To celebrate World Creativity Day, I interviewed Professor Vlad Glaveanu, one of the most prolific creativity scholars, for this episode of the book series. He is a Full Professor of Psychology at Dublin City University and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen.

With an outstanding career path, Professor Glaveanu’s breadth of work includes areas like psychology, social sciences, arts, anthropology, education, and future studies. He is one of the minds behind the creation of a whole new field of research, the study of the possible, where he and his colleagues at the Possibility Studies Network are dedicated to exploring in-depth.

With an eloquent writing style and contagious charisma, Professor Glaveanu is the author and editor of several books and academic papers, but has also ventured into writing fiction books.

Personally, Vlad’s work has inspired me in many ways. Having the opportunity to discuss ideas with such a brilliant scholar and thinker, not only for this interview but also for my PhD research, where he has contributed closely, proved to be instrumental in shaping both my work and my thinking.

To begin, I imagine that your first field of research was creativity. What was the first question about creativity that genuinely puzzled you enough to devote years of your life to studying it? How did it influence the way you began writing about the topic?

Where did it all start? Great question. You see, this hidden question didn’t necessarily start with my PhD. Obviously, I had a question there that I can talk about, but it evolved from way back. I was always fascinated by symbols and understanding how we think in symbolic terms, so the connection with creativity and culture actually came very early on. Although I wouldn’t have framed it that way at the time, I was curious about the roles of institutions, who becomes an artist, and why we call some people artists. These were big questions for me.

Then, my PhD went into folk art, which is in the vicinity of it. It has the name “art”, but it’s kind of on the periphery. Art is a whole universe of creativity. For example, you have Becker, who wrote Art Worlds, a very influential work in the art ecosystem. I did work on street art as well. All these are art-adjacent topics that, for me, represent a very interesting sociocultural challenge. Art is an easier example to explain the role of culture and creativity, but street and folk art are much more community-based.

Through my mom, who was an art teacher, through the exhibitions, and the artistic camps that I did, I think I was really interested from the start in how we create together, and how we create with these symbolic things that come to mean something for people. So, we can say that meaning and creativity were probably among my earliest questions.

Across your books and articles, your work seems to move from creativity research toward broader questions about imagination and possibility. When you look back, do you see a clear thread connecting these phases of your thinking?

Well, I do see that the clear track would be, in many ways, the sociocultural. If you notice, I started from distributed, sociocultural, and creativity, and then my first book on the Possible was The Possible: A sociocultural theory.

But interestingly — and you’re making me reflect on this here and now — when I started creativity, it was an established field. You need to find your footing, and you, Felipe, know that very well. You’ve also adopted some distributed ideas, and you need to kind of choose camps. At the time when I did my PhD, the sociocultural approach was even younger. Obviously, you have great researchers like Amabile, Simonton, and Csikszentmihalyi accredited with a lot of the social approach to creativity. Then you have Sawyer, and Montori & Purser, who did group creativity in the 90s. But when I came in in the early 2000s, it was still kind of a relatively newer thing, so it was easier for me to adopt an identity and build stuff.

When you start your PhD, you have this confidence in the early beginnings, and you think, “nobody has ever done this.” Because I did a master’s in culture and psychology, I thought nobody had ever put together a sociocultural psych and creativity. So, I wrote to some Vygotskyian guy I knew, and he was like, “Vygotsky’s work on children and imagination was about this,” and I was like, “Okay, so people have tried it before,” but it was that exercise of positioning.

Now, with Possibility studies, this is a completely new thing. It has a lot of roots, connections, and historical resonance with creativity research. But it’s easier for me to start wide and actually to widen my own interest, because with creativity, you must make a choice to position yourself to exist in that universe. With possibility, we’re all starting. I feel like I have become more open to literatures, methodologies, and things like that. When I did the creativity bit, I was much more constructivist, sociocultural, and qualitative at the beginning, and nowadays my name is even on papers that validate a test, which young Vlad would not have approved of (laugh).

You mentioned your book, The Possible, and I believe it was the first book that you wrote about the topic and this transition. When did you first realize that it might become a central concept in your work, and how did that idea evolve as you wrote the book?

Again, great question. First of all, as a little fun historical fact, it’s not the first thing I ever wrote on possibility. When I was the editor of an open-access journal, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, there was an editorial there called The Possible as a Field of Inquiry. That’s the very first, earliest thing. Before I started the distributed sociocultural stuff, I had another editorial in Egypt, and this is much older, named Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual. It was kind of an anti-individualistic critique.

