Although creativity isn't a gift from the muses or something that comes exclusively to a small group of individuals in a spectacular insight, it can still seem as though creative individuals are a select group. It feels as if the people we view as outstandingly creative are just a certain breed—that they are cut from different cloth than the rest of us. Sometimes they even appear different on the surface. Because they look and act so different, we're tempted to assume that they must be different underneath. This is what I call the Breed Myth, the notion that creative individuals are a different breed from normal humans or that something in their genetic code draws them to more creative pursuits. We're eager to believe that some people are born creative and others drew a different genetic hand. When we look at outstandingly creative individuals in the arts or design fields, they don't seem to conform to the business-as-usual types. If we believe that they are different or that they have something we don't, then we have a safe rationalization for believing that we're not as innovative as they are. If we don't share their creative genes, then we can rest in that comfortable excuse every time we're called on to generate new ideas. “I'm just not creative,” we can say, and shirk the responsibility to think innovatively.

In many organizations, there is even a clear distinction between “creative” types and “suits.” The “suits” occupy the traditional business disciplines, accounting, finance, operations, and management. The “creatives” can be found in different departments: marketing, advertising, or design. They are easy to spot; they rarely wear suits. In many organizations, these departments are kept separate from each other, and sometimes the rules even apply differently to one group than to another. In the United States, the distinction has made its way into how companies process payroll. The current U.S. tax code allows organizations certain exemptions from federal minimum wage and overtime regulations if the nature of the exempted individual's work meets its definition of “creative.”¹ The U.S. Department of Labor actually makes a distinction between traditional professions and creative professions. Traditional professions involve work that depends on “intelligence, diligence, and accuracy,” whereas creative professions involve “invention, imagination, originality, or talent.” If even the IRS has spoken on the matter, then clearly the chasm between creatives and suits is wide and entrenched.

The distinction goes beyond individuals in organizations. Often we separate whole businesses into various categories, making a point to label which businesses fall into the “creative industries.” Although these distinctions are made mostly for the purposes of analyzing the economy of a region or country, they still demonstrate the belief that certain occupations are filled with people who are creative, and presumably others house their noncreative counterparts. It's easy to look at the output from design firms and entertainment companies and find creativity. It's a lot harder to recognize the creativity in a place like Walmart, despite its drastic innovations in areas like product pricing and supply chain management.

This distinction explains why the Breed Myth is persistent. Because we have that separation, we also want a simple, preferably biological reason for why some people seem incredibly creative and others do not. Perhaps the most telling anecdote has to do with Albert Einstein's brain. After Einstein's death, his brain was removed and preserved (despite his request that his body be cremated).² Psychologists and medical doctors alike subjected the brain to close examination in hopes of finding a biological explanation for his creativity and genius. In the case of Einstein, none of the studies revealed any significant difference between his brain and the brain of most humans—except for the surprising find that his brain was significantly smaller in mass than the average male brain. This wasn't exactly what they had hoped to find, so their search continues.

Over a half a century ago, in 1950, Dr. J. P. Guilford inspired a generation of researchers by challenging them to prove where creativity came from and whether creatives really were a breed of their own. He had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), and as the newly minted leader of psychology's premiere gathering of research scientists, he was scheduled to give the keynote at their annual meeting—his first presidential address.³ Traditionally, the presidential address is intended to be a time for APA presidents to call attention to a prominent issue that they believe requires greater psychological research. Guilford had spent much of his life researching psychology, and during his career, he developed a massive program of psychological testing for the U.S. military. On this day, he stood before the assembled crowds to announce that he believed that the next area of focus for the APA should be creativity.

At the time, little psychological research on creative individuals or the creative process had been done, and most people held unproven stereotypes about creative people. Creatives were often envisioned as long-haired neurotics who retreated from society to a lonely studio or cabin in the wilderness to focus on their craft. Guilford's message questioned the accuracy of these stereotypes. The research he called for was meant to prove just how poorly most preconceptions of creative individuals reflected reality, encouraging the development of a means to psychologically explain the creative process. Decades after Guilford's address, however, the lingering influence of these stereotypes can still be felt.

If there is a creative type, a particular breed of human specifically designed for creative pursuits, then we should be able to discover it by examining two particular areas: personality and genetics. Some people have personalities that enable them to see connections between seemingly unconnected concepts or that make them more willing to risk the judgment that comes with creating. It may well be that the particular personality traits that make a person creative will be represented in their genetic code. Fortunately for our purposes, creativity researchers, as well as psychologists and geneticists, have been examining just those assumptions.

Shortly after Guilford's seminal address, research on the shared personality traits of creative individuals began. The most prominent of this early research came from the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at the University of California, Berkeley.⁴ IPAR began by having a pool of experts nominate the most creative people in their field. The nominated creatives were invited to spend the weekend in Berkeley to participate in the study. While much of the weekend consisted of shared meals and informal discussions, IPAR researchers also subjected their nominees to a variety of testing and found that many of them shared similar traits, including above-average intelligence, openness to new experiences, balanced personalities, and a preference for complexity. Although these traits helped differentiate this particular group of people from the population as a whole, they failed to establish what differentiated creative people from their noncreative counterparts. The list generated by IPAR revealed shared traits, but they were hardly uniform, and there was no comparison to a general population. There was no way of knowing from the institute's research what made creative people different from normal individuals, or even if they were all that different. Future studies would provide such comparisons.

As the field of personality research progressed, eventually a standard system of measurements was developed that made it possible to easily draw comparisons between two groups of individuals. The most commonly used measurement is the five-factor model of personality (also called the “Big Five”). The five-factor model was first discovered in the 1960s, but wasn't readily adopted until the 1980s. The Big Five measures an individual on five personality scales: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Instead of classifying individuals into certain types, like the DISC or Meyers-Briggs tests used so often by organizations, the Big Five test reveals an individual's personality as numerical scores on the five personality scales. Instead of placing individuals inside one of a fixed set of categories, it is a system for describing the subtle differences among individuals' personalities. In their quest to uncover a creative personality, researchers eventually adopted the Big Five as a way to compare the personality measurements of creative standouts to those of a general population (presumably noncreative). If creative people all tended to score higher than average in some of the dimensions, then we could begin to see the template for a creative personality. However, the evidence for a creative personality is mixed at best. While openness to experience shows the strongest correlation to creativity, there is little solid evidence linking creativity to any of the others.⁵ These results imply that creativity isn't the exclusive domain of one kind of personality. There isn't one particular creative personality type.

With personality out of the picture, it makes sense to look to genetics for some validation of the Breed Myth. Since the discovery of genes and the mapping of our genetic code, scientists have continued to hunt for genetic explanations for much of human behavior. We're eager to attribute human behaviors to some innate biological source, and genetics have promising potential to do so. We're fascinated with the idea that nature might let nurture off the hook. We've been searching for a music gene, an obesity gene, and yes, even a creativity gene. Such biological explanations are hard to argue with. And if creativity is determined by our genes, then once we find out that we are or are not coded to be creative, we can start down the right career path. If creativity is decided at birth, then organizations that want to enhance their creativity just need to identify those who have won the creative birth lottery.

If you want to study the influence of genetics on creativity or music or any other trait, then you have to start with families.⁶ This is difficult, though, because not every family will do. In a typical family, children experience the same parenting styles, and their genes come from the same pool. They share the same home but only half the genes of their siblings. In such an arrangement, the influence of genetics and the influence of upbringing are too closely woven together. In these families, it is too difficult to sort out what can be attributed to nature and what can be attributed to nurture. However, there is a special kind of family that allows such distinctions to be made: families with twins.

On the surface, families with twins appear to pose the same research challenge as regular families—they weave biology and upbringing too closely together. However, because there are both identical (or monozygotic) twins, who share the exact same genetic code, and fraternal (or dizygotic) twins, who only share half their genes, it's possible to examine large samples of identical and fraternal twins and make educated claims about what traits come from genetics and what traits come from experience. We can compare nature and nurture. If identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, then the cause is likely nature. If there isn't a noticeable difference between the two groups' similarity, then the cause is likely nurture. To conduct a study of creativity and genetics, you need to find a large sample of both kinds of twins.

In 1973, a team of researchers led by psychologist Marvin Reznikoff set out to do just that. They tapped the Connecticut Twin Registry, which maintains a listing of all multiple births that occurred in the state of Connecticut since 1897, and conducted a comprehensive study of creativity among twins.⁷ From the registry list, Reznikoff's team put together a group of 117 twins and divided them by gender and by zygosity (whether the twins were identical or fraternal). The participants were given a battery of eleven different tests designed to gauge their creative abilities. Each test measured a different element of what contributes to creative ability, such as the ability to generate large quantities of ideas or to apply existing concepts in new ways. This method would allow the researchers to calculate the measurements of creativity and see if there were significant differences in the rates of similarity between identical or fraternal twins. When they tabulated the results, they found almost no significant distinctions. In their published paper, they write, “There is little consistent or compelling evidence, however, to support the notion of a genetic component in creativity.”⁸ Where the research team did find similarities between twins, their rates were no better than similarities randomly distributed throughout the general population. This evidence implies that the twin similarities result from their environment and not their genetic code. They found no evidence for a creativity gene. Nature couldn't explain away nurture.

If creativity isn't limited to specific types and creative ability is not a result of the genetic lottery, then why does the strict separation in some organizations continue? Why do we insist on segregation between creative and noncreative roles? If creativity is within the grasp of every person, in every department or industry, then perhaps the way we structure our organizations should reflect that integration and make it possible for everyone to contribute his or her own creativity. There are a few companies out there that have done just that, and they've found that the integration enhances their innovation and profitability.

At W. L. Gore & Associates, all employees start in the same position: associate.⁹ There is no clearly defined assignment and no ladder to climb if the assignment is completed well. Instead, new associates are paired with a “sponsor”—a longtime associate who helps translate the company jargon, introduces new hires to the larger organization, and guides them through the first few weeks of rotating around on different project teams. This is the life of new associates for several months, meeting people and learning about projects. It's an audition phase, designed to find the right fit between a new associate's skills and desires and the needs of a particular project team. And there are a lot of project teams.

Gore was founded in 1958 by Wilbert “Bill” L. Gore as an alternative to the large, bureaucratic organizations most people were used to. Bill Gore had just left a seventeen-year career at DuPont, where he believed the market potential of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, or Teflon) was being significantly underestimated. Gore had spent some time inside smaller, entrepreneurial-feeling R&D teams while at DuPont, and he hoped to find a way to ensure that his new company had a similar feel. He wanted all his employees to feel free to invest their time in projects they felt passionate about or to invent their own projects. To accomplish this, he created a structure at W. L. Gore & Associates that was drastically different from the large conglomerate bureaucracies common at the time.

In 2010, W. L. Gore and its more than eight thousand associates generated nearly $3 billion in revenue from a diverse set of products. Their most well-known product, Gore-Tex, is made from the very PTFE technology that Bill Gore left to experiment with. His son, Robert, discovered how to stretch the material into a threadlike polymer that was durable and porous, and that discovery became a platform for hundreds of products from boots and gloves to medical products to the space suits worn by NASA astronauts. Gore even used PTFE technology to create a stronger, less breakable dental floss. Gore sold the technology, now called Oral-B Glide, to Procter & Gamble in 2003, but continues to manufacture and develop the product.

Although W. L. Gore's products are certainly innovative, its unique structure is the company's true innovation. Gore has a formal CEO and is organized into four major divisions: fabrics, electronics, medical, and industrial. Beyond those elements, however, the entire organization looks quite flat. Instead of a hierarchy, Gore is structured as what it calls a lattice. This lattice is a horizontal structure in which everyone is connected to everyone else. The lines of communication are direct, and the responsibilities are lateral. There are no real organizational charts, no ladders to climb, and no departmental distinctions between creative and noncreative roles. Gore's core structural units are the self-managed teams of associates who band together around each project. These associates are responsible to each other. They rely on each other's creative contribution to a project's success, and they even determine each other's compensation.

Without a series of management tiers, there is no formalized system for green-lighting projects. So Gore relies on its lattice to develop new products. When someone has a new idea, he or she starts working to develop it and asks for help as needed. As people join the project, it gains momentum. If no one joins, the project suffocates. Although there are no formal titles at Gore—nothing distinguishes the PhD scientist from the marketing expert or the operations manager—there is one title that associates can have added to their business card: leader. A leader is someone who has started several projects or is asked to serve as a project leader often. Even their CEO (which their corporate charter requires) is selected via a collaborative process between the board of directors and a cross-section of Gore associates.

Before Dave Myers became a leader, Gore wasn't in the guitar string business. Myers, an engineer by training, was working on a cardiac implant project at a Gore plant in Flagstaff, Arizona, when he started experimenting with ways to improve his mountain bike cables by coating them with the same polymer used to make Gore-Tex fabric. After Myers made a successful prototype (and likely a great mountain bike ride), his mind wandered from his mountain bike to his guitar. Myers knew that guitar strings lose their tonal integrity as skin oils build up around and inside the steel coils. So he assembled a team of volunteer associates, and together they began to experiment with coating guitar strings with the Gore-Tex polymer. After three years of off-and-on experiments, the team created a guitar string that held its tone longer than any other string in the industry. It was an immediate hit in the market, and Elixir guitar strings still continue to outsell all other U.S. competitors.

Although W. L. Gore's four divisions do provide some degree of structure, it is common for people to work on projects across those four divisions. To facilitate collaboration, Gore intentionally keeps its plants small, usually fewer than two hundred people, and generally builds plants in clusters around each other. This allows everyone working in one plant to become familiar with one another, but also allows potential project leaders to move beyond their plant to others in the cluster when they need help—just as Myers did with his guitar string project. In this way, individuals from all backgrounds can join forces around a new creative project.

In a traditional organization, it's hard to imagine an engineer working on a medical device while simultaneously experimenting with mountain bike cables and guitar strings. But W. L. Gore is no traditional company. Its unique structure means that its employees don't spend time worrying about traditional labels or whether a project is in their department. There are no preconceptions about who is or isn't creative. Instead, if associates are interested and feel that they can contribute to a project, even one as new to the company as guitar strings, they make a commitment to the project and start contributing. Because there isn't a certain department for developing ideas or even a separation between product development ideas and marketing ideas, the entire Gore organization is a creative marketplace where people invest their time in the projects that appeal to them, and sometimes even compete for the ability to work on a new and promising project. This breeding ground for ideas is what allowed the company to grow to a portfolio of over one thousand different products, from the fabric in space suits to the strings on a guitar.

Gore is a unique organization with truly innovative products. In fact, its uniqueness makes it easy to dismiss as an outlier. The company was built from the start around the lattice idea and around the mission of developing new and innovative products. Perhaps Gore can avoid the traditional distinctions because it has been that way since its inception, but what about “normal” companies? Can such an idea be implemented in a traditional organization? It turns out that it already has.

In 1980, industrialist Antonio Curt Semler passed the ownership of his manufacturing company, Semco, to his son Ricardo.¹⁰ The company was founded three decades earlier, shortly after the senior Semler had immigrated from Vienna, Austria, to settle in São Paulo, Brazil. Over time, Antonio built Semco from a one-man operation in his small apartment to a company with $4 million in revenue and a hundred employees. He did it by following the traditional rules of industrial management. As he grew, he built a hierarchical structure in which management wrote policies and procedures, creating binders of specifications for every possible circumstance. Although this method worked at first to grow the company, that growth had slowed and eventually began to reverse by the time Ricardo took over.

The company Ricardo inherited was on the verge of bankruptcy. The traditional hierarchy wasn't performing well, and Ricardo needed a drastic shift. He needed innovation. He needed creativity, and he needed it from every level—from factory workers and from senior managers. The junior Semler decided to restructure the organization in hopes of allowing innovative ideas to develop at any level. Semler knew that not everyone would allow that to happen, so on his first day, he fired 60 percent of his top-level management team. At first, he attempted to restructure Semco as a matrixed organization, in which individuals were assigned to different projects, sometimes in different departments on an as-needed basis. When this failed to achieve the turnaround, Semler ditched the concept of assignments all together. He created a fluid organization in which teams formed and reformed around ideas and projects, and individuals self-selected in and out of those projects as desired. Although this might seem like a chaotic lack of structure, at Semco, individuals determine the structure by their actions. “That's not a lack of structure,” Semler argues, “that's just a lack of structure imposed from above.”¹¹ Management doesn't make the distinction between creatives and suits; individuals decide for themselves what skills they have and where they can be useful.

Because Semler built an organization where individuals make the decisions about how to use their creativity, they use it more often. Eventually, Semler pulled back even further from making decisions, not just about people but about everything. In 2003, Semco threw a celebration to mark the tenth anniversary of the last decision the CEO made. The lack of top-down decision making and the democratization of innovation appear to be paying off. Also in 2003, Semco celebrated annual revenues of $212 million, a substantial turnaround for a company that was once nearly bankrupt.

W. L. Gore and Semco are illustrations of how continuous innovation can flourish in an organization that accepts the creative potential of all its members. The Breed Myth doesn't survive in places like Gore or Semco, where everyone can propose ideas and find himself or herself leading a team. Instead of imposing departmental separation between creative and noncreative types, Semco created an organizational structure in which the projects and products, not an assumed genetic distinction or a self-imposed differentiation, affect one's role. Instead of managers using the creatives-and-suits distinction to draw up a top-down hierarchy, Gore lets its people self-select into roles where they can use the creative insights they have, even in ways the U.S. Department of Labor might not classify as “creative.”

It's easy to trust the Breed Myth. It's easy to believe that some are born creative and others less so. Our current understanding of genetics leaves us eager to explain away creative ability as coded into someone's genes and thus downplay the creative potential of others. Even the bureaucratic rules surrounding labor and human resources rely on the Breed Myth, specifying a supposed distinction between positions that demonstrate creativity and those that do not. But the evidence supports a different conclusion. Creative ability isn't limited to a particular personality type, and it isn't controlled by our genetic code. When traditional organizations separate those they think are creative from those they think are not, they are severely limiting their own potential for success. Smart organizations, like W. L. Gore and Semco, have abandoned this false division altogether and have structured themselves so that creativity arises from across the entire firm. Every organization wanting to stay competitive in an innovation-driven economy needs creativity from every one of its people. We need innovative ideas too much to seek them out from only those of a certain, imaginary breed.

1. U.S. Department of Labor, “Fact Sheet #17D: Exemption for Professional Employees Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),” Wage and Hour Division (July 2008).

2. R. Keith Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2012).

6. Brian Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

7. Marvin Reznikoff and others, “Creative Abilities in Identical and Fraternal Twins,” Behavior Genetics 3 (1973): 365–377.

9. Gary Hamel, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

10. R. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007).