Author: Mario Miqueles

Reading time: 18 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · Runco & Jaeger · Amabile · Csikszentmihalyi · Rhodes · Wallas · Sternberg & Lubart · Kaufman & Beghetto · Keywords: what is creativity · definition of creativity · theories of creativity · psychology of creativity · models of creativity · creative thinking · Big-C little-c · creativity in education · creativity and psychology

Few words are used as frequently and with as little agreement about their meaning as creativity. In a single meeting you might hear that the new product design is “very creative,” that the marketing department needs “more creative people,” and that today’s students “lack creativity.” Three uses, three distinct implicit meanings, none defined with precision.

This problem is not exclusive to everyday language. Until a few decades ago, academic psychology itself struggled to agree on what to study when studying creativity. The first systematic review of the literature, presented by Guilford in 1950, found that creativity represented less than 0.2% of all psychology output in the preceding ten years. It was, in Guilford’s own words, “the most neglected topic” in the entire history of scientific psychology.

That has changed radically. Today there is a robust field of research — the psychology of creativity — with well-established theoretical frameworks, validated measurement instruments, and replicable findings. This article brings together the most important definitions, models, and theories from that field: the ones anyone who wants to understand or teach creativity seriously needs to know.

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The Problem of Defining Creativity

The first obstacle to understanding creativity is its definition. Not because no accepted definition exists — one does — but because the concept is complex enough that many partial definitions compete with each other, each capturing a different aspect of the phenomenon.

Runco and Jaeger (2012), in their article “The Standard Definition of Creativity” published in the Creativity Research Journal, traced the history of creativity definitions in the scientific literature and reached an important conclusion: although dozens of definitions exist in the literature, the vast majority converge on two criteria that can be considered the standard definition of the field:

“Originality is undoubtedly required. It is often labeled novelty, but whatever the label, if something is not unusual, novel, or unique, it is commonplace, mundane, or conventional. It is not original, and therefore not creative […] Originality is vital for creativity but is not sufficient. Ideas and products that are merely original might very well be useless.”

Their conclusion is that creativity requires two simultaneous conditions: originality (novelty, statistical rarity, unconventionality) and effectiveness (utility, appropriateness, relevance to a goal). This dual definition — which appears in the literature also as novelty + usefulness or originality + appropriateness — is the starting point of virtually all contemporary creativity research.

The definition has an implication worth emphasizing: being creative is not just being original. An idea can be completely original and completely useless — that is not creativity. Nor is it sufficient to be useful without being original — that is competence, not creativity. Genuine creativity requires the intersection of both conditions.

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The Four P Model: A Taxonomy for Organizing the Field

Before turning to specific theories, it is useful to have a general map of the field. The most widely cited framework for organizing the different research approaches to creativity is the Four P’s model, introduced by Mel Rhodes in 1961 in his article “An Analysis of Creativity,” published in Phi Delta Kappan.

After reviewing more than forty definitions of creativity, Rhodes found that all of them could be organized into four categories that complement but do not reduce to one another:

Person: the profile of the creative individual — their personality traits, cognitive abilities, attitudes, values, and dispositions. Typical questions: What characteristics do creative people have? Can an individual’s creative potential be measured? What traits predict creativity?

Process: the cognitive and metacognitive operations involved in creative thinking. Typical questions: How is an original idea generated? What stages does the creative process go through? What mental mechanisms produce new connections?

Product: the tangible or intangible results of the creative process — ideas, works, solutions, inventions. Typical questions: How is it determined whether a product is creative? What are the criteria for evaluating creativity? What makes one solution more creative than another?

Press: the social, cultural, and institutional context in which creativity occurs. Typical questions: What conditions favor or inhibit creativity? How does the organizational or educational environment influence creative production? What role does culture play in the valuation of original ideas?

The Four P model remains the most widely used organizational framework in creativity training textbooks and programs, precisely because it makes clear that talking about creativity without specifying which dimension is being analyzed inevitably produces conceptual confusion.

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Types of Creativity: From Mini-c to Big-C

One of the most useful contributions of contemporary psychology to the study of creativity is the distinction between types or levels of creativity according to their scope and impact. The most influential taxonomy is the Four C Model, developed by Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) building on earlier work by Csikszentmihalyi, Simonton, and others.

Big-C creativity: eminent, transformative creativity that changes a field of knowledge or culture. It is the creativity of Einstein, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, or Bach. It requires decades of work, recognition by the expert community of the field, and verifiable historical impact. It is statistically exceptional and is not a realistic goal for ordinary education or professional development.

Pro-c creativity: expert creativity developed through years of deliberate practice in a domain. The architect who designs original buildings, the chef who develops new recipes, the researcher who publishes relevant findings. It requires domain mastery and sustained production of original and appropriate work, but not necessarily the historical impact of Big-C.

little-c creativity: the creativity of ordinary problem solving, of improvisation in daily life, of finding new solutions to common challenges. It is the creativity that all human beings exercise to a greater or lesser degree, and which can be deliberately developed.

mini-c creativity: the most intimate level of creativity, introduced by Beghetto and Kaufman to capture the internal creative processes that accompany all genuine learning. When a student connects a new idea with their prior experience in a way that is original for them — even if it is not original for anyone else — they are exercising mini-c. It is creativity as a process of learning and personal meaning-making.

This taxonomy has direct consequences for education: teachers who expect to see Big-C in their classrooms will not recognize the real creativity occurring at the mini-c and little-c levels. And students who assume creativity is synonymous with genius will dismiss their own creative capacity before developing it.

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Guilford’s Structure of Intellect Model

The first rigorous theoretical framework for studying creativity as a cognitive process was J. P. Guilford’s, presented in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 and developed in his Structure of Intellect (SOI) model from 1956 onward.

Guilford proposed that intelligence was not a unitary factor but a set of cognitive abilities classifiable along three dimensions: operations (what the mind does), contents (what the mind operates on), and products (what type of result is produced). Within operations, he identified six types, two of which are fundamental to understanding creativity:

Convergent production: the ability to find the single correct answer to a problem that already has a defined solution. This is the type of operation that conventional intelligence tests measure almost exclusively.

Divergent production: the ability to generate multiple possible and original solutions from the same information. This is the central cognitive operation of creative thinking.

Divergent thinking, according to Guilford (1967), has four fundamental dimensions: fluency (quantity of ideas), flexibility (variety of categories), originality (statistical rarity of ideas), and elaboration (level of development of ideas). This four-part distinction remains the standard reference structure for measuring creative potential, including the world’s most widely used test for this purpose: the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).

Guilford’s most enduring contribution to the field is the demonstration that creative thinking can be studied scientifically, measured empirically, and developed through deliberate practice.

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The Four Stages of the Creative Process: Wallas’s Model

If Guilford’s model answers the question of what capacities are involved in creativity, Graham Wallas’s model answers the question of how the creative process unfolds over time.

Wallas, an English social psychologist, published his book The Art of Thought in 1926, in which he proposed that the creative process moves through four stages that have since been confirmed, revised, and extended by contemporary neuroscientific research:

Preparation: the phase of conscious, intentional work on the problem. The individual gathers information, studies the domain, formulates and reformulates the problem, explores perspectives, and exhausts the most obvious solution paths. It is a cognitively demanding phase that lays the groundwork for everything that follows.

Incubation: the phase of withdrawal from conscious work on the problem. The individual attends to other things, rests, or is distracted. But cognitive processing continues at an unconscious level, reorganizing the information accumulated during preparation in ways that conscious, directed thinking cannot produce on its own. Ritter and Dijksterhuis (2014), in a review published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (PubMed Central, DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00215), confirm that during incubation “unconscious processes contribute to creative thinking” — that the unconscious processes active during incubation are not simply a rest period but a period of active non-conscious processing.

Illumination: the moment of insight — the sudden appearance of the solution or connection that resolves the problem, frequently in moments of relaxation or distraction. It is Archimedes’ famous “Eureka!,” the melody of “Yesterday” that Paul McCartney says he dreamed. Research shows that these insight moments are not random: they occur with greater probability after adequate periods of preparation and incubation.

Verification: the phase of conscious work again, dedicated to evaluating, refining, and developing the solution or idea that emerged during illumination. Verification distinguishes creative insight from mere random occurrence: it subjects the idea to appropriateness criteria and transforms it into a finished product.

Wallas’s model, though more than a century old, remains the most widely cited description of the creative process because it captures something that neurocognitive research has repeatedly confirmed: the creative process is neither linear nor exclusively conscious. Incubation and illumination are real phenomena with measurable physiological correlates.

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Amabile’s Componential Theory: Creativity in Social Context

While the models of Guilford and Wallas focus on individual cognition, Teresa Amabile, a researcher at Harvard Business School, developed from 1983 onward the theory that best integrates individual and social factors in creative production: the Componential Theory of Creativity.

According to Amabile (2012), creativity emerges from the confluence of four components:

Domain-relevant skills: the knowledge, technical skills, and accumulated experience in the specific field. Without domain knowledge, divergent thinking produces ideas that may be original but not appropriate.

Creativity-relevant processes: the cognitive skills and personality characteristics that facilitate creative thinking — tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to explore, ability to suspend judgment, skill at seeing problems from new perspectives.

Intrinsic task motivation: genuine interest, enjoyment, and personal sense of challenge in the task itself. Amabile demonstrated empirically that people are systematically more creative when motivated by the work itself than when motivated primarily by external rewards or threatening evaluations.

The social environment: the conditions external to the individual — the organizational or educational climate, the type of supervision or teaching, the presence or absence of autonomy, the attitude toward error. Amabile identified that environments that suppress intrinsic motivation (through excessive surveillance, threatening evaluation, rigid restrictions) reduce creativity measurably, regardless of the individual’s skills.

The fundamental contribution of the Componential Theory is the demonstration that creativity is not a fixed trait or innate talent: it is the product of the interaction between components that can be developed, cultivated, or inhibited. All components are sensitive to pedagogical or management intervention.

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Csikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model of Creativity

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers one of the most radically systemic frameworks for understanding creativity. In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996), he proposes that creativity cannot be understood as an individual process: it is the product of the interaction between three elements of a system:

The person: the human being who generates ideas and proposes transformations in a domain. Their knowledge, cognitive skills, motivation, and openness to experience are necessary but not sufficient conditions for creativity.