There is a reason I’ve been doing these editorials, and this might be a little hack or a tip for readers: I feel like in the world of ideas of today, you have to put a flag on certain things, but before you get to do the whole book, which can take years, you have to start communicating and writing about it. I highly advise people to publish an editorial, a commentary, or even a presentation at a conference. Let other people know you’re working on something.

The Possible as Field of Inquiry was the first piece of writing, and it linked psychology and possibility. I reused that for the Encyclopedia of the Possible, where I wrote the psychology entry, so it was a nice revisiting. The book itself was a project that I worked on for years, and I was in creativity at that time, so I just transported it into possibility. I know colleagues who, when they have an idea and they shift it, they don’t recognize, “I’ve been kind of doing that before,” but I love these continuities. I think it’s perfectly normal to do that.

Obviously, I didn’t leave creativity, but I write much more on the possible now. It was post-5As framework, into the perspectival model, and I wrote a paper called Creativity as a Sociocultural Act. That was when I put in the perspective-taking, repositioning — all after my PhD — and the Possible book is exactly the anatomy of that sociocultural act. The building blocks are difference, positions, perspectives, dialogue, metaposition, all of that. It’s like unpacking what I saw as a creativity model, and I still think that it has relevance for creativity. The highest, sharpest formulation of that is in another paper called A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity. I called it the Perspective Affordance Theory (PAT). There was a lot of stuff that I learned from creativity, but then, suddenly, I realized that it applies to so much more than just creativity.

If you’re wondering, and many people might be: what is the difference between the possible and creativity? Aren’t they kind of the same? Well, the possible is wider than creativity. I think creativity holds you to a standard of novelty and originality. Which can be very wide, obviously. I mean, it can be mini-c, Big-C, and we know that. But possibility is not about originality. You can rehearse and revisit possibilities that you’ve thought about a million times, and it’s still very interesting from a possibility perspective. I feel that creativity is one of these drivers of possibilities. It’s one of the most forward-looking and active ways of engaging with the possible. But, you know, counterfactual thinking is also a way of engaging with the possible that doesn’t always result in creativity. People might argue that it might be a mini-c creative outcome, but anyway. It was a shift from a lot of thinking I had into a new, bigger framework.

I feel the same about the creativity field. It’s kind of becoming a little constrained for what I’m thinking, doing, and what I’m curious about. As you said, the possible is broader than creativity, so it is interesting to explore it. Also, you mentioned a lot of papers you wrote to get where you are now. In your writing process, when a new research idea emerges for you, how does it typically evolve into a paper or book? Do you start with conceptual sketches, empirical questions, or a broader narrative you want to develop?

I had a different process when I was a little bit younger and more at the beginning than what I do now. Obviously, it’s nice to grow in age and to be fortunate to have an academic job that is stable, because a lot of people have to write in a specific way, and about something, because of constraints to get a job. That was something I was spared. I also entered academia just at the transition point. I definitely could see how academia has changed and become much more competitive, ruthless, and unfunded.

However, when I was at the beginning, I would have a paper idea and then add a lot of references. I would be very focused on who said something relevant, and I would have these huge pages upon pages of references, and I would put them into a structure, so a lot of my sentences would have many references. Nowadays, I sometimes add references only after writing my piece. I mean, it’s the benefit of reading. You know when you refer to other people. It’s not like writing completely out of my own head. But I’m much more driven by what I want to say, and I think that’s the best way you can write. You know, it’s much clearer, because otherwise you need to connect to that reference, then read again, and sometimes you have to take detours into your own thinking because you have to acknowledge, and so forth.  

The latest paper I wrote was Possibilities Literacy: Empowering Learners For An Uncertain World. It just came out, and it’s open access. I’m so happy because I’m doing so much with that idea. I mean, that’s kind of the sharp end or the formulation I want to get behind with the possible, so people will really get it and then do something with it. That was completely in dialogue with my colleagues Catrinel Tromp and Constance de Saint Laurent, doing some practical work.

By the way, some behind the scenes: We put together this framework for the paper, and then reviewers came in and were like, “But how did you make this framework?” You know, it’s a very typical reviewer question. Oftentimes, you do frameworks as a creative exercise in which you use all your life experience and thinking, and there is no step-by-step. It is an abductive jump in the way you think. If you read the paper, you’ll identify where, because of the reviewer, we had to say certain things. But I like writing like this, which is much more idea-driven.

