future of Design and a high-powered group of educators and practitioners who specialized in innovation and creativity had pondered the question: What will define the next frontier for innovation and what new methodologies would need to be developed?
The conference focused on what large corporations needed to do to become more innovative, and the discussion revolved around how we might go beyond design thinking to something richer, something that reflected the intelligence necessary for breakthrough design that was deeper than the process of thinking alone. The ideas and discussions I had over that weekend pushed my own thinking about the social and cultural aspect of creativity and helped me formulate some of my ideas for assessing creativity.
It was at the end of the second day that Burnett, who had worked at Hasbro and Apple, made a statement that really resonated with me. “We have GREs and SATs to measure math, verbal, and writing scores,” he said, “but we don’t even attempt to measure creativity. We have no currency with people who do measure.” By that Burnett was describing admissions officers at schools like Stanford, but he could have been talking about HR departments in corporations and other organizations. Burnett said that whether we like it or not, “What can’t be measured doesn’t have value.” And then he concluded with this: “We need a measure of creativity. We need an SAT for creativity.”
My close friends have a four-year-old daughter named Zoe, and my hope is that by the time she applies to Stanford (and she will), the university admissions office will have developed a methodology to assess her Creative Intelligence. Perhaps by then we will have comparable “CQ assessments” for children around the world, paralleling the current global measures on math and science. How would American students match up against German or Korean students in creativity? How would they fare against French or Brazilian kids? Would students from New York and London, San Francisco and Milan, where there are many schools in design, fashion, art, media, music, and architecture, do better than students from places without these kinds of educational opportunities?
How should we go about building a method to assess creativity on a national and global scale? Where do we start? As I discovered from my investigation into the history of creativity research, the attempt to find quantitative measures of creativity hasn’t been very fruitful in the past. But what’s the alternative? We do, after all, tend to associate assessment with mathematical measurement. From the incessant testing that goes on in K–12 classes thanks to No Child Left Behind, to Six Sigma management in business, we constantly test by the numbers.
But creativity doesn’t appear to lend itself to metric measurement at this point in time. Perhaps in the future, we might be able to come up with an algorithm that works. But for now, we need qualitative measures. So I set about talking to the most creative people I know about what to do, asking them, “How do we assess creativity?”
I first turned to what might appear an unlikely source, a business school dean. The overwhelming number of these deans were dedicated evangelists of the efficient market theory model and the purely mathematical analytical skills that go with it. Nothing creative about the concept or the competencies taught in their schools. But Roger Martin at the Rotman School of Management was among the first deans to bring design thinking into his school’s business curriculum.
Martin offered up some simple and obvious advice: “Do what Juilliard does,” he said. “Look at students’ portfolios. And test them on their performance.” In other words, go to places that already assess creativity. It was good advice. The Juilliard School’s process for auditioning talented dance students begins with prospective students attending ballet classes where they are observed by a teacher. The basic level of training and ability is judged, and some receive callbacks to perform modern dance. In effect, their “portfolios”—what they’ve learned and how they move—are assessed.
Then each student performs a two-minute solo dance of his or her choosing, either original choreography or from repertory. Another assessment is made, and a small number are called back. At this point, the student is briefly coached on modern dance movements and told to perform right there before a panel of faculty members. The panel assesses how fast the student picks up choreography, responds to corrections and changes, and works as a member of an ensemble.
The Juilliard process includes both planned and unplanned or spontaneous performances. The professors look at technique as well as risk-taking, skill as well as learning ability, solo performance as well as ensemble work. All these categories are assessed by a small jury of experts who, based on their own domain knowledge, determine the best candidates.
This method of assessing Creative Intelligence can be found throughout society. Creativity is assessed using portfolio and performance criteria every day, Olympics gymnastics and on music sharing sites.
Nowhere is this method of assessing creativity more evident than on TV. Turn your TV on and you, along with tens of millions of other people, can see shows like Project Runway or Chopped whose judges assess skill and originality much like Juilliard does. Most competition-style reality TV shows use a similar model: small jury, specific challenges, performances, assessments, scores, and winners. On Dancing with the Stars, amateurs are paired up with professional dancers, although the “amateurs” are often celebrities in fields other than dancing. Astronauts, Olympic athletes, singers, and supermodels—people with high visibility—are brought onstage with the pros. A three-person panel of judges consisting of professional dancers then scores them on points. The audience also votes. Couples that receive the lowest combined scores are eliminated every week until only one pair remains dancing. In this model, you have a panel of experts combined with a large group of nonexperts providing an evaluation of the performance.
