SOLVING THE ACCOUNTABILITY VS. CREATIVITY PARADOX

Sir Ken Robinson, who has made the study of creativity in schools his life’s work, has observed that instead of fuelling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: “We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies…. Imagin

It is typical that in creative environments spontaneous idea generation gets in the way of following through on any particular idea. The wise creative leader understands that idea generation is a wild animal that requires a stolid trainer to tame excitement with a healthy dose of skepticism. You need to say “no” more than you say “yes,” and you nee

But brainstorming, Bass thought, was an ersatz creativity. “The chief danger of brainstorming lies . . . not in the question of whether or not it produces more or less ideas . . . but in fact, that it distorts the creative process by dealing with it piecemeal and putting it on the production line.