Sometimes, I’m invited to write a chapter, which can be difficult, because you write it because you know the editor. You know, I say no to most things. There are so many things to do. To give you an idea of what I’m doing now, I have the literacy framework, and one of them is mindsets. I was invited to write a chapter in Romanian on winning mindsets for a sports psych. I tend to say yes to Romanian requests because I feel like I owe a debt, and, you know, connecting back to my roots. But now, I want to do on possibility mindset, so I’m very keen to see how I can… — you see, I’m already like, “I need to write about that,” so there’s energy there (laugh).

As you said, you have this idea, and you want to write about it. But how much of your theoretical development actually happens during the writing process itself?

What you want to write and what you get to write are two different things. I’m the kind of person who plans a lot ahead, and I’ve noticed some people really struggle with the let-me-see-what-I’m-going-to-write-next type of formula. There are people I’ve known who got into writer’s block because of that. You can’t really write paragraph by paragraph not knowing what’s next.

I focus on doing a good structuring. I make sections in my head and write them down. I even put word counts so that I don’t go on and on, because that’s another thing when you like a topic, so you need to sharpen your thinking there. For example, I mentioned the Sociocultural Act paper. I put a schema there, a visual thing, and it’s not great, it’s very convoluted, but anyway, it’s there. I put the 5A models in a dynamic process-like thing. It was something. I don’t often go back to these visuals, because people will not get it. But the act of putting that figure or table together, that’s when you have the possibility to really understand what you’re doing. When you write, you have to define, to be specific. But it’s the tables and figures that really push you to think about what the line is, what the link is between this and that in your paper.

I know that some of your work explores less traditional formats, such as interdisciplinary collaborations. Do you see your writing as a kind of intellectual experimentation? If so, how do you decide when an idea is ready to be shared publicly?

There is a playfulness to building ideas, and that’s the motivation, honestly. It’s like, “What is the sense of the possible? How is this going to shape up?” By the way, I find conference presentations very useful for that, because you have to put it into words. It’s a different modality, but it’s still language-based. I’m a very improvisational speaker and probably writer as well. Although I plan a lot — and that’s maybe a paradox — I like to think on the spot. When you present, you have to make links. I’m teaching in business school, for instance, and I’m giving talks about possibility and work, or whatever. This is not my usual, but I definitely see the links. I put some of the usual slides I have, but then I want to give examples for business, and that’s such a beautiful challenge. Sometimes I do it on the spot, so I love that experimentation.

How do I decide what I will publish? Well, in my experience, especially for books, I have a cycle. I put a lot of books out, and then there are about 5 years that I’m done with books. The last big book sprint was in early 2020, with Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience and Mobilities and Human Possibility, and I don’t know what else. Now I’m in a new book sprint, and it’s going to be a textbook for Possibility Studies and several other books with Palgrave. I have this Possibilities Literacy Workbook, so it’s a moment when I’m pushing again. It’s cyclical.

For articles, it’s driven by collaboration. I’m very lucky that people want to co-write, because they bring what they do and connect with what I do, so it becomes a really interesting process. I would add a little piece, then they would take the lead, and we would adapt it to a specific journal. For instance, the Possibilities Literacy paper, which I hope will become kind of big and important, is in the Thinking Skills and Creativity (TSC) journal, not in the Possibility Studies journal. I hope to write a piece for possibility studies, but there is also this kind of where’s-my-audience type of question when you decide what idea you want to publish. This paper has a lot of education in it, so I thought Thinking Skills would certainly be the best place.

I’m sometimes frustrated that we don’t have enough outlets. At the moment, I want to put some futures-connected stuff, and I know there are some futures journals, and I know some colleagues, but we don’t yet have a full dedicated journal. We know the creativity world very well and who the players are. For theoretical contributions, the Journal of Creative Behavior (JCB) is very good, maybe TSC. Creativity Research Journal (CRJ) is empirical, and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA) is hyper-empirical, so it’s a bit rarer for me, because I don’t get to do as much empirical work. And then there is my journal, Possibility Studies & Society, so I’m always yearning for new outlets to put ideas in.

Talking about new outlets, I know that besides your academic work, you also wrote a novel, The Wish Thief. After years of writing academic papers, how did that experience shape your approach to fiction? And conversely, did writing a novel change the way you think about writing academic work?