The domain: the symbolic field — the rules, concepts, procedures, and established works of a discipline (music, physics, architecture, law). The domain is the repository of accumulated knowledge on which the creative individual operates. One cannot be creative in a domain one does not know.

The field: the experts and institutions that have the power to evaluate and validate whether a contribution is creative within the domain. A scientific finding, a work of art, or an innovative design only becomes a recognized creative contribution if the relevant field validates it.

The most important implication of Csikszentmihalyi’s model for education is that creativity does not occur only inside the student’s head: it also depends on the domain the student knows and on the social environment that values or renders invisible original contributions. An educator who does not recognize originality is not merely an insufficient assessor: they are a field that is failing to fulfill its function within the creative system.

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Sternberg and Lubart’s Investment Theory

One of the most original and influential theories of recent decades is the Investment Theory of Creativity, proposed by Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart in 1991 and developed in subsequent publications, including their article “Investing in Creativity” in American Psychologist (1996).

The central metaphor of the theory is that of the financial market: creative people are like intelligent investors who “buy low and sell high” in the marketplace of ideas. Creative people generate ideas that at the time of their formulation are seen as unconventional, risky, or even ridiculous — this is “buying low.” Then, when those ideas gain acceptance, creative people receive recognition for their originality and move on to the next set of unpopular ideas — this is “selling high.”

What distinguishes this theory is its identification of six resources whose confluence is necessary for creativity:

Intellectual abilities: in particular the ability to see problems from new angles, to recognize which ideas are worth developing, and to persuade others of their value.

Knowledge: sufficient mastery of the field to know what is conventional and where the opportunities for innovation lie. Without prior knowledge, there is nothing to innovate on.

Thinking styles: the preference for legislative thinking (creating new rules) over executive thinking (following existing rules) or judicial thinking (evaluating rules).

Personality: tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to overcome obstacles, readiness to take reasonable risks, persistence in the face of resistance.

Motivation: especially intrinsic motivation for the task — the genuine interest that sustains creative work over time.

Environment: the contextual conditions that allow, stimulate, or suppress creative expression.

The Investment Theory highlights something that purely cognitive models tend to underestimate: creativity requires social courage. Generating ideas that challenge consensus means exposing oneself to criticism, resistance, and rejection. Creative people do not only think differently: they choose to think differently despite the social costs that may entail.

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Creativity and Flow: Csikszentmihalyi and Optimal Conditions

Beyond his systems model of creativity, Csikszentmihalyi is known for his research on flow: the optimal psychological state experienced when a person is completely absorbed in a challenging but manageable activity.

Flow is not synonymous with creativity, but it is closely associated with it. Csikszentmihalyi’s studies of highly creative individuals — artists, scientists, athletes, musicians — showed that they frequently reported flow states during their most productive creative episodes. Flow is characterized by: loss of time awareness, absence of self-consciousness, total absorption in the task, a sense of control and mastery, and sustained intrinsic motivation.

The conditions that generate flow — balance between challenge and skill, clarity of goals, immediate feedback, and sustained concentration — are also, to a large extent, the conditions that favor creativity. This convergence is not a coincidence: flow is the subjective experience of the optimal cognitive functioning that creativity requires.

For the educator, this has direct implications: designing learning experiences that generate flow states — challenging but achievable tasks, with clear goals and immediate feedback — is also designing conditions that favor creative thinking.

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Creativity and Domain: Is Creativity Domain-General or Domain-Specific?

One of the most debated questions in the psychology of creativity is whether creativity is a general ability (transferring across domains) or domain-specific (developing separately in each field).

Plucker and Beghetto (2004), in their work “Why Creativity Is Domain General, Why It Looks Domain Specific, and Why the Distinction Does Not Matter,” argue that the question is ill-posed. Creativity has general components (such as divergent thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, and intrinsic motivation) and domain-specific components (the field knowledge that makes it possible to recognize what is original and useful in a given context). As a person deepens their experience in a domain, specificity dominates; in the early phases of learning, generality dominates.

This conclusion has direct pedagogical consequences: it makes no sense to teach “creativity in the abstract” disconnected from disciplinary knowledge, but it also makes no sense to assume that domain mastery automatically produces creativity without explicit work on the general creative processes.

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The Neuroscience of Creativity: What the Brain Reveals

Neuroscientific research on creativity has advanced significantly over the past twenty years. Without entering into technicalities, it is worth mentioning some findings that illuminate the theoretical models described.

Neuroimaging studies show that during divergent thinking tasks, three neural networks that in other contexts tend to operate in alternation are simultaneously activated: the default mode network (active in spontaneous thought and imagination), the executive control network (which regulates attention and evaluation), and the salience network (which determines what information is important). The unusual coordination of these three networks is, according to the research of Beaty et al. (2016) and others, the neural correlate of high-level creativity.

This finding confirms something the theoretical models already suggested: creativity is neither unconstrained divergent thinking (default mode network activated without control) nor only disciplined convergent thinking (executive network dominant). It is the productive interaction of imagination and control — exactly what the models of Guilford, Amabile, and the Osborn-Parnes CPS described conceptually.

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Creativity and Culture: Glăveanu’s 5A Framework

The models described so far tend to center creativity on the individual or, at most, on the individual-environment relationship. A more recent current in the psychology of creativity proposes that this perspective is insufficient.

Vlad Petre Glăveanu (2013), in his work on the 5A framework (Actors, Actions, Artifacts, Affordances, Audiences), argues that creativity is fundamentally a cultural and relational phenomenon, not only psychological and individual. Creativity occurs between actors who act, with and on cultural artifacts, in environments with specific possibilities, before audiences that do or do not value contributions.

This cultural perspective complements — without replacing — cognitive models: it reminds us that what is considered “creative” varies across cultures, historical periods, and epistemic communities, and that the evaluation of creativity is never purely technical but always culturally situated.

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The Major Open Questions

Despite considerable advances, the psychology of creativity still has fundamental questions without definitive answers:

To what extent does creativity have a genetic basis and to what extent is it the result of environment and practice? Is there a universal “creative personality” or do the traits that favor creativity vary by domain and culture? Can artificial intelligence be genuinely creative according to the standard definition of originality + effectiveness? How does creativity relate to mental health — research shows both positive and negative correlations that are not yet fully explained?

These open questions do not invalidate the accumulated knowledge. They put it in perspective: creativity is a sufficiently complex phenomenon for its scientific study to be both intellectually demanding and pedagogically indispensable.

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Conclusion: Creativity as a Serious Object of Study

Creativity is not an unfathomable mystery or a talent one either has or does not have. It is a complex psychological phenomenon, with cognitive, motivational, social, and cultural dimensions, that research has broken down into identifiable, measurable, and — most importantly for education — developable components.

The theoretical frameworks reviewed in this article — the standard definition of Runco and Jaeger, Rhodes’s Four P model, Kaufman and Beghetto’s Four C taxonomy, Guilford’s cognitive model, Wallas’s process model, Amabile’s Componential Theory, Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model, and Sternberg and Lubart’s Investment Theory — are not competing theories. They are complementary perspectives on a multidimensional phenomenon.

Understanding them together is understanding why creativity cannot be reduced to a single intervention, technique, or activity. It is understanding that developing creativity requires working simultaneously on the individual’s cognitive skills, their domain knowledge, their intrinsic motivation, and the conditions of the environment in which they work.

It is, ultimately, understanding why creativity is a long-term educational project that deserves all the seriousness the research has devoted to it.

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References

Amabile, T. M. (2012). Componential theory of creativity (Working Paper No. 12-096). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=42469

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

Glăveanu, V. P. (2013). Rewriting the language of creativity: The five A’s framework. Review of General Psychology, 17(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029528

Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist, 5(9), 444–454. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0063487

Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.

Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013688

Plucker, J. A., & Beghetto, R. A. (2004). Why creativity is domain general, why it looks domain specific, and why the distinction does not matter. In R. J. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, & J. L. Singer (Eds.), Creativity: From potential to realization (pp. 153–167). American Psychological Association.

Rhodes, M. (1961). An analysis of creativity. Phi Delta Kappan, 42(7), 305–311.

Ritter, S. M., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2014). Creativity — the unconscious foundations of the incubation period. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 215. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00215

Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.650092

Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1996). Investing in creativity. American Psychologist, 51(7), 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.7.677

Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. Harcourt Brace.

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · Torrance · Alabbasi et al. · Karunarathne & Calma · Xu & Tognolini · Jönsson & Panadero · Keywords: assessing creativity in the classroom · creativity assessment higher education · creativity rubric · divergent thinking tests · TTCT · creativity assessment tools · formative creativity assessment · student creative skills

There is a problem that almost every university educator who has tried to work with creativity in the classroom has encountered at some point: assessment time arrives, and the feeling is of standing on unmapped terrain. What criterion do you use to grade an original idea? Who decides how creative a piece of work is? Is all of this not inevitably subjective?

It is a legitimate concern. And if left unresolved, it has serious consequences: educators avoid assessing creativity explicitly, students receive vague feedback on their creative processes, and creativity ends up being a declared curricular objective that is never actually measured or developed.

The good news is that research in cognitive psychology and educational assessment has been working on this problem for decades, producing concrete, validated, and replicable tools that make it possible to assess creativity with rigor — without “rigor” meaning reducing assessment to a multiple-choice test, and without “creativity” meaning leaving everything to the subjective impression of the assessor.

This article presents the main tools available, their theoretical foundations, their honest limitations, and the concrete implications for the university educator who wants to assess their students’ creativity rigorously and fairly.

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The Core Problem: What It Means to Assess Creativity

Before discussing tools, it is necessary to clarify what is actually being assessed when creativity is assessed. Confusion about this is the primary source of educator discomfort with creative assessment.

Psychological research defines creativity, in operational terms, as the production of ideas, processes, or products that are simultaneously novel (original, statistically uncommon) and appropriate (useful, relevant to a specific goal) (Amabile, 2012; Guilford, 1967). This dual definition is fundamental: an idea can be original but completely useless (it is not fully creative), or it can be useful but entirely conventional (neither is that creative). Genuine creativity requires both conditions.

