The flow champions vs. Agile culture
It is not a drawing test
The task is simple: complete this drawing. There is a scribble of no particular shape on the paper, and the person taking the test has to use these graphic elements to create a cartoon on a subject of their choice in a limited time. The first reaction is usually bewilderment: only some people enjoy taking these tests. People try to complete the test with more reluctance than euphoria, but not before warning: “But I can’t draw.”
The Torrance Test for Creative Thinking (TTCT) is not a test of drawing ability. It was developed by American psychologist E. Paul Torrance in the 1970s, based on the structure of intellect proposed by psychologist Joy Paul Guilford.
Snapshot of the TTCT 1
Guilford (Way Beyond the IQ, 1977) suggests that mental processes (cognition, memory, divergent production, convergent production, and evaluation), contents (figurative, symbolic, semantic, and behavioral), and products (units, classes, relations, system, transformations, implications) converge in human intelligence. He also proposes that creative thinking is nested within intellect but cannot be assessed by traditional IQ tests.
For Guilford, creative thinking is closely related to problem-solving; it only sometimes involves generating products (stories, musical compositions, inventions, scientific theories), and it only sometimes involves new ideas. This mental process is characterized by divergent production (departure from the most common path) and the transformation of the context and the mind of the creative thinker.
How does this process work? The person identifies the problem, gathers information, incubates ideas, comes up with possible solutions, and then verifies, tests, and elaborates on the result. This mechanism is not linear; it allows many comings, goings, dead ends, and serendipities.
Guilford understood that fluency, flexibility, and elaboration are some of the most vital attributes of creative thinking. Torrance used these and other elements to develop valuable tools for assessing creative thinking in school contexts, which could be extrapolated to different settings. This author understands creativity as
(…) the process of identifying difficulties, problems, information gaps, missing elements, or something wrong; making conjectures and formulating hypotheses about these deficiencies; evaluating and testing these conjectures and hypotheses; possibly revising and retesting them; and finally communicating the results (Shaugnessy, M., 1998, An Interview With E. Paul Torrance: About Creativity).
The psychologist with the unpronounceable last name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, also devoted many years of his professional life to studying flow* as the ability to generate ideas continuously, profoundly, and profoundly way. His findings can be found in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as an altered state of deep concentration, an optimal experience in which even the idea of happiness can be a distraction. You don’t have to stand at an easel to experience flow: the repertoire of activities that can provide this experience is as vast as the diversity of people in the world. What makes you flow? Doing maths on paper, telling jokes, doing the dishes — there are correct answers.
Achieving fluency and staying in it takes time. It works differently for everyone, but it is a fact that factors such as environment, motivation, stored information, interaction with other people, and the time available for an activity influence the quality of creative thinking.
The Torrance test, in its version of graphic elements for adults, assesses whether all the vignettes have been made in the specified time, whether the drawings are thematically related or not, the degree of abstraction between the picture and the words the person has used to title it, and the level of detail (shadows, perspective, colors), among other attributes.
When people take this test, they often complain that they have little time to complete the tasks. If the vignettes are not completed within the time allowed, the instrument is annulled and must be completed again.
What valuable lessons can we learn from the Torrance test? That time is a precious resource closely related to fluency and elaboration. Also, that creativity is not about drawing well, nor is it exclusive to artists (in fact, some artists need to be more creative!)
Making it “Agile.”
In early 2001, a group of software developer compadres — calling themselves the Agile Alliance **— agreed on a manifesto to breathe new life into the way they work and deliver results in the SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY; these are the manifesto’s premises:
People and interactions rather than processes and tools.
Functional software rather than exhaustive documentation
Collaborating with customers rather than negotiating contracts
Responding to change rather than following a plan
Since then, the mantra of Agile culture has been invoked in various industries, not as a call to privilege people and collaboration with the customer, but as an axiom that translates to “deliver for yesterday,” no matter what.
I have worked with organizations where I hear this kind of magical invocation: “is there a way to make this more agile?”, “this will work if we make it agile,” “we are promoters of an agile culture.” This meant “you can always do it faster.”
The Agile Alliance may have good intentions, and some of the tools and techniques they suggest are very useful, even if you are outside of software development. However, using the agile concept in its most superficial sense undermines the fluidity and level of elaboration necessary for creative thinking. Not to mention that the drive for speed is part of the syndrome Donald Rushkoff (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, 2014) calls present shock, and Roman Krznaric (The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, 2020) calls marshmallow brain dominance, a situation that makes it difficult for us to conceive and execute long-term projects, crucial for sustainable human life.
The tension between increasingly compressed delivery times and the attributes of creative thinking is easy to observe in almost any professional context. There is no time to catch up, and the consequences are on very different scales, from a typo in a particular document to a series of flaws in the structure of a bridge. These different scales have in common the undesirable nature of the consequences.
Guilford was suitable to separate creative thinking from the production of goods. Not all exploration leads to a tangible product, but it implies some transformation in the environment and the individual. It is terrible if we immerse ourselves in productive processes that demand the production of tangible results for “yesterday.” I’ll be right back: I’m going to get my time machine; I parked it outside.
Eager for quick rewards
“What good is this going to do me?” is a common refrain in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Students’ frustration when they fail to see the application or tangible outcome of the creative task is capital. “It will make you less empty-headed” is the response that school rules stop me from saying.
“How can I be more creative?” is another question I often hear, and the joke tells itself, as people are often disappointed when they get answers that do not guarantee an immediate solution. For example, to improve fluency, I recommend The Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Notes Effectively to Boost Writing and Learning for Students, Academics, and Nonfiction Writers (2022) by Sönke Ahrens because, as Guilford noted, creativity is closely linked to information and how non-obvious relationships are established between its elements: the disappointed faces are often unspeakable. “Don’t you have a more AGILE solution?” is a recurring response.
Lack of mindfulness and multitasking is part of this syