Creating a Vision of Creativity: The First 25 Years

This article describes three stages of my attempts to understand, measure, and develop creative thinking. The first stage explored creative intelligence. The second investigated a theory of creativity, the investment theory. The third proposed a theory of creative leadership. Together, these three stages comprise the development of my thought on creativity—its nature, measurement, and development. For roughly 25 years, I have been trying to understand creativity and its various aspects. Because this article is based on an Amer- ican Psychological Association (APA) Division 10 Arnheim Award address for career achievement studying creativity, this seems like a good time to review what I think I have learned in 25 years. My goal has been to create some kind of vision of creativity: What is it, how can it be measured, how can it be developed? Over the course of the years, my attempts to understand creativity have gone roughly through three stages. The stages have not been wholly sequential. Sometimes I would proceed to a next stage, only later to go back to an earlier one. My goal always has been to broaden and deepen my, and, I hope, others' understanding of creativity. What has changed over the years are not the "answers." I have not found anything earlier that I later retracted or ceased to believe. Rather, what have changed are the questions. As time has gone on, the questions that have seemed important to ask have changed as my research interests have developed.

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