This operational definition has a direct implication for assessment: assessing creativity is not the same as assessing the assessor’s taste. It is possible to construct explicit criteria for determining whether a product, process, or idea meets the conditions of novelty and appropriateness in a given context. Those criteria are, by definition, teachable and assessable.

Karunarathne and Calma (2024), in a study published in Studies in Higher Education (University of Melbourne, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2023.2225532), describe the current state of the problem clearly:

“The importance of creativity for survival in modern society is well recognised. However, the development of creative thinking skills through formal education still needs more attention, and the assessment of creative thinking skills using valid models in higher education is under-researched.”

That creativity assessment in higher education is under-researched does not mean tools do not exist. It means university educators have limited access to them — and this article aims to close that gap.

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The Three Dimensions That Can Be Assessed

Creativity research identifies three main dimensions that can be assessed separately: creative potential, creative process, and creative product. Understanding the difference between these three dimensions is the first step toward designing assessment that makes sense.

Dimension 1 — Creative Potential

Creative potential refers to the cognitive capacities of the student that make creative thinking possible: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration — the four dimensions of divergent thinking identified by Guilford (1967). Assessing creative potential means assessing the student’s capacity to generate original ideas, not the final result of a specific project.

The most widely used and validated instrument for assessing creative potential is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), developed by E. Paul Torrance in the 1960s. Alabbasi, Paek, Kim, and Cramond (2022), in a comprehensive review published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1000385), describe the scope of the instrument:

“This review aims to offer school psychologists and other educators such as teachers, policymakers, and curriculum designers a comprehensive and practical guide to one of the most well-known creativity assessments — the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) that was developed by E. Paul Torrance in the 1960s. The paper discusses the history, components, training, psychometric properties, and uses of the TTCT. Contrary to the notion that the TTCT is only a measure of divergent thinking skills, the current article presents its other uses.”

The same authors confirm the instrument’s robustness: the TTCT has demonstrated high reliability and validity over six decades, with validation in more than 2,000 studies worldwide, in 35 languages, including Spanish-language validations (Krumm et al., 2016).

However, the TTCT has important limitations that university educators should be aware of. As Xu and Tognolini (2022) note, in an article accessed directly from the proceedings of the HEAd’22 conference at the Universitat Politècnica de València, psychometric creativity tests — including the TTCT — “are based on a norm-referenced assessment and can only provide minimal information about what students know and can do in relation to creativity.” In other words: the TTCT measures creative potential under artificial conditions and by comparing students to their cohort, but does not provide information about how that potential unfolds in real tasks within a disciplinary domain.

For the university educator, the TTCT can be a useful diagnostic tool at the start of a course — to understand the divergent thinking profile of students — but it is not the most appropriate instrument for formative or summative assessment of creative learning within a subject.

Dimension 2 — Creative Process

The creative process refers to how the student works: how they frame the problem, how they generate and select ideas, how they prototype and refine their solution, how they learn from failure. Assessing the process means observing and documenting the journey, not just the destination.

This dimension is especially relevant in higher education because it directly reflects the competencies to be developed: divergent thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to reformulate problems, and a disposition toward iteration. A student may produce a mediocre final result due to external constraints (time, resources, information limitations) while having deployed a high-quality creative process. Assessing only the final product makes that process invisible.

The most appropriate tools for assessing the creative process are portfolios (documented collections of the work process over time), process journals (student records of their decisions, explorations, and learning), and process rubrics that specify criteria for each stage of the creative process.

Xu and Tognolini (2022) are explicit about the limitation of current approaches: “the priority of representing and measuring student creativity will be given to the creative process and the creative outcome.” The need to assess the process — not just the result — is one of the most robust consensuses in the research on creativity assessment in higher education.

Dimension 3 — Creative Product

The creative product is the tangible result of the process: the written work, the prototype, the design, the project, the solution. It is the dimension most commonly assessed in university classrooms, but also the one most frequently assessed without explicit creativity criteria — limited to technical or content-based criteria.

Assessing the creative dimension of a product requires specific criteria oriented toward novelty and appropriateness. Karunarathne and Calma (2024) used in their research three dimensions drawn from the PISA framework for assessing creativity: creative expression, knowledge creation, and creative problem solving — a model that offers a transdisciplinary structure applicable across different domains of university knowledge.

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Analytic Rubrics: The Most Accessible Tool for Educators

For most university educators, the most practical tool for assessing creativity without falling into subjectivity is a well-designed analytic rubric.

An analytic rubric breaks creativity down into separately assessable dimensions and defines descriptors for different performance levels in each dimension. It does not eliminate the assessor’s judgment — no tool can do that — but it structures it, makes it explicit, and makes it communicable to students before they produce their work.

Jönsson and Panadero (2017), in their work on the design and use of rubrics to support learning assessment, verified from Scaling up Assessment for Learning in Higher Education (Springer), conclude that reliable assessment of complex competencies can be improved through the use of rubrics, especially if they are analytic, domain-specific, and complemented with exemplars and rater training. This finding has a direct implication: a generic creativity rubric — one that works equally for design, writing, engineering, and social work — will have lower reliability than a rubric specifically designed for the domain and the concrete task.

For the university educator who wants to design their own creativity rubric, Xu and Tognolini (2022) propose a three-step process based on the standards-referenced assessment model:

Step 1 — Clearly define the construct: before designing the rubric, it is necessary to define what creativity means in the specific context of the subject. Is originality of generated ideas being assessed? The quality of the problem-reformulation process? The appropriateness of solutions to the real context? The definition guides everything else.

Step 2 — Identify the assessable dimensions: from the definition, the progress variables are identified — the specific dimensions that will be assessed. For a subject focused on creative thinking, these might include: originality of ideas (statistical novelty relative to the domain), appropriateness to the objective (usefulness in the given context), elaboration (level of development and detail), and flexibility (variety of perspectives explored).

Step 3 — Describe the performance levels: for each dimension, descriptors are written for different levels — from initial to advanced performance. Descriptors should be specific enough for different assessors to arrive at the same grade when evaluating the same work, but broad enough not to exclude unexpected creative expressions.

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The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT): When Greater Rigor Is Needed for Product Assessment

For contexts where assessing the creative product requires greater rigor — final projects, degree dissertations, jury-evaluated presentations — the most validated tool is the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), originally developed by Amabile (1982).

The CAT is based on a conceptually sound principle: the creativity of a product can be estimated reliably through the independent judgment of multiple domain experts, without those experts needing to reach prior agreement on criteria. Experts evaluate the creativity level of the product holistically (commonly on a 1–7 scale), and the average of their independent evaluations produces a sufficiently reliable score.

What makes the CAT particularly valuable for university assessment is that it does not require creativity to be reduced to a predetermined list of criteria. Domain experts — whether instructors, professionals, or academics — have expert judgment about what is original and appropriate in their field, and that collective judgment, when properly systematized, produces evaluations with high inter-rater consistency.

The limitations of the CAT are equally important. First: it requires multiple domain-experienced evaluators, which is costly in time and resources. Second: it does not provide specific feedback to the student about which aspects of their work are more or less creative — it says how much, but not what or why. Third: it is less suitable for formative assessment (during the learning process) and more suitable for summative assessment of finished products.

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The PISA Framework as a Transdisciplinary Model

For educators seeking a creativity assessment framework applicable across multiple disciplines, the model developed by the OECD for creativity assessment in PISA offers a three-dimension structure that has been validated in real educational contexts.

Karunarathne and Calma (2024) used this model in their research with 150 first-year university students in economics and business at the University of Melbourne, structuring the assessment around three main axes:

Creative expression: the ability to express one’s own ideas in an original way within a given format — a text, a visual, a proposal. The originality of expression and autonomy relative to conventional models in the domain are assessed.

Knowledge creation: the ability to generate new knowledge or original perspectives from existing information. Innovative synthesis, cross-domain connections, and the generation of unconventional hypotheses or perspectives are assessed.

Creative problem solving: the ability to identify and formulate problems in an original way and to generate novel and appropriate solutions. This is the dimension that connects most directly with the CPS models reviewed in earlier articles in this series.

The findings of Karunarathne and Calma are especially useful for pedagogical design: they identified that first-year students had specific deficits in creative expression and creative problem solving, and that the authentic assessment task designed for the study produced measurable improvements in both dimensions over the course of the semester. This confirms that well-designed assessment is not only a measurement tool: it is in itself a pedagogical intervention that develops creativity.

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Five Common Mistakes in University Creativity Assessment

Research on creative assessment in higher education makes it possible to identify five mistakes that educators make most frequently.

Mistake 1 — Assessing only the final product, ignoring the process

A mediocre final product may be the result of a high-quality creative process interrupted by external circumstances. A brilliant final product may be the result of a conventional process well executed. Assessing exclusively the final product offers an incomplete and frequently unfair picture of the student’s creative capacities.

Mistake 2 — Using the same rubric to assess creativity and technical quality

Originality and technical quality are distinct criteria that are not necessarily correlated. A piece of work can be technically impeccable and completely conventional. A piece of work can be highly original and technically imperfect. A rubric that mixes both criteria without distinguishing them produces assessments that do not measure creativity in a differentiated way.

Mistake 3 — Penalizing originality that does not match the educator’s expectations

One of the most consistent findings in creativity assessment research is that evaluators tend to prefer ideas that confirm their prior assumptions about what a “good solution” looks like. This bias — which Jönsson and Panadero (2017) identify as one of the main risks of assessment without a rubric — can cause “creative” assessment to end up rewarding conformity with the educator’s expectations rather than genuine originality.

Mistake 4 — Not communicating assessment criteria to students before the work

If students do not know in advance the criteria by which their work’s creativity will be assessed, they cannot direct their efforts in an informed way. Worse still: they may interpret the absence of explicit criteria as a signal that what matters is “impressing” the educator, which generates aesthetically elaborate production that is not necessarily original. Explicit criteria shared before the work begins are a necessary condition for fair creativity assessment.

Mistake 5 — Assessing creativity with a single evaluator and no prior calibration

The reliability of creativity assessments improves significantly when multiple evaluators assess independently before comparing results, when evaluators are trained with examples of the expected performance level (exemplars), and when there is a discussion and calibration process among evaluators. Assessing creativity alone, without any of these processes, produces assessments more susceptible to the individual bias of the assessor.

