The fallacy of how to be creative workshops

While creativity is a powerful advantage in a new world where the lack of it can be punished dreadfully, our business environment is swarming with those who think they have it, when they don’t.

If creativity isn’t there early it very likely won’t be there late. Trying to put it there is much like trying to teach elephants to create paintings. They’re alert enough to learn eventually to pick up a brush, dip it in the bucket and swirl it onto the paper.

But all they’re doing is whatever it takes to earn another bucket of peanuts, given to them by people who don’t understand art any more than the elephants do.

People are a lot like the elephants. Particularly when they’re clustered together in a “How To Be Creative” seminar.

It’s actually easy to convince people they’re being creative simply by encouraging them to blurt out a random thought without much regard for its connection to the topic under discussion. Since they would never have otherwise had the nerve to do this, and since they’re applauded now for doing it, they can be forgiven for thinking that something seriously profound has taken place.

Blurting thoughts and receiving approval is a real novelty and a lot of fun, like it must be for a philosophy professor to yell insults at the referees at a football game.

Finally, since this sharing of impractical, irrelevant thoughts is enthusiastically applauded by everybody else in the room – indeed, criticism is strictly forbidden – they forever after think their ideas are all good ones. They instinctively misinterpret their random mental outbursts as creative product and cost their companies fortunes in wasted time and coworker annoyance.