Yes! And, surprise, the second volume is coming up! It will be part of a trilogy called The Land of Mar. The Wish Thief is book 1, The Wish Tree is Book 2, and The Wishlist will be Book 3. I am insane, I guess; I don’t know how to name this. This is self-published. I did look for an agent, but forget about it. You need to really dedicate your life to that type of creative writing.

Fantasy is a very different ballgame than academic publishing. It’s a very crowded field, but I’m doing it for the joy of it. I love the story. I try to connect now, more and more, the two sides, because wishes and wish-making are so close to possibility. I worked with an Australian colleague who is also a writer on a presentation about wishes. I also wrote an encyclopedia entry on wishes and wish-making for the possible.

At the next conference in Brighton, we have a symposium for academics who kind of have an art practice, and the different ways in which you keep it separate, or integrate, or build, etc. I find it awesome, and I think it’s very in line with our community in possibility studies. A lot of people in our universe do that. Do you have any creative writing or art practice somewhere, Felipe?

I do have it, yes. My background is in Graphic Design, so I continue my art practice in photography and Illustration, and keep my online portfolio updated just for the joy, just like you. But when it comes to fiction writing, I like to write short stories. But I have this longer story in my head for, I don’t know, 10 years now. I’m not actively working on it right now, but I keep a separate notebook just for this story. One day, I will sit down and write it.

This is where — and this applies to my academic writing as well — I love thinking of titles. Even before I have the paper, the right title gives me an idea of what the paper is about. I’m not saying that I have the greatest titles, but I like playing with them. I always have to name the thing I’m working on. With the novel writing, I’m super big into plot. I know exactly what I want to happen, and sometimes the writing takes me, like, there is a kiss scene that was not planned, and it just happened because of the characters. But building the story, the narrative arc is what gets me into stories. More than just the immersion, the psychological, the description that puts you in, which I would love to do more of, but it’s not fully my style.

It’s also a preference for what I read. I love stories that move fast, and the action is driving the character’s development. I remember when I was reading Jules Verne as a kid, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. I scored 3 pages of describing the submarine. I know that in the history of science fiction, this is super important, but I could not read about mechanisms on a boat. I was like, “I need to know what the characters are doing.” So I write in a story-moving way.

Now I’m doing this big novel, but short stories are so powerful, and I love a good premise. For me, it’s similar to article writing. I need to know what the punchline is. In the Possibilities Literacy, it is bringing all that expertise on the possible but talking about the how. How do we do this? Can you learn it? How do you practice it?

For my novel, my premise is that, in this fantasy world, people are born with a wish they can make. And they have a luminous orb that they kind of grow up with as kids, and when they come of age, they break it, and they say what they want, and they get that wish. It’s one wish, that’s it. But you can’t wish for anything, like superpowers or to change the world with one orb. There is a limit somewhere. Then everything is built around the question, “What kind of a society would that be?” There would be a wish order, people would try to regulate wishes, or how do you even live with others in a world where you have this power? And the main character is this girl who doesn’t want to make any wish at all.

Looking back across your publications, do you see your writing as a kind of intellectual archive of your thinking over time? Have you ever rediscovered earlier ideas in your own work that later became more significant?

Absolutely, it’s an archive. Actually, that is the motivation I always had to publish, and it’s different than a lot of colleagues I’ve seen. A lot of them are shy to publish because they think, “I’m not ready, I’m still thinking about this, or what if I regret it? What if I change my mind?” I firmly believe that it is a history of your thinking, so I’m absolutely fine contradicting myself. Sometimes I just express it, or tease it out, or, you know, reflect on the changes and stuff like that.

Now, the second question. I will be honest with you, and this can sound like a humble brag. I have, like, 200 papers by now? Probably, I don’t know. I do not rewrite or re-read what I wrote. I know the essence of it, but I don’t think I’ve ever re-read my papers. At conferences, people are very kind, and sometimes they cite me. It’s kind of embarrassing, because I’m there in the room and I get to read back what I wrote, and I’m thinking, “Oh, that was great, I wrote that?” (laugh).

Maybe I should read myself a bit more. I don’t know what I wrote, necessarily. And it came also for a few reasons. One of them is that I’m always up for the next idea. I mean, that’s a bad feature of my life, generally. Look at this textbook of possibility studies, for example. Of course, it’s going to be a lot of work. I’m going to have a creative pedagogy approach to it; it’s a lot of exciting stuff. But crazily enough, it’s almost done for me, because I thought of it, we have the contract, and that’s it. It’s almost like, “What’s next?”, which is a very bad way to live your life. Anyway, it’s pathological (laugh).

The second reason is that I’m kind of embarrassed sometimes to read what I wrote. I don’t know if it happens to you, but you know when you have to re-read and proofread, there are always mistakes coming in, and I hate discovering a grammatical error or something. My book, Distributed Creativity, is a very short book. It was after my PhD research, where I never mentioned distribution, so it was really an upgrade of my own thinking. So, one day, I swear to God, I get the book, I’m so excited, I open it, and I read the following sentence: “Now that we know what Vygotsky has said, we are not better equipped to understand…” How is it not better? No! The right sentence is, “now that we read Vygotsky, we are better equipped,” but there is a “not” there, I swear to you. I closed the book. And I shall never read again (laugh).

Looking at your work today, what questions or ideas are currently occupying your attention? And looking ahead to the next year or so, what directions might we expect your research and writing to take?

What’s my next big idea? I can tell you. I can tell you because, you see, I live in the possible future (laugh).

I’m really invested in possibility studies. I find it to be almost like a legacy project, and the joy of my academic life is that so many people connect to it, and I’m not possessive around it. If I were really into it, it would have been called the Sociocultural Possibility Studies Network or something, but it’s called Possibility Studies, so everybody can come in and do their own version of it. I don’t care, as long as we talk about these beautiful, big topics, I’m excited that people do that.

I keep writing on creativity, of course. I mean, I will always be a creativity researcher. It was my entry point. Then wonder comes back, and care is a new topic of interest that a lot of people around me have. But for me, it’s the practice of possibility.

For the next few years, there are the possibilities literacy article that came out, there is a workbook with 450 exercises, quick sparks, and deep dives, and we’re making an online resource and kind of formatting beautifully, and it’s open access, so that people can download it freely. We’re also thinking of developing a course, training people in possibilities literacy. Potentially, there could be a pay element to that, just because we don’t change a membership fee. Everybody comes in, and all the resources are kind of free, but we need some money to run conferences and to do some things, so we do have a fee for the summer conference. We’ll have a merch shop, by the way. We have these beautiful designs for our conference bags, and sometimes people want a second bag. And then there’s going to be an education initiative that we’re working on for the Possibilities Literacy project.

I feel that all of us need to use all our knowledge to make a little bit of good in that messy, crazy world, and we who study creativity, imagination, possibility, or whatever, have a double responsibility, because these are the human attributes that will make a difference and need to make a difference now. So, I feel very energized by what we contribute to.

You can learn more about Professor Vlad Glaveanu’s work at the DCU website or at ResearchGate. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn or join the Possibility Studies Network.

This is the fourth episode of the book interview series, and I would like to introduce you to Prof. Johnathan Feinstein from Yale School of Management.

He studies creativity as an unfolding process of learning, engagement, and development, exploring both individual and collective paths of creative growth. Prof. Feinstein’s research also examines how creative fields evolve, highlighting the often-overlooked influences and connections that shape innovation but are lost in the historical record. Beyond creativity, he is also an authority on tax compliance, detection, and models of auditing and compliance.

Prof. Feinstein has been exploring the role of contexts in creativity for a long time. As he told me in the interview, since his last book (The Nature of Creativity Development), he has taken almost 20 years to come up with a computational modeling capable of reading through a vast amount of data and information when it comes to creative endeavors people engage with.

With a background in Economics, Prof. Feinstein explained that typical economic data about individuals (e.g., family income, education level) tells us very little about why people pursue a particular path or engage in creative work. For that, a broader context needed to be addressed so one can understand why and how it unfolded through time. Noticing that creativity research normally doesn’t take a mathematical approach, he felt the need for a more structured model to approach it.

Why did you decide to write Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts? Was there any gap to fill, or just evolved somehow from your previous book, The Nature of Creative Development?

Well, that’s a big question. I think it’s a combination of both things, because when I started on Creativity, it was actually back a pretty long time ago now. I realized I wanted to study, to put in a nutshell, how each individual makes their own unique contribution. That’s what I’m interested in. That’s kind of more than creativity, by the way, as it’s traditionally thought about. Everybody makes a contribution in this world. And sometimes we call it creative, and sometimes we don’t, but really it’s always about the individual having their unique path that leads to the particular contribution they make. And so, when I started doing that, I interviewed lots of people for my first book and lots of biographical work. Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, William Faulkner, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein… all kinds of people.

When I got done with the book, I knew even before that I wanted to do formal modeling of the process. Someone once said that “mathematics is the language of the universe”. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But it is a way to force ourselves to be precise in our thinking, which I think is useful. I struggled with that for quite a while. The first book was published in 2006. Then, in 2009, I sat down and started doing some computer programming, modeling the processes. I was a bit stuck.

In 2014, our father died, and I started talking once a week to my brother, an applied mathematician. He’d helped me before in college, which is really when I first started down this path, actually. But it took a long time to get back around to it. I started talking to him, and he was so excited about some math modeling he was doing. Around January 2017, I realized that I wanted to go back and do this as a formal model. Right away, I realized the simple networks are the way to go. In Chapter 2, there’s a very simple diagram of a network. And that is kind of where that book started.

Then, as soon as I had the simple network, things got more complicated. I was driven to do the network thing because I wanted to formalize what I was doing, but it’s also true that I’ve known for a very long time that the creativity world is very anchored in psychology. There’s not a lot of formal modeling of how the processes happen, so I always knew that if I could do it, it would be something new, something different.

I did a ton of computer work; some worked, some didn’t. Then, during the pandemic, I sat down with this huge piece of paper. By hand, I drafted out these contexts for Hans Krebs, the biochemist, and then Clifford Pawson, the Indigenous Australian artist. I did these gigantic pictures. I did 5 drafts, trying to get it right, and then started writing about that. By 2021, a year later, I had a draft of a good chunk of the book, and I went to my previous publisher, Stanford. They were very interested in it. We signed the contract, and then I just worked hard to finish it.

I also wrote it for my own internal development, because my goal is to depict in a formal modeling structure where each individual follows their own unique path, which means learning particular elements, and seeing and building new connections among them until they finally make a contribution. I think a lot about great creatives, because if you’re going to be creative, you have to be careful. You have to both absorb what other people do and use it, but also not be derailed from something that you particularly have to say that they might not initially recognize. I see that as a bit of a balance between those two things. I’ve been very lucky to be a professor where I’ve had the opportunity to pursue all this and do the work.

Since you’re talking about guidance in your work and how it evolved, how do you think this concept of guidance informed you during the writing of the book? Did this guidance, in some way, transform the process or evolve through it?

Yeah, I think those things are hugely important. For example, Albert Einstein’s relativity principle was a huge guiding principle for him. He used it especially to rule out solutions that he didn’t think were valid. It was really an important restriction for him that this principle had to hold true. It is so important because it forced him to stay on this path until he finally came up with answers that he thought were consistent with relativity. Guiding principles are important because they help us stay on the path we need to follow.

I have a lot of guiding principles about the way I want the work to look and what it needs to do, and that’s been there for a while. Guiding conceptions are a little bit different. I think it’s been a little less out there in the world of creativity. It is having that larger vision and then allowing it to kind of fill in over time, rather than forcing yourself to know exactly what you’re going to do when you start. Giving yourself the freedom to say, “Hey, this is exciting to me, and I don’t know exactly what the details are going to be, but I’m going to be comfortable enough to develop it, and then the details will fill in over time to make it work.”

I think that’s a very important way to go about creative work. I think for me, as I said, after the first book was done, I wanted to do the modeling. I really didn’t know what to do. I was stuck for quite a while. The guiding conception was there to say, “This is the big picture I want, and I’m going to try some things, and eventually I’m going to find the path forward towards that guiding conception where I can actually develop it productively.”

You use a lot of case studies from different fields. How does immersing yourself in these different contexts help you write the book? Is there a Chapter or some theory in the book that felt more meaningful to you? For example, when the theory and the case studies came together.

In case studies, you have to go into a lot of detail on it. Virginia Woolf, for example, I have really gone into so much detail on her. She left us a tremendous number of materials, which is awesome, but I’ve spent so many hours of my life going through that to really understand the best we could about her path. You really want to know those in incredible detail, because then you see how it matches with the theory. It can inform your theory, obviously, and it does, especially inductively earlier, but then you want to be sure you see what the connection is.

I see that as a guiding principle for me, that the theory should connect with these examples. I like examples like the case studies because you can get into that level of detail. Lots of statistics, like in my home field of economics, are much higher in the sky. How many years of education did they get? How does that relate to their income? Well, that’s a great question to ask and to answer, but that’s not the same as what we’re talking about here, right? Because that’s not telling you how they came up with specific ideas. To get to that level, you’ve really got to map out their context in so much detail to see how they could make the connections. And I love that in the book. I’ve got the first context in Chapter 3, then a few chapters later, I show you their guiding conceptions in those contexts.

