The new book, Creative Intelligence, shows that creativity is a learned behavior that gets better with training — like sports. You can make creativity routine and a regular part of your life. That’s true for big companies as well as small startups, corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs. Creativity is scalable.

So here are four specific ways to lead a more creative life and boost your creative capacities. Creativity is not about blue rooms and brain waves but about social engagement and mining the existential.

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Unintuitive Lessons on Being a Designer — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium http://bit.ly/1V9kQeA

Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. The book summarizes and integrates a broad range of research in psychology and related scientific fields. In the last 40 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have devoted increased attention to creativity; we now know more about creativity than at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, business innovation, and creativity in everyday life. Sawyer’s approach is interdisciplinary. In addition to examining psychological studies on creativity, he draws on anthropologists’ research on creativity in non-Western cultures, sociologists’ research on the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity, and cognitive neuroscientists’ studies of the brain. He moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, including the role of collaboration in the creative process.

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Fostering Collective Creativity | Learning Change http://bit.ly/21i6MPX

People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea. However in complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task.

How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. In the altogether illuminating 1994 volume The Psychology of Writing, cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow.

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