Feedback from “expert” judges is important. As discussed earlier in the book, researchers have discovered that creativity emerges from specific fields of knowledge. Experts—whether it’s a fashion designer on Project Runway or a celebrity restaurateur on Top Chef—share an ability to judge what is different and what is not, what is truly innovative and what is not.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was one of the first to use a jury of experts to evaluate creativity. In The Creative Vision, which Csikszentmihalyi wrote with Jacob W. Getzels in 1976, he describes telling MFA students to paint still-life pictures and asking a panel of five art experts to rate each of them on originality, craftsmanship, and aesthetics. Teresa M. Amabile later used a jury to assess creativity in schoolchildren by looking at their collages. This technique of using a small jury of experts to assess performances or a body of work has been codified into a methodology called the consensual assessment technique (CAT) by Amabile and colleagues.
I wanted to get into the business world and see who was using an assessment model to find creative employees. So I talked to one of the most creative people I know, Tim Brown, who runs one of the most innovative consultancies around, IDEO. In 2012, 7 percent of all business school graduates said they wanted to work at IDEO. That placed the consultancy thirteenth on a list of the one hundred favorite companies to work for, according to research firm Universum.
On March 28, 2011, Brown presented in my Design at the Edge class at Parsons. It was a tour de force about design and innovation, and the eighty-seven students loved it. In speaking about the need for change, Brown said that businesses and schools needed to rethink the whole notion of a résumé. It’s a bad measure of what they are really seeking. “The résumé is a nineteenth-century idea. It’s ridiculous,” he said. So how do they hire?
IDEO begins with what people have already done, assessing applicants’ portfolios. “The portfolio is the architected communication of what it means to be you and what you’ve done in the world,” said Brown. It extracts your experience and abilities and presents them in tangible form to others. A portfolio should be meaningful to the expert who is assessing it and provide that person with a way of calculating your future capabilities. “That’s a far better way of understanding somebody than a résumé,” Brown said as part of his presentation.
At IDEO, portfolios are presented in several forms. They can be movies, interactive games or sites, visual imaging, or even just the written word. “I don’t mind how conceptual it is as long as it is tangible,” said Brown. For members of Gen Y who grew up using Apple’s digital tools, making YouTube videos, generating images for Instagram, and building their own Facebook pages, portfolio works particularly well.
But how do companies find people who may be creative but don’t see themselves that way (most of us, really)? What about the business and science majors who don’t have a formal portfolio to show? IDEO may have an assessment technique for that too. Ideo.org, a nonprofit organization that came out of IDEO’s work in the social sector, asks people to build a “visualization of self,” a revealing portfolio of their hobbies, interests, travels, aspirations. No matter your field, constructing a portfolio—virtual or physical, highly designed or not—is a way of holding a mirror to your creative accomplishments. Not only will such a portfolio make you more attractive to potential employees than a standard résumé; it’s a way of making yourself aware of creative skills.
For IDEO, portfolio assessment is just the beginning of the vetting process. Then comes the performance. IDEO, like Google and a growing number of companies, gives performance challenges right at the interview. And they give up to six interviews per prospective employee. Most often, people are asked to perform in teams.
A lot of creative companies outside the realm of performing arts have similar hiring processes. They don’t just hire you and hope for the best; they give you assignments, then assess you on your performance. Spotify, for example, has a page of puzzles that assess problem-solving abilities, which it encourages prospective employees to try. They are mostly complex math puzzles that only the best writers of software code can solve.
Continuum, the innovation consultancy that designed the new on-the-go Tetra Pak DreamCap, also combines portfolio with performance when evaluating the creative capacity of applicants. It gives a test on the spot to see if people have the raw creative capabilities necessary for the job. “These are especially important for people who might not have a conventional design background or portfolio,” said Harry West. One of them is the bottle test. A bunch of cans, juice bottles, and packs and other liquid containers are brought into a room and the candidates are asked to describe them. Can they see the differences in color, shape, labeling? Can they see their relationship to the content, the drink itself? And most important, can the candidate frame a narrative story about the drink based on the design elements—who is it for, what is it really, how will it be drunk? “Some people smile and dive deep, creating interesting stories to connect the cues in the packages in front of them,” says West. Those are the people who get invited back. At the same time, “Some people are deer in the headlights: They can’t see design,” says West. “They wonder why they are being asked to do this.” Those candidates fail the audition and don’t get a callback.
In judging portfolios and performances, Continuum has a clear goal in mind, one that differs from conventional design thinking and innovation strategies. “We are not interested in random ideas,” says West. “We are not interested in a hundred ideas, but we are interested in the right idea which can align a complete solution.” That means people who can bring many different aspects of an issue together with a single concept.
WHAT CAN YOU, AS AN individual, do to boost your Creative Intelligence? A good first step is to stop and simply reflect about what you are good at, what you can perform. Most of us don’t know how to evaluate our own creative competencies. We often are not aware of our own capabilities, and when we are, we fail to perceive them in a larger context. We’re not recognizing how to connect the skills from one area to another. We’re not seeing them as skills or presenting them as skills. Many of us lead book clubs or sports teams but don’t recognize that we’re actually creating “magic circles.” You might be great at reading body language or bargaining while shopping or organizing family trips but don’t realize that by framing these skills differently, you can utilize them in countless creative ways.