I believe general theory is important. I don’t think that creative work is more similar across these different fields than some people recognize it to be. I think creativity scholars, some of them would agree with that, some of them might not, but I think there are a lot of similarities in the way these paths unfold across these different fields. Of course, what you have to know is different, and some of your skills are different, obviously. Virginia Woolf was not going to do the wet chemistry that Hans Krebs was doing; that would not work. But leaving aside the specific skills, the patterns of what they’re doing are maybe more similar. So, I have always picked out a very wide range of fields to see across them.

You have to learn a lot to do that. You’ve got to be able to spend the time. There’s no shortcut. Such a rich treasure store of materials. So, you’ve got to find those, and then just see how your theory fits together with those.

Exactly, there is no shortcut to that. What reminds me of what you talked about in your book about “seed ideas”. Has writing this book served as a seed idea for new research questions or new projects?

Well, I definitely think these are always unfolding processes where we keep going. Looking back later, we or other people may see we had a peak and came down from the peak. That’s just the way creative careers often are, but when you’re immersed in the moment, you always try to keep going. I wouldn’t call the book itself a seed idea. There were seed ideas that became the book, absolutely, sketches that became the book, but the book is more of a snapshot of a part of the overall creative process.

You get the guiding conception, which you’ve got your context built up, you form a guiding conception by recognizing with some intuition higher-level links you could make, and those then generate seed ideas, and then you’re using your guiding principles to develop those into projects. That’s what the book talks about. But I knew after that I wanted to go back and study the longer-term paths through which individuals build up their context, and then eventually find their way to be able to make these guiding conceptions and then go forward. If you think about all the stills in the film, it shows you a piece of it, and there’s a lot back before it. So, the book is like a snapshot, a deep dive into just a piece of the film.

I’m now trying to work towards getting a fuller understanding of how people actually follow their unique paths in the field. I see it as more of a building block that you can use, but we’re trying to get to that point where this book applies, and then I’ll be a little more comfortable that I’ve filled in the whole process better.

You said that individuals can create or construct their own context. Building on that, how do you see this relation between the individual and the context? Are they responsible somehow for constructing their own context, having this agency of determining their context, or are they just taken by it?

I see it as a combination of both things, so there are lots of things we’re exposed to, or experiences that we did not choose to have, but we have them. From schooling, where we just happen to be in a certain class, to family stuff, to, you know, all kinds of things that happen. But within that world of things happening around us, certain things stand out to us as more salient, as more important, and we kind of grab hold of those.

Once some things start to appear interesting to us, then we can be more self-generating and say, “Okay, I want to learn more about that.” Like, I want to learn to paint, or I want to learn this mathematical theory of calculus, or I want to read a certain area of psychology because I’m excited about it. So, then we start to learn on our own. Even then, new things in the stuff that we are exposing ourselves to, things pop up that we did not anticipate, because we can’t know everything we’re going to find.

Then again, new things pop up, and we pick the ones that we care about. And over that recursive, sort of iterative process, you do build up a pretty unique, personal context. That is a mixture of the things you choose to focus on, but also the things that were brought to you. At the end of the day, as you build that up, eventually, you’ve got to have the intuition to be able to recognize the guiding conception that’s going to be a springboard for your own creativity.

And there’s no guarantee of that. One of the things I do in my class at Yale on creativity is to have students work on formulating their guiding conception, because I think that’s a part of the process. Sometimes people don’t recognize how important it is, because it’s kind of a little earlier than the actual creativity.

So, is it possible to actually see these guiding conceptions, or, in your experience with your students, is it hard to become conscious of your guiding conceptions?

I think it’s intuitive for some people to do it. Obviously, there are lots of people throughout history who have done it, and we can read them basically giving it to us. But then, for a lot of other people, it’s not intuitive, and they have not been educated in a way where they automatically grab onto that.

A lot of people don’t want to get caught in the world of sketching. They want to jump to the final idea and say, “Hey, here’s my idea.” For those people, it is a training exercise to learn to form a guiding conception and say it’s okay to have more of a dream, more of a conception, without knowing the details now; get comfortable with that and then see how it unfolds.

If you could imagine the ideal response from your reader, what would you hope for them to carry with them after reading a book? What’s the biggest lesson?

Well, so far with Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts, the biggest excitement for me personally is when somebody’s really read the book and really understands it, sometimes understood in ways I didn’t even understand.

