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.