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A Minimal Rubric Proposal for the University Classroom

Drawing on the evidence reviewed, it is possible to propose a minimal rubric structure for assessing creativity in university assignments across different disciplines. This proposal integrates Guilford’s (1967) dimensions, the PISA framework used by Karunarathne and Calma (2024), and the rubric design principles of Xu and Tognolini (2022).

Dimension 1 — Originality: To what extent does the idea, solution, or perspective presented differ from the conventional responses in the domain? Basic level: reproduces standard perspectives without modification. Intermediate level: introduces variations on existing perspectives. Advanced level: proposes genuinely new perspectives for the domain or context.

Dimension 2 — Appropriateness: To what extent does the idea or solution respond relevantly to the problem or challenge posed? Basic level: the solution is tangential or partially relevant. Intermediate level: the solution is pertinent but with significant limitations. Advanced level: the solution responds directly and effectively to the challenge posed.

Dimension 3 — Elaboration: To what extent is the idea or solution developed, specified, and argued? Basic level: the idea is sketched without development. Intermediate level: the idea is developed with some arguments or details. Advanced level: the idea is fully developed, specified, and grounded in evidence or reasoning.

Dimension 4 — Process (when assessed): To what extent does the documented process show exploration of multiple alternatives, problem reformulation, and learning from errors? Basic level: the process shows a single line of development with no exploration of alternatives. Intermediate level: the process shows exploration of some alternatives with implicit selection criteria. Advanced level: the process shows broad exploration, explicit problem reformulation, and clear selection criteria based on feedback received.

This structure should be adapted to the specific domain and the concrete task, incorporating exemplars — examples of work at each level — to calibrate assessor judgment and communicate it clearly to students.

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Formative Assessment as Creative Development

One of the most important conclusions of the research reviewed is that well-designed assessment is not only a measurement of students’ creative level: it is in itself an intervention that develops their creativity.

Karunarathne and Calma (2024) document this in their study: students who participated in the authentic assessment task designed to measure the three PISA framework dimensions showed measurable improvements in creative thinking over the course of the semester. The structure of the task — which required creative expression, knowledge creation, and creative problem solving — acted as scaffolding for the development of those competencies.

This has a direct pedagogical implication: designing creativity assessment with clear, shared criteria does not only allow for better measurement — it also teaches students what it means to think creatively within the context of their discipline. The rubric, in this sense, is not merely a grading tool: it is a map of the creative territory the student is learning to navigate.

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Conclusion: Subjectivity Is Not Inevitable

Assessing creativity in the university classroom does not have to be a territory of arbitrary subjectivity. The theoretical frameworks of Guilford and Torrance, standards-referenced analytic rubrics, the Consensual Assessment Technique, and the PISA framework offer concrete, validated, and applicable tools for assessing creativity rigorously, fairly, and formatively.

What research consistently shows is that the key is not to eliminate the assessor’s judgment — that is neither possible nor desirable — but to structure it through explicit criteria, communicate it before the work begins, and calibrate it through training and exemplification processes. An educator who does this is assessing their students’ creativity with the same rigor they apply to any other complex competency.

And at the same time, they are teaching their students what it means to create with intention.

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References

Alabbasi, A. M. A., Paek, S. H., Kim, D., & Cramond, B. (2022). What do educators need to know about the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: A comprehensive review. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1000385. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1000385

Amabile, T. M. (2012). Componential theory of creativity (Working Paper No. 12-096). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=42469

Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.

Jönsson, A., & Panadero, E. (2017). The use and design of rubrics to support assessment for learning. In D. Carless, S. M. Bridges, C. K. Y. Chan, & R. Glofcheski (Eds.), Scaling up assessment for learning in higher education (Vol. 5, pp. 99–111). Springer.

Karunarathne, W., & Calma, A. (2024). Assessing creative thinking skills in higher education: Deficits and improvements. Studies in Higher Education, 49(1), 157–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2225532

Xu, W., & Tognolini, J. (2022). Build an assessment rubric of student creativity in higher education. In 8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’22). Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd22.2022.14695

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · Runco & Acar · Xia et al. · de Vink et al. · Quinn, Rawlings & Roome · Keywords: divergent and convergent thinking · creative thinking · creativity in the classroom · types of thinking · fluency flexibility originality · Guilford · TTCT · 21st-century skills · higher education

There is a question that any educator who wants to teach creativity will inevitably face: how do I explain to my students what creative thinking is without it sounding vague, undefinable, or exclusive to the arts?

The most robust answer that cognitive psychology has produced in more than seventy years of research is this: creative thinking is not a single type of mental process. It is the effective combination of two modes of thinking that most educational systems treat as irreconcilable opposites — divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

Understanding what each one is, how they relate to each other, and what their presence or absence in the classroom implies is one of the most solid theoretical foundations for any educator who wants to work with creativity rigorously and methodologically.

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The Origin: Guilford’s Contribution

The distinction between divergent and convergent thinking was formally introduced by J. P. Guilford in his celebrated presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 — now considered the founding document of the scientific study of creativity.

In that address, Guilford posed two questions that became the driving force of his career: How can we identify creative potential in our children and young people? And how can we promote the development of creative personalities? To answer them, it was first necessary to understand what type of cognitive process creativity involved.

Guilford identified that conventional intelligence tests measured almost exclusively what he called convergent thinking: the ability to find the single correct answer to a problem that already has a defined solution. This type of thinking is valuable and necessary, but it is not the only type relevant to human life. Conventional intelligence tests, Guilford argued, actively penalized the other type: divergent thinking.

In his Structure of Intellect (SOI) model, developed from 1956 onward, Guilford classified human cognitive abilities along three dimensions: operations, contents, and products. Within operations, he distinguished between convergent production (finding the single correct answer from given information) and divergent production (generating multiple possible solutions from the same information). This distinction was not merely theoretical: Guilford argued that the educational system was systematically underdeveloping divergent production because it almost never assessed or trained it.

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What Is Divergent Thinking?

Divergent thinking is the cognitive ability to generate multiple possible, original, and varied responses to an open-ended problem or a question with no single answer. It is the mode of thinking that operates when someone is asked to generate all possible uses for a paperclip, propose alternative solutions to a complex problem, or imagine every possible way to end a story.

Guilford identified four dimensions of divergent thinking that remain the standard reference framework in contemporary research:

Fluency: the quantity of ideas generated. Measured as the total number of responses produced within a given time. A thinker with high fluency generates many ideas, not necessarily all original.

Flexibility: the variety of categories explored. It is not only about how many ideas are generated, but how many distinct conceptual categories they span. A thinker with high flexibility does not get stuck in a single type of solution.

Originality: the statistical rarity of the ideas. An idea is original if very few people produce it. Measured by evaluating how frequently a response appears in the sample.

Elaboration: the level of detail in developing ideas. A thinker with high elaboration does not merely propose ideas but develops them, specifies them, and adds layers of complexity.

Runco and Acar (2012), in a review published in the Creativity Research Journal and accessed directly from ERIC and multiple verified sources, synthesize the state of evidence on divergent thinking tests with precision:

“Divergent thinking (DT) tests are very often used in creativity studies. Certainly DT does not guarantee actual creative achievement, but tests of DT are reliable and reasonably valid predictors of certain performance criteria. The validity of DT is described as reasonable because validity is not an all-or-nothing attribute, but is, instead, a matter of degree.”

This nuance is important: divergent thinking is not synonymous with creativity. It is a measurable component of creative potential. A person may have high divergent thinking and still not produce relevant creative outcomes if they lack domain knowledge, intrinsic motivation, or the capacity for evaluation and selection. But the presence of developed divergent thinking significantly increases the probability of producing original and useful ideas.

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The Torrance Tests: How Divergent Thinking Is Measured

The most widely used tool for assessing divergent thinking in educational settings is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), developed by E. Paul Torrance beginning in the 1960s following directly from Guilford’s work. The TTCT includes verbal and figural batteries that measure the four dimensions Guilford identified.

What makes the TTCT a particularly valuable instrument for educators is its long-term predictive validity. In the 50-year follow-up of Torrance’s longitudinal study, Runco, Millar, Acar, and Cramond (2010) found that TTCT scores obtained in childhood predicted creative achievements in adult life. Plucker (1999) had reanalyzed Torrance’s original data and found that childhood divergent thinking test scores were better predictors of adult creative achievement than general intelligence (IQ) — a finding that directly challenged the way most educational systems value and measure student capacities.

This finding is relevant for educators not because they should administer the TTCT in their classes, but because it demonstrates that divergent thinking — the capacity the TTCT measures — has real and lasting consequences for student development. It is not a decorative skill or an educational bonus: it is a predictor of creative performance across an entire lifetime.

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What Is Convergent Thinking?

Convergent thinking is the ability to analyze, evaluate, and select among multiple possibilities to arrive at the most appropriate solution to a given problem. It is the mode of thinking that operates when identifying the best answer among several alternatives, when applying a criterion to filter ideas, or when constructing a coherent argument that integrates different elements.

Within Guilford’s Structure of Intellect framework, convergent thinking corresponds to convergent production: given a set of information, find the answer the information determines. It is the type of thinking that conventional intelligence tests measure in the most detail — the capacity for logical reasoning, correct inference, and rule application.

The most frequent error in popular writing about creativity is to present convergent thinking as the opposite and enemy of creative thinking. This characterization is inaccurate and, for educators, dangerous. Contemporary research is clear: creativity requires both types of thinking. Divergent thinking without convergent thinking produces many ideas but no solution. Convergent thinking without divergent thinking produces efficient solutions to known problems but no new ideas.

The most useful distinction is not that one is “creative” and the other “analytical,” but that they operate at different moments in the creative process and with different logics: divergence expands the space of possibilities; convergence deliberately narrows it until the most appropriate solution is reached.

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The Evidence: Both Types of Thinking Work Through Interaction

The most recent research has advanced significantly in documenting how divergent and convergent thinking interact in real educational contexts.

Quinn, Rawlings, Taggart, and Roome (2025), in a study published in Thinking & Reasoning (Taylor & Francis), examined the relationship between divergent and convergent thinking in adults using the two standard tasks in the literature: the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) for divergent thinking and the Remote Associates Test (RAT) for convergent thinking. They found positive associations between fluency, originality, elaboration, and a composite score of the AUT with RAT scores — meaning higher divergent thinking was associated with higher convergent thinking. Their findings suggest that creativity emerges from the interaction of both cognitive processes and that the skills measured by both tasks have significant overlap.

