THE JUDGEMENT CURVE: "Creativity is not learned by adults...Non-creativity must be unlearned!"

I have stumbled upon the foregoing fascinating 'Judgement Curve' while surfing the internet.

It came from an old article entitled 'Why Innovation is Imperative Now: Creating a Continual Competitive Advantage', by Don Redinius & George Land.

Prior to this, I have never heard of Don Redinius, but I am very familiar with the brilliant work of George Land, whose one or two books I have already reviewed in this weblog.

By the way, Don Redinius is the author of 'The New Era of Financial Success: Powered by the REACH Methodology'.

George Land is the author of 'Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation' & 'Breakpoint & Beyond: Mastering the Future Today'.

Although the information given in the article isn't new, I reckon it is nonetheless worth reminding ourselves of its ramifications.

In a nut shell, George Land distributed, way back into the late sixities, among 1,600 5-year olds a creativity test used by NASA to select innovative engineers & scientists. He retested the same children at 10 years of age, & again at 15 years of age.

The following, almost amazing results, was obtained:

Test Result amongst 5-year olds, 98%

Test Result amongst 10-year olds, 30%

Test Result amongst 15-year olds, 12%

Very interestingly:

When the same test was given to some 280,000 adults, the Test Result came up to 2%!

The author concluded that non-creative behaviour was learned once we had embarked on the highway of life.

Back to the Judgement Curve:

As the graph quickly shows, creativity continually declines until we reach retirement, where it begins to improve somewhat.

Why do we adults seemingly lose our creative ability?

As we all already know or rather experienced, the primary reason is because we learn to judge or evaluate our ideas before we express them.

When we evaluate our ideas, & if they seem a little weird, or maybe a little embarrassing, we clamp up & do not express them.

We are very much focused on assessing whether we might be frowned upon &/or ridiculed, before we release what we are thinking.

The article sums up with this interesting point:

"Research has demonstrated time & time again that creativity is not learned by adults; it is discovered. When assisted by methodology aided with some technology to make it easier to do & aided by some expert facilitation, individuals & groups can quickly increase their creativity by more than 400%!"

Wow! How about that!

[If you are looking for many ideas to unleash your personal creativity, please feel free to browse the archives of my 'Optimum Performance Technologies' weblog, under 'Personal Creativity'.]