One way to make yourself aware of your creative potential is to start keeping a portfolio. A portfolio could begin as a journal that contains your ideas, notes, sketches, and work. Some people could include fashion concepts. Others, new business models for start-ups. A portfolio could show you the many “dots” you’ve collected over the course of your life, make them transparent and alive, and encourage you to begin connecting some of them.
Colleges should begin to request portfolios as part of their admissions process—and not just design schools but business schools as well. Corporations that are not yet doing so should be requesting portfolios as part of their hiring process and adding performance challenges to their job interviews.
There may already be a model for assessing the CQ of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people at a time—a game called Odyssey of the Mind. Millions of students from kindergarten through college have played it. There are tournaments in cities and towns all over the world leading up to the world finals every year. Students play in every state of the United States, Britain, Korea, Mexico, Poland, Germany, China, Uzbekistan, Japan, Russia, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and other countries.
The game was created thirty-four years ago by Sam Micklus and Theodore Gourley at Rowan University of New Jersey (then Glassboro State College). It had its beginnings in the classroom of Micklus, a professor of industrial design who began to challenge his students to create cars without wheels, mechanical pie throwers, and other fun stuff that he then judged on ingenuity and risk-taking, not success. Word got out that this was fun. It grew into a larger competition and eventually into Odyssey.
The goal of the game is straightforward. According to its website, “The Odyssey of the Mind teaches students to learn creative problem-solving methods while having fun in the process. Students learn how to identify challenges and to think creatively to solve those problems.”
In the game, there are age divisions, from grades K–5 (less than twelve years of age) through college, and all but the youngest compete. Every year, students in teams of up to seven are offered five Long Term Problems that range from the technical to the artistic. The problems fall into five general categories: Mechanical/Vehicle, where teams build and operate actual vehicles; Classics, where the problem is drawn from literature or art; Performance, which involves stage performances around themes; Structure, where teams build houses and other structures; and Technical Performance, where teams build robots or gizmos that incorporate artistic elements. In the 2011 to 2012 game, one challenge was to put on a musical theater performance of Shakespeare’s line “To be or not to be.” A previous year’s problem was to design and run vehicles whose only source of energy was mousetraps.
The teams are then assessed by small panels of three to six judges. There are two areas of competition, the Long Term Problem and something called Spontaneous. As at the Juilliard audition or the IDEO interview, students are given a problem on the spot by the judges to solve in a creative way. The winners of all the tournaments and of the world final have to come out best on both the Long Term Problem and the Spontaneous Problem. It’s similar to being assessed on Portfolio and Performance.
Judges are mostly parents and other adults who volunteer to give up some serious personal time. Problem Captains—experts who have years of experience observing student projects—organize and train the judging teams. The game has a Head Judge, who leads a specific judging team that compiles the assessments made on score sheets; a Staging Judge, who checks teams in at their competition time and makes sure everything is in order; and other types of judges. For a single statewide tournament, up to seventy judges—all volunteers—can be needed.
Odyssey of the Mind is a good existing methodology for assessing creativity on a national and even global basis—perhaps not as good as the more formal and better-financed Olympics, but pretty close. Both show that scoring portfolios and performance is an excellent way to assess creativity. It’s not an “SAT of creativity,” but definitely a step in the right direction.
Kickstarter is yet another model of assessing creativity on a large scale. It combines both the “expert” and the “mass” models of assessment. A small group of curators (it used to be just the three founders and has now expanded to many more to keep up with the explosion of proposals) screens all the applications for new books, movies, fashion lines, games, dance performances, watches, food, and other projects. These “judges” use their expertise to select a limited number of candidates, which are posted online. Then the crowd assesses them, voting with their patronage. This hybrid model of assessing creativity is a tremendous success. It’s a different kind of judge and jury but a similar kind of assessment.
Kickstarter is also a wonderful window into the way thousands of people are being creative in thousands of different ways. Check it out and see the amazing array of products and services being proposed that you probably have the potential to create.
The challenge ahead of us is not to invent new forms of assessment for creativity. We’ve already done the hard work. We’ve figured out that portfolios and performances can provide a pretty good picture of our creative competencies. And we’ve learned that small groups of judges can validly determine what is creative and what is not in different content areas. This is an important and rather amazing accomplishment that should not be taken for granted.
What we need to do now is apply the models that are all around us—on our TV programs, in our multiplayer games, and in our crowdfunding ventures—to our own personal lives and businesses. We need to move the way we assess creativity from the periphery of our lives to the center of our society.