De Vink, Willemsen, Lazonder, and Kroesbergen (2022), in a study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology with fifth-grade primary school students, investigated how both types of thinking related to mathematics performance. Their findings, accessed from PubMed (PMID 34496047), are especially relevant for educators:

“Background: Creativity requires both divergent and convergent thinking. Previous research established that divergent thinking relates to mathematics performance, but generally ignored the role of convergent thinking.”

Their results showed that the role of divergent thinking was twofold: it complements convergent thinking in multiple-solution tasks, and compensates for it in single-solution tasks. In other words: in mathematics (and by extension in other disciplines), divergent thinking does not merely produce more ideas — it also improves the quality of analytical thinking when that thinking alone is insufficient. This interaction is not intuitive for many educators, who tend to treat mathematics as exclusively convergent territory.

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The Uncomfortable Finding: Educational Systems Train One and Neglect the Other

Xia, Kang, Chen, Ouyang, and Hu (2021), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695002), investigated the effect of design training on divergent and convergent thinking in 120 university students divided into three groups: senior design students (with at least four years of design training), junior design students (in their first year), and undergraduate students in majors unrelated to design.

Their abstract frames the central problem of the article with clarity:

“Design training programs that teach creativity often emphasize divergent thinking (generation of ideas) more than convergent thinking (evaluation of ideas). We hypothesized that training would lead to more both types of creativity, but especially divergent thinking.”

The results confirmed the hypothesis: senior design students significantly outperformed the other two groups in divergent thinking. But they did not find the same difference in convergent thinking. The study’s conclusion has direct implications for pedagogical design: programs that teach creativity tend to develop divergent thinking but not convergent thinking with the same effectiveness. This means students leave those programs better equipped to generate ideas, but without having equally developed their capacity to evaluate, select, and bring ideas to concrete solutions.

This finding is not an argument against training divergent thinking. It is an argument in favor of designing creativity education more completely, ensuring that both types of thinking are explicitly trained.

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Why Educational Systems Suppress Divergent Thinking

If divergent thinking is so valuable, why do educational systems develop it so little?

The structural answer is straightforward: most educational assessments measure exclusively convergent thinking. Single-answer exams, multiple-choice tests, mathematics problems with one verifiable correct answer — all of these instruments measure the ability to find the already-established correct answer. They do not measure the ability to generate multiple possibilities, explore different categories, or propose statistically infrequent ideas.

The accumulated result of years of exclusively convergent assessment is that students learn, implicitly, that there is one correct answer and their job is to find it. Learning that the correct answer can be multiple, that exploring more possibilities increases the probability of finding the best solution, that the “unusual answer” may be the most valuable — all of this requires an environment that actively models and assesses it.

Guilford was already flagging this problem in 1950: the educational system was producing efficient convergent thinkers and underdeveloping the divergent potential of its students. More than seventy years later, the research of Xia et al. (2021) shows that even programs specifically designed to teach creativity can make the same mistake, emphasizing idea generation without equally working on the capacity to evaluate them.

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The DT/CT Dynamic in the Classroom: Not a Choice but a Sequence

One of the most useful frameworks for applying these concepts in teaching practice is what mathematics education research has termed the DT/CT dynamic (divergent thinking / convergent thinking dynamics).

The idea is that the creative process in the classroom is not a choice between “doing divergent thinking” or “doing convergent thinking” — it is a deliberate sequence that alternates between both modes repeatedly. In the divergent phase, many possibilities are generated without filtering. In the convergent phase, they are selected, refined, and developed. The quality of the result depends on the quality of both phases.

De Vink et al. (2022) are precise on this point: the interaction between both types of thinking allows students to implement the most appropriate solution from a range of options, which is especially valuable when no learned solution is available — that is, exactly when creative thinking is necessary.

For the educator, this has a concrete pedagogical implication: it is not enough to allow divergent thinking (free time to generate ideas). It is also necessary to teach the criteria and processes by which those ideas are evaluated and selected. And this must be done sequentially: first expand, then select. Mixing both phases — evaluating ideas as they are generated — produces the worst possible outcome: few ideas and low originality.

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How to Integrate Both Types of Thinking in the Classroom

The research reviewed points to a set of concrete pedagogical principles for developing both divergent and convergent thinking in the university classroom.

For divergent thinking:

Pose open-ended questions with multiple valid answers, rather than questions with a single answer. Ask students to generate the largest possible number of explanations, hypotheses, or solutions before evaluating any of them. Use the deferred judgment rule in idea-generation sessions: any idea proposed is recorded before it is evaluated. Present problems from the disciplinary domain that have no known solution or that admit multiple approaches.

For convergent thinking:

Teach explicit evaluation criteria before asking students to select among generated ideas. Train the ability to argue why one solution is better than another in terms of defined criteria, not personal preference. Use evaluation matrices that weight multiple criteria. Ask students to identify the most appropriate solution from several possible ones, justifying their choice.

For the dynamic between both:

Design activities in two clearly separated phases: an expansion phase (divergent, without judgment) followed by a selection and refinement phase (convergent, with criteria). Make the distinction between both phases explicit to students — not as something obvious, but as a metacognitive skill worth developing. Provide explicit feedback on both capacities, recognizing both the originality of generated ideas and the quality of the reasoning used to select them.

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The Relationship Between Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and Intelligence

A clarification that educators frequently need is how divergent and convergent thinking relate to general intelligence measured by conventional tests (IQ).

The research on this is clear but nuanced. There is a moderate positive correlation between divergent thinking and general intelligence: higher IQ is associated with a higher likelihood of divergent thinking. However, the relationship is not linear. The threshold hypothesis, initially proposed by Guilford and revisited in subsequent research (Jauk et al., 2013), suggests that above approximately IQ 120, IQ no longer predicts gains in divergent thinking. That is: a certain level of intelligence is necessary for divergent thinking, but beyond a threshold, other factors — motivation, openness to experience, environment — matter more than IQ.

This finding has direct implications for teaching practice: the student with high IQ is not automatically the most creative, and the student with moderate IQ has no ceiling on divergent thinking development. Both types of thinking develop with deliberate practice across any range of general intelligence.

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Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and 21st-Century Skills

The interest in divergent and convergent thinking in contemporary education is not purely theoretical. There is a broader context that gives it practical urgency.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies creative thinking as the most demanded skill in the global labor market. The OECD has integrated creative thinking as one of the competencies assessed in the PISA program, including divergent and convergent thinking tasks among its assessment items. The structural reason is the same one noted in the CPS article: as well-defined tasks with single answers are automated, the problems that remain for human beings are precisely those that require divergent thinking to be formulated correctly and convergent thinking to be solved optimally.

The university student today who graduates without having explicitly and deliberately developed both types of thinking leaves with a competency gap that the labor market will surface quickly.

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Conclusion: Neither Divergent Without Convergent, Nor Convergent Without Divergent

The distinction between divergent and convergent thinking is not an academic curiosity or a philosophical debate about the nature of creativity. It is an operational distinction with direct consequences for how teaching is designed, what activities are proposed, how assessment is structured, and what capacities are developed in students.

The research from Guilford (1950, 1956, 1967) through Quinn et al. (2025), de Vink et al. (2022), Xia et al. (2021), and Runco and Acar (2012) converges on the same conclusion: creativity is neither divergence alone nor convergence alone. It is their productive interaction.

The educator who understands this distinction has a concrete advantage: they can design activities that train each mode separately and then combine them in the correct sequence. They can assess with criteria specific to each mode. And they can explain to their students, with theoretical precision, what they are doing cognitively when they generate ideas, and what they are doing when they evaluate them — and why both things matter.

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References

de Vink, I. C., Willemsen, R. H., Lazonder, A. W., & Kroesbergen, E. H. (2022). Creativity in mathematics performance: The role of divergent and convergent thinking. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(2), e12459. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12459

Guilford, J. P. (1956). The structure of intellect. Psychological Bulletin, 53(4), 267–293. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040755

Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.

Quinn, E., Rawlings, B. S., Taggart, R., & Roome, H. E. (2025). Divergent thinking is linked with convergent thinking: Implications for models of creativity. Thinking & Reasoning, 31(4), 586–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2025.2485059

Runco, M. A., & Acar, S. (2012). Divergent thinking as an indicator of creative potential. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.652929

Runco, M. A., Millar, G., Acar, S., & Cramond, B. (2010). Torrance tests of creative thinking as predictors of personal and public achievement: A fifty-year follow-up. Creativity Research Journal, 22(4), 361–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2010.523393

Xia, T., Kang, M., Chen, M., Ouyang, J., & Hu, F. (2021). Design training and creativity: Students develop stronger divergent but not convergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 695002. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695002

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Treffinger & Isaksen · Mumford & Reiter-Palmon · Oppert et al. · Scott, Leritz & Mumford · Keywords: creativity problem solving · creative thinking · Creative Problem Solving · CPS · problem solving method · divergent convergent thinking · complex problems · innovation · lateral thinking

Almost every problem-solving method taught in schools, universities, and companies shares one assumption: that the problem is already correctly defined. That the thinker’s job is to find the right answer to a question someone else has already formulated with precision.

The problem is that most real problems don’t work that way.

The problems that actually matter — in business, in professional life, in education, in communities, in organizations — are what researchers call ill-structured problems: problems where there is no single correct definition, where available information is incomplete or contradictory, where no objective criterion exists to verify that a solution is the “right” one, and where any intervention generates unexpected consequences that change the problem itself.

Faced with this type of problem, conventional analytical techniques fail. Not because the people applying them lack intelligence, but because those techniques were designed for a different kind of problem entirely.

This article presents the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) framework — its theoretical foundation, its structure, the evidence on its effectiveness, and the concrete implications for any professional or educator who wants to transform the way they approach complex problems.

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The Problem With How We Solve Problems

Before explaining CPS, it is worth understanding why conventional problem solving has structural limits.

Most traditional problem-solving approaches follow a linear logic: identify the problem → gather information → analyze options → choose the best → implement. This process is perfectly adequate for what Rittel and Webber (1973) called tame problems — problems that have a definable solution, clear success criteria, and a verifiable end state. The medical diagnosis of a bacterial infection is a tame problem. So is the multiplication table.