So, leaving aside what they do with it, if they have insights about it, because they have really understood something at the level where they can creatively work with it, then that is super cool. So, in a way, you want somebody to understand whatever bits and pieces they are interested in well enough to be able to integrate. I talk with my students about this sometimes: what is understanding?

I’m sure you, Felipe, from your background, could give me a better definition than I’m about to, but understanding has something to do with integrating a piece of knowledge with the larger context of your previous understanding and knowledge, so that you can use it in these new ways integrated with other concepts that you care about and know. So, for me, the greatest thing is if somebody can read a book and pick some pieces of it and be able to integrate them into their own worldview, their own concepts, and then use it in some creative way.

I couldn’t have said it better. You talked about integration, and I know from your book that you mentioned that generating a lot of random ideas is not efficient. So, what do you think of this relation of generating ideas or creating novelty that’s normally attributed to creativity?

The idea that creativity is about randomly generating ideas and then picking the best one is just not valid in a large-scale context. It would not work. Even with the big computers today. You can always make the context bigger and bigger, but it’s not possible. And also, there’s no way to evaluate them or even see what’s going to work.

Again, you go back to the guidance. I think the guiding conceptions, and later the guiding principles, do reflect a degree of integration of your larger-scale learning context so that you can see how higher-level concepts that have not necessarily previously been related by other people connect.

Clifford Possum, in my book, is a great example. His adoptive father was a tourist guide who worked with maps a lot. He got into the indigenous art painting movement at Papunia. He was already a very good artist, but he realized that instead of just painting a single dream on a canvas or board, he would like to step back and focus on the geographic region and connect to maps.

Rather than just showing one dreaming, he picked a place and showed all of the dreamings that happen around that place. It was partly political, a justification of why they are the true custodians of this land, because they understand it in its deep history. He connected those things together at this high level.

That reflects a lot of integration of ideas to create the guiding conceptions. And then, of course, it will continue to happen as you develop ideas, because your guiding principles and your work, you’ll be picking bits and pieces that work together.

That makes a lot of sense. You transport one idea from one context to another, understanding what is happening in that particular geographical region, in this case. But it could not be just a geographical place, but from one ecosystem to another, or one context to another.

Yeah, cross-field stuff is sort of in the background, but I don’t believe in just smashing them together. Conceptions are more intuitive, and they pick pieces of each one and see that they connect through certain attributes or properties that enable them to be more productive.

There’s still a need for the person or the team to see the higher-level connections that might be possible. That’s super important, I think. The guy who founded Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark, used that framework in this very new way with graphics, because he had been trained at the University of Utah by a guy who did a lot of work with graphics. So, he brought those things together in this beautiful way to invent this new approach that led to a company. That’s happening all the time. That’s one of the ways in which we are getting to these guiding conceptions that eventually trigger creativity or innovation.

Since you did these case studies with great minds from different fields, how do you see, when we talk about large-scale contexts, the role of the genius? Is there a real genius that actually did something extraordinary, or is it a product of something that was already evolving in this context?

I don’t like to talk about the genius or to put certain people on a pedestal. Some people have done things that turned out to be super useful and beautiful or whatever, but everybody can be creative. It’s really a matter of learning the process and seeing how it unfolds.

One of the examples I sometimes think about is Albert Einstein. At 16, he hit on this paradox that he could not figure out for 10 years. Finally, 10 years later, he has this famous story about talking to his best friend and suddenly realizing the solution. He had read David Hume a few months before that, which I think was a very important link he made to this other field of philosophy.

But I sometimes think that if he hadn’t hit on that paradox at the age of 16, his life might have unfolded differently. He might not have set up and found the relativity theory; we don’t know. I think initially he wasn’t entirely sure, but he did recognize the importance, so that was valuable. When someone asked him, “What’s your most outstanding quality, Albert?” he said, “You know what, when I had a problem, I would not stop until I found an answer I was satisfied with.”

With his guiding principle, he had a very high standard for what satisfied them. So that was maybe something that he had that enabled him to be very outstanding. Is that a genius thing? It’s really more about the qualities, the values that we bring to the work that we do, I think. Everybody could be creative. I like to think that we’re all going to have that opportunity.

We don’t always all get it, of course, for various reasons, but we certainly like to think of improving our situation in the world so that more people get it. And then we’ll have all kinds of different guiding conceptions and things that get produced, and that’ll be good.

Prof. Johnathan Feinstein’s book Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts is available on Amazon. You can also learn more about his work at his website.