But the same authors identified another category: wicked problems. A wicked problem is one that has no definitive formulation, where each framing of the problem reveals new sub-problems, where there is no correct solution but only more or less adequate ones, and where each attempted solution has consequences that change the problem itself. Educational inequality is a wicked problem. Talent retention in an organization is too. Most real strategic challenges are.

Contemporary research confirms that the cognitive processes required to address these two types of problems are qualitatively different. Mumford et al. (1991), after reviewing multiple models of creative cognition, identified eight core processes involved in most episodes of creative problem solving: problem construction, information gathering, concept selection, conceptual combination and reorganization, idea generation, idea evaluation, implementation planning, and monitoring. The first of those processes — problem construction — is the most critical and the most consistently overlooked.

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Why Defining the Problem Matters More Than Solving It

One of the most counterintuitive and best-documented findings in creativity and problem-solving research is that the quality of the solution depends fundamentally on the quality with which the problem is constructed before any attempt is made to solve it.

Murugavel and Reiter-Palmon (2018), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central, PMID 30455654), investigated the effect of problem construction on the creative processes and outcomes of work teams. Their abstract describes the central finding:

“Although research on the benefits of problem construction within the creative process is expanding, research on team problem construction is limited. This study investigates the cognitive process of problem construction and identification at the team level.”

The study’s results showed that teams that actively engaged in the process of constructing and defining the problem before generating ideas produced more original ideas than teams that began directly with solution generation. The implication is clear: investing time in properly defining the problem is not a trivial preparatory step — it is a cognitive intervention that qualitatively improves the originality of the solutions generated.

This conclusion is supported by decades of research on experts versus novices. Reviews by Mumford and colleagues consistently show that experts spend more time than novices structuring and formulating a problem before searching for solutions, and that the most successful scientists spend more time defining the problems they find interesting before beginning to investigate them. High-level creative ability does not reside in generating many ideas quickly: it resides in framing problems in ways that make it possible to generate truly original ideas.

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What Is Creative Problem Solving (CPS)?

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is a methodological framework developed over more than six decades specifically to address the kind of complex, open-ended, and ill-structured problems that conventional methods handle poorly.

Its origins trace back to 1953, when Alex Osborn — the originator of brainstorming — published Applied Imagination, in which he first articulated a systematic process for facilitating creative thinking oriented toward problem solving. Sidney Parnes extended and academically validated that work, and the model evolved over decades into what is now known as CPS Version 6.1™, developed by Donald Treffinger and Scott Isaksen at the Creative Learning Center.

Treffinger and Isaksen (2013), in an article published in the International Journal for Talent Development and Creativity and accessed in full text from ERIC, define CPS with precision:

“CPS builds on both creative and critical thinking (in harmony with each other). The CPS Version 6.1™ framework incorporates guidelines and specific tools for generating ideas (‘creative’ thinking) and focusing ideas (‘critical’ thinking), and involves four components (Understanding the Challenge, Generating Ideas, Preparing for Action, and Planning Your Approach) and eight specific stages.”

CPS Version 6.1™ comprises four main components:

1. Understanding the Challenge: encompasses three stages — Constructing Opportunities, Exploring Data, and Framing Problems. This component, often the most underestimated, is dedicated to ensuring the team is working on the right problem, not merely the stated problem.

2. Generating Ideas: the stage of maximum expansion of possibilities, where many options are produced without prior judgment, using divergent thinking tools.

3. Preparing for Action: comprises Developing Solutions and Building Acceptance, where ideas are transformed into concrete plans and resistance to implementation is anticipated.

4. Planning Your Approach: the components of Appraising Tasks and Designing Process allow teams to adapt the CPS process to the specific characteristics of the problem and context.

What distinguishes CPS from other methods is its emphasis on the deliberate alternation between divergent thinking (generating many possibilities without filtering) and convergent thinking (selecting and refining). Treffinger and Isaksen are explicit: CPS is not merely an idea-generation technique. It is a complete process that integrates creativity and critical thinking “in harmony, not in opposition.”

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The Evidence: CPS Works in Real-World Contexts

The relevant question for any professional or educator is whether CPS produces real, measurable results, or whether it is simply an appealing pedagogical methodology. The evidence accumulated over six decades is compelling.

Treffinger and Isaksen (2013) synthesize the empirical basis of the model:

“CPS tools are proven (having been used successfully for more than six decades and supported by extensive research), portable (readily learned and applied across a variety of situations by people of all ages), powerful (able to produce important changes in one’s life and work), practical (applicable to everyday problems as well as complex, long-term challenges), and positive (capable of being used constructively and collaboratively by groups as well as able to be applied individually).”

Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004), in the meta-analysis on the effectiveness of creativity training based on 70 prior studies — verified directly in earlier articles in this series — found that the best-designed training programs are precisely those that focus on the development of cognitive skills and the heuristics for applying them through realistic exercises appropriate to the domain. CPS satisfies exactly those criteria.

Oppert et al. (2022), in a mixed-methods study published in Frontiers in Psychology (DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.759226), investigated CPS in the real work context of engineers — a field that faces exactly the type of complex, ill-structured problems CPS was designed for. The study’s abstract states:

“The future of work is forcing the world to adjust to a new paradigm of working. New skills will be required to create and adopt new technology and working methods. Additionally, cognitive skills, particularly creative problem-solving, will be highly sought after.”

Their findings confirm that the problem construction process — the initial phase of CPS — is especially valuable in high-pressure work environments, where the default tendency is to jump into solving the problem as presented, without questioning it. Engineers who actively applied problem construction found richer formulations and generated more original solutions than those who proceeded directly to idea generation.

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The Two Cognitive Operations CPS Trains

To understand why CPS produces better results than conventional approaches, it is necessary to understand the two central cognitive operations it trains explicitly.

Divergent Thinking: Quantity First

Divergent thinking is the ability to generate multiple possible responses to an open-ended problem. It is the cognitive operation that CPS activates during its exploration and idea-generation phases.

Research on divergent thinking shows that the creative quality of ideas increases significantly when the number of ideas generated is high. This phenomenon — known informally as the “Linus Pauling principle” (the Nobel laureate claimed that the best way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas) — has been experimentally verified. The most original ideas tend to appear later in the generation process, not at the beginning. This means that stopping generation too early, evaluating the first ideas as “good” or “bad,” systematically eliminates the most creative ideas before they can emerge.

CPS trains the skill of deferred judgment — keeping evaluation suspended during the generation phase — as an explicit cognitive competency. This is not something most professionals do naturally. It requires deliberate practice.

Convergent Thinking: Quality After

Convergent thinking is the complementary operation: the ability to evaluate, select, and refine the ideas that have been generated, applying explicit criteria to identify the most promising ones and develop them into viable action plans.

The most frequent mistake in attempts to apply creativity to problem solving is treating these two modes of thinking as incompatible — as if creativity were only the free generation of ideas and critical thinking were its enemy. CPS operates from the opposite premise: divergence and convergence are complementary and necessary in every phase of the process.

Mumford and colleagues’ research on cognitive processes in creative problem solving shows that idea evaluation — when done correctly, with explicit criteria applied to a sufficiently large set of generated options — is one of the processes that most contributes to the final quality of solutions. Not evaluating ideas is just as problematic as evaluating them too early.

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CPS in Practice: The Four Mistakes Teams Make

Most teams that attempt to solve complex problems make four predictable mistakes that CPS is specifically designed to correct.

Mistake 1 — Solving the stated problem without questioning it

The problem as presented in a meeting, briefing, or report is almost never the real problem. It is an interpretation of the problem, frequently shaped by the assumptions of whoever formulated it. CPS requires spending time in the Framing Problems phase before generating any solution, asking questions such as “In what sense might this be a problem of X?” or “What do we actually need to achieve?” This reframing typically reveals opportunities and constraints that the original statement did not contain.

Mistake 2 — Evaluating ideas as they are generated

In most work meetings, ideas are evaluated the moment they are proposed. Someone says “what if we did X?” and immediately someone else responds “that wouldn’t work because…” This pattern — premature evaluation — is the primary killer of creativity in group settings. It generates self-censorship, reduces the diversity of ideas, and systematically eliminates the riskiest and most original proposals before they can be explored. CPS deliberately structures separate divergence and convergence sessions to break this pattern.

Mistake 3 — Generating too few ideas before evaluating

Related to the previous mistake: most teams stop generating ideas once they have “enough” options to evaluate — typically three or four. Research shows that this threshold is arbitrary and counterproductive. The probability that the most original solution is among the first four ideas generated is low. CPS uses specific tools (structured brainstorming, SCAMPER, analogical thinking) to extend the generation phase beyond the team’s natural comfort threshold.

Mistake 4 — Not planning implementation

Many creative processes produce brilliant ideas that are never implemented. The most frequent cause is not a lack of resources: it is insufficient work in the Building Acceptance phase — anticipating resistance, identifying the people whose support is necessary, and designing the communication of change. CPS dedicates an entire component to this phase, recognizing that acceptance of creative solutions is as challenging as their generation.

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Why CPS Matters in Today’s Work Context

The relevance of CPS for the contemporary professional is not merely theoretical. There is convergent evidence that creative problem solving is becoming a critical labor market competency.

Oppert et al. (2022) note in their abstract that the future of work paradigm requires new skills to create and adopt new technologies and working methods, and that cognitive skills — particularly creative problem solving — will be “highly sought after.” This assertion is supported by multiple labor market analyses: the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies creative thinking as the most valued skill in the global labor market, above specific technical and digital skills.

The reason is structural. As routine, analytical, and well-defined tasks are automated by artificial intelligence systems, the problems that remain for humans are precisely the most complex, ambiguous, and ill-structured ones. Exactly the ones CPS was designed to address.

This does not mean CPS is the answer to every challenge of contemporary work. It means that the ability to construct problems correctly, generate multiple possibilities without premature censorship, and transform original ideas into implementable plans is a competency that will increasingly distinguish those who can solve complex problems from those who cannot.

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How to Start Applying CPS in Your Work

CPS does not require a certification or a weeks-long training program to begin generating value. There are three concrete practices any professional can start immediately.

Practice 1 — Reframe before solving

The next time you face a problem at work, before searching for solutions, spend ten minutes writing five to ten alternative formulations of the same problem. Start each one with “How might we…?” You will find that some reformulations reveal aspects of the problem that the original framing did not capture, and that some of them open completely different solution possibilities.

Practice 2 — Physically separate generation from evaluation

In your next group problem-solving session, establish an explicit rule: during the first 15 minutes, any idea proposed is written down without comments or evaluation. Only after the group has generated a sufficient number of ideas (at least 20 or 30, not 4 or 5) does the evaluation phase open, with explicit criteria. The effect on the quality and diversity of ideas is typically immediate and striking.

Practice 3 — Evaluate with criteria, not with intuition

When the time comes to evaluate the ideas generated, resist the temptation to choose the ones that “feel right.” CPS offers convergent evaluation tools such as the Evaluation Matrix, which weighs each idea against explicit criteria defined by the team (cost, implementation time, expected impact, technical feasibility, etc.). This process does not eliminate intuition — it captures it and makes it visible to the team.

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CPS as a Learning Method

One of the least discussed contributions of CPS is its value as a learning methodology, not merely as a problem-solving tool. Treffinger and Isaksen (2013) are explicit on this point:

“Engagement in creativity and CPS is demanding, but also rewarding. After a period of extended work on a creative project, or in a problem-solving group, it is very common for people to say: ‘I’m exhausted; I would never have believed thinking could be such hard work— but it was worth it!'”

This phenomenon — the productive exhaustion that follows a well-facilitated CPS session — is itself a signal that something qualitatively different occurred. People who have worked through a rigorous CPS process have not merely generated solutions to the problem they addressed: they have trained cognitive capacities. They have practiced problem construction. They have exercised divergent thinking. They have learned to evaluate ideas with criteria rather than with bias.

This makes CPS a particularly valuable tool in educational contexts, where the goal is not just to solve the problem at hand but to develop in students the capacity to approach problems that do not yet exist.

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Conclusion: The Problem Is the Method

The difference between people who solve problems creatively and those who do not rarely lies in intelligence or talent. It lies in method.

Professionals who approach the complex problems of their work with the same linear logic that worked for well-defined school problems will inevitably produce conventional solutions to unconventional problems. Not because they are incapable of more, but because they never learned to do what CPS teaches: construct the problem before solving it, generate possibilities before evaluating them, and transform ideas into plans before celebrating them.

The evidence accumulated over more than six decades of research and practice — from the studies of Parnes and Noller to the meta-analysis of Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004), and from Murugavel and Reiter-Palmon’s (2018) research on problem construction to Oppert et al.’s (2022) study on engineers in the future of work — converges on a simple conclusion: CPS works, it can be taught, and it produces measurable differences in the quality and originality of solutions to complex problems.

The question is not whether it is worth learning to use it. The question is when to start.

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References

Isaksen, S. G., Dorval, K. B., & Treffinger, D. J. (2011). Creative approaches to problem solving: A framework for change (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

Murugavel, V. R., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2018). The effect of problem construction on team process and creativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2098. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02098

Mumford, M. D., Mobley, M. I., Uhlman, C. E., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Doares, L. M. (1991). Process analytic models of creative capacities. Creativity Research Journal, 4(2), 91–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419109534380

Oppert, M. L., Dollard, M. F., Murugavel, V. R., Reiter-Palmon, R., Reardon, A., Cropley, D. H., & O’Keeffe, V. (2022). A mixed-methods study of creative problem solving and psychosocial safety climate: Preparing engineers for the future of work. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 759226. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.759226

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730

Scott, G., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2004). The effectiveness of creativity training: A quantitative review. Creativity Research Journal, 16(4), 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400410409534549

Treffinger, D. J., & Isaksen, S. G. (2013). Teaching and applying creative problem solving: Implications for at-risk students. International Journal for Talent Development and Creativity, 1(1), 87–97. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1301380.pdf

Treffinger, D. J., & Isaksen, S. G. (2005). Creative problem solving: The history, development, and implications for gifted education and talent development. Gifted Child Quarterly, 49(4), 342–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/001698620504900407

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Amabile · Csikszentmihalyi · He & Chiang · Zhou et al. · Shaw & Yu · Keywords: how to develop creativity · creative mindset · creativity for professionals · intrinsic motivation · flow · creative habits · creativity at work · creative thinking · professional innovation

Most professionals reach a point in their careers where creativity feels like something other people have and they don’t. The engineer who envies the designer’s ease. The project director who watches with admiration as a colleague consistently proposes the unexpected idea. The lawyer who wishes they could approach their clients’ problems with more originality.

What those people rarely know is that the creativity they admire is not an innate trait. It is the result of habits, conditions, and practices that can be learned, cultivated, and sustained. And there are decades of research to prove it.

This guide is built on that evidence. It offers no shortcuts or magic formulas. It offers what the psychology of creativity has identified as the genuinely determining factors for developing a creative mindset in professional contexts.

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Why Most Professionals Underestimate Their Own Creativity

Before discussing how to develop creativity, it is worth understanding why so many professionals believe they are not creative.

The primary cause is conceptual: popular culture has reduced creativity to a very specific type of talent — artistic, eccentric, spontaneous — that most people do not recognize in themselves. But that image is both a distortion and a trap. Contemporary research clearly distinguishes between what is called Big-C creativity — the creativity of Einstein, Picasso, or Mozart — and little-c creativity: the everyday creativity that allows people to solve problems in original ways, generate useful ideas, and see non-obvious connections in any field of knowledge (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).

This second form of creativity — the one that matters in professional life — does not require exceptional talent. It requires a specific mindset and specific conditions that can be deliberately built.

He and Chiang (2024), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central) grounded in the frameworks of social cognitive theory and mindset theory, examined the role of implicit beliefs about creativity in people’s creative thinking. Their abstract establishes a central finding:

“Creativity, commonly defined as the production of an idea or product that is novel and useful, has long been an important research topic due to its significant contribution to personal success and societal progress. Notably, an increasing research attention has been paid to a subset of implicit theories of creativity (i.e., creative mindset), which specifically pertains to people’s beliefs regarding the stable-versus-malleable nature of creativity.”

The practical implication is direct: people who believe creativity is fixed and innate tend not to invest effort in developing it. Those who believe it is malleable and trainable behave differently when facing creative challenges, persist more in the face of failure, and consequently produce more creative outcomes. Belief precedes behavior.

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Amabile’s Model: The Four Components You Can Develop

The most robust theoretical starting point for understanding how to develop professional creativity is Teresa Amabile’s Componential Theory of Creativity, developed at Harvard Business School. From the abstract of her Working Paper, verified directly from the HBS faculty publications page:

“The componential theory of creativity is a comprehensive model of the social and psychological components necessary for an individual to produce creative work. The theory is grounded in a definition of creativity as the production of ideas or outcomes that are both novel and appropriate to some goal. In this theory, four components are necessary for any creative response: three components within the individual — domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and intrinsic task motivation — and one component outside the individual — the social environment in which the individual is working.” (Amabile, 2012, p. 1)

What makes this model an exceptionally practical tool is its immediate implication: all four components are developable. None is fixed. None depends on a talent one either has or doesn’t. All of them can be developed through deliberate work.

Here is what that means for a working professional.

Component 1 — Domain-Relevant Skills

The first component is deep knowledge of the field in which one works. Creativity does not occur in a vacuum: it needs a substrate of information, concepts, principles, and accumulated experiences to operate on. Without domain knowledge, divergent thinking may produce ideas that are original but neither appropriate nor useful.

For the professional who wants to be more creative, this implies an apparent paradox: studying more, not less. Reading outside the comfort zone of one’s own field. Attending conferences in adjacent disciplines. Developing what Amabile calls multiple perspectives on one’s own knowledge domain.

Research confirms that the most creative professionals are not necessarily those with the most “free” thinking, but those who combine deep field knowledge with the disposition to question it. Knowing a domain deeply makes it possible to see where the unquestioned assumptions are — and that is precisely where creative opportunities live.

Component 2 — Creativity-Relevant Processes

The second component encompasses the cognitive style and mental skills that facilitate creative thinking: tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to explore unconventional paths, ability to suspend judgment during idea generation, and skill at making connections between apparently unrelated domains.

These processes are not fixed personality traits. They are trainable skills. A professional who has never practiced divergent thinking can develop it through specific exercises (Guilford’s Alternate Uses Task, SCAMPER techniques, structured brainstorming). A professional who tends to evaluate ideas prematurely can learn to defer judgment. A professional with low tolerance for ambiguity can develop that capacity through gradual exposure to open-ended problems.

Amabile also notes that these cognitive processes can be actively inhibited by the environment. Excessive surveillance, constant evaluation, and intense time pressure do not merely generate stress: they actively block the mental processes associated with creative thinking (Amabile, 2012). This finding has direct consequences for how professionals should manage their working conditions if they want to be more creative.

Component 3 — Intrinsic Task Motivation

The third component is the most powerful and the most frequently neglected in efforts to stimulate professional creativity: intrinsic motivation, defined as genuine interest, enjoyment, and personal sense of challenge in the task itself.

Amabile demonstrated through decades of research that people are systematically more creative when motivated primarily by the work itself — its intrinsic interest, the pleasure of exploration, the intellectual challenge — than when motivated by external rewards, threatening evaluations, or zero-sum competition. This does not mean external incentives are irrelevant: Amabile (2012) refined over time that some extrinsic motivators can coexist with creativity if they are presented in ways that confirm competence and autonomy rather than controlling them. But intrinsic motivation remains the core.

The practical implication for the professional is significant: the question “how can I be more creative?” may be poorly formulated. The more productive question is “what kind of work genuinely generates curiosity, interest, and energy in me?” Creativity tends to appear at that intersection.

Component 4 — The Social Environment

The fourth component transcends the individual: the environment in which a person works has measurable and direct effects on their creativity. Amabile and Pratt (2016), in the most recent revision of the componential theory published in Research in Organizational Behavior, introduced the concept of progress in meaningful work as one of the primary catalysts for everyday creativity.

This finding was documented with particular rigor in the book The Progress Principle (Amabile & Kramer, 2011), based on the analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries written by 238 employees across 7 companies over months of work. The results identified that making progress in meaningful work was the number-one day-to-day motivational factor — far above financial incentives, recognition, or interpersonal support. As Amabile stated in the Harvard Gazette: “Making progress in meaningful work was the #1 day-to-day motivator, and by a huge margin.”

For the professional, this means the environment matters as much as individual attitude. An environment that facilitates daily progress, reduces obstacles, tolerates error as part of the process, and grants autonomy in executing work is an environment that structurally favors creativity.

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Csikszentmihalyi and Flow: The Optimal Condition for Creative Work

The second major theoretical framework for understanding how to develop professional creativity comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of flow.

Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1996) identified that people describe their best creative experiences in very consistent terms: a feeling of total absorption in the task, loss of time awareness, absence of self-consciousness, and a sense of control and mastery that is intrinsically rewarding. He called this state flow, and identified it as the optimal psychological condition for both performance and creativity.

What makes flow particularly useful for the professional is that Csikszentmihalyi identified the specific conditions that generate it — conditions that can be deliberately built:

1. Balance between challenge and skill. Flow occurs when the difficulty of the task roughly matches the professional’s skill level. If the challenge is too high, it generates anxiety. If it is too low, it produces boredom. The professional seeking flow needs to actively calibrate the difficulty level of their tasks.

2. Clarity of goals. Tasks with clear objectives and immediate feedback favor flow. Ambiguous tasks, without visible progress metrics, make it harder to achieve. This does not mean every task must be perfectly defined: it means the professional can create their own progress indicators when the environment does not provide them.

3. Immediate feedback. Flow requires knowing whether what one is doing is moving in the right direction. Creative professionals tend to build rapid feedback loops — trusted colleagues who respond to early drafts, personal progress metrics, frequent reviews of their own work.

4. Sustained concentration. Flow is incompatible with constant interruption. Professionals who work in high-interruption environments — email, notifications, fragmented meetings — rarely experience deep flow states. Creating protected time blocks for creative work is not a luxury: it is a necessary condition for high-quality creative thinking.

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The Growth Creative Mindset: Believing It Can Be Developed

He and Chiang (2024) distinguish in their research between two types of creative mindset: the fixed creative mindset, which conceives of creativity as a stable, innate trait, and the growth creative mindset, which conceives of it as malleable and developable through effort and practice.

Their most important finding, accessed directly from PubMed Central, is that creativity motivation acts as a mediator between mindset type and actual creative thinking. In other words: holding a growth creative mindset does not directly produce more creativity. It does so through a motivational mechanism — it generates greater willingness to try, to persist, and to invest effort in creative processes.

Zhou et al. (2020), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology with 282 employees in real companies, found that the growth creative mindset predicted creative performance as rated by supervisors, and that this effect was mediated by effort: people with a growth creative mindset worked harder on their creative tasks. The fixed creative mindset, by contrast, did not significantly predict creative performance. Their abstract is direct: “Growth mindset, but not fixed mindset, was significantly related to creative performance, and such an effect was mediated by effort.”

For the professional, this has a very concrete practical consequence: the work of developing creativity begins with beliefs. Before seeking techniques, before reorganizing the environment, before reading about divergent thinking, it is worth asking honestly: Do I believe I can become more creative if I commit to it? If the honest answer is “no,” that is the first obstacle to address.

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Openness to Experience: The Trait That Most Predicts Professional Creativity

Research on personality and creativity consistently identifies openness to experience as the personality trait most strongly associated with creative behavior in professional contexts.

Shaw and Yu (2023), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central) with data from employees in real work environments, found that openness to experience predicted creativity both in work and non-work contexts. More importantly: they found that in the work environment, openness to experience interacted with extraversion and conscientiousness to predict creative performance as evaluated by supervisors.

Openness to experience includes traits such as intellectual curiosity, active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, willingness to consider unconventional perspectives, and genuine interest in new and complex ideas. The good news — consistent with the growth mindset framework — is that these traits are not entirely fixed: they can be cultivated intentionally.

Concrete practices for developing openness to experience:

Actively seek exposure to knowledge fields outside your own. Read biographies and case studies of people who solved problems in unexpected ways. Practice deep listening in conversations with people who think differently. Cultivate tolerance for the initial confusion that comes with ideas or practices you do not immediately understand. Keep a journal of observations, questions, and ideas — not necessarily answers.

None of these practices requires talent. All of them require intention and consistency.

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Five Concrete Habits for Building a Creative Mindset

The research reviewed converges on a set of practices that professionals can implement immediately. These are not formulas: they are structures that create the internal and external conditions creativity needs in order to appear.

Habit 1 — Protect deep, uninterrupted work time

Flow, identified by Csikszentmihalyi as the optimal condition for creative work, requires sustained concentration. This means defining daily time blocks — ideally 90 minutes to two hours — dedicated exclusively to cognitively demanding tasks, without notifications, email, or meetings. Research on ultradian rhythms suggests that these high-concentration blocks alternated with periods of active recovery are the temporal structure that best supports sustained creative performance.

Habit 2 — Fuel intrinsic motivation by identifying meaningful work

Amabile is explicit: creativity flourishes in work the professional finds genuinely interesting and meaningful. This does not always mean changing jobs. It often means reorganizing existing responsibilities to increase the proportion of tasks that generate real interest, autonomy in execution, and a sense of progress. The question a professional should ask themselves regularly is: What part of my work genuinely makes me curious? The answer points toward where creative energy should be directed.

Habit 3 — Actively seek productive imbalance

Csikszentmihalyi demonstrated that flow — and by extension creative thinking — occurs in the zone of balance between challenge and skill. To develop a creative mindset, the professional needs to actively seek out tasks slightly above their current comfort level. Not so difficult as to generate paralysis. Sufficiently challenging to activate the search for new solutions. This means accepting projects that involve some uncertainty, taking on responsibilities that require skills not yet fully mastered, and resisting the temptation to always stay within the established zone of competence.

Habit 4 — Build an environment that makes progress visible

Amabile and Kramer (2011) demonstrated that progress in meaningful work is the primary catalyst for daily motivation and creativity. The professional can build this environment deliberately: using visual project boards that show advancement, defining weekly micro-goals with clear achievement metrics, documenting small advances that would otherwise go unnoticed. The visibility of progress does not just motivate — it activates the positive psychological states that Amabile associates with greater creativity.

Habit 5 — Practice deliberate exposure to ideas outside your own domain

Research on the connections that characterize creative thinking consistently shows that the most original ideas emerge at the intersection of knowledge domains that do not normally interact. The professional who reads only about their narrow field develops deep knowledge but a limited repertoire of connections. Dedicating weekly time to reading about adjacent or entirely different fields — history, natural sciences, psychology, design, philosophy — is not an optional recreational activity. It is a direct investment in the raw material of creative thinking.

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What Your Environment Does For You (and Against You)

One of the most important conclusions of Amabile’s research is that professional creativity is not solely an individual matter. The environment in which a person works can stimulate or suppress their creativity significantly, independently of their skills and motivation.

The environmental factors that most consistently inhibit professional creativity are, according to the research: threatening evaluation (being judged on the outcome of ideas before they can be developed), excessive surveillance (feeling that the work process is constantly observed and controlled), extreme time pressure (deadlines so tight they prevent exploration), and lack of autonomy (having no control over how work is executed, only over whether it gets done).

Zadow et al. (2023), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central) on psychosocial safety climate in digital work environments, found that a high psychological safety environment — where employees feel their opinions are valued, errors have no punitive consequences, and genuine support from leaders and colleagues exists — significantly predicts greater creativity and innovation, even after controlling for other individual factors.

For the professional working in an organization, this implies two parallel actions: working on the individual factors that research identifies as developable (mindset, habits, motivation, openness to experience), and simultaneously honestly evaluating whether the environment in which they work facilitates or blocks their creativity — and, where possible, intervening on it.

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The Most Common Mistake: Waiting for Inspiration

One of the most frequent obstacles in developing a professional creative mindset is not a lack of talent or absence of techniques. It is the passive waiting for inspiration.

Psychological research on the creative process consistently shows that inspiration is not the starting point of creative work: it is frequently its result. The most original ideas tend to appear during or after periods of sustained, intentional work on a problem — not before. The act of beginning to work, of exploring even without clear direction, of generating ideas even if they are poor at first, creates the mental conditions for originality to emerge.

Csikszentmihalyi documents this pattern in his interviews with the 91 exceptionally creative individuals in his research (1996): almost none described their creative process as beginning with sudden illumination. They described persistent work, saturation in the problem, and then — often in moments of rest or at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep — the emergence of a non-obvious connection.

For the professional, the corollary is clear: a creative mindset is not developed by waiting to feel inspired. It is developed by working, practicing, and creating the conditions for creative thinking to occur more frequently and with greater quality.

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Conclusion: Creativity as Practice, Not as State

Developing a creative mindset is not an event. It is a continuous process that involves building knowledge in one’s own domain, training specific cognitive skills, cultivating intrinsic motivation, creating working conditions that favor flow and psychological safety, and sustaining the belief — grounded in evidence — that creativity can be developed.

Amabile (2012) formulates it precisely: creativity is at its highest point when an intrinsically motivated individual, with high domain competence and high skill in creative processes, works in an environment that supports creativity. Those four factors are all developable. Every one of them.

The question is not whether you are creative or not. The question is which of those four factors you need to develop first.

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References

Amabile, T. M. (2012). Componential theory of creativity (Working Paper No. 12-096). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=42469

Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40692

Amabile, T. M., & Pratt, M. G. (2016). The dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation in organizations: Making progress, making meaning. Research in Organizational Behavior, 36, 157–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2016.10.001

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

He, Z., & Chiang, F.-K. (2024). From growth and fixed creative mindsets to creative thinking: An investigation of the mediating role of creativity motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1353271. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1353271

Shaw, A., & Yu, A. (2023). Different personality factors drive work and non-work creativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1099345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1099345

Zadow, A. J., Loh, J. M. I., Dollard, M. F., Mathisen, G., & Yantcheva, V. (2023). Psychosocial safety climate as a predictor of work engagement, creativity, innovation, and work performance: A case study of software engineers. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1130620. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1130620

Zhou, Y., Yang, W., & Bai, X. (2020). Creative mindsets: Scale validation in the Chinese setting and generalization to the real workplace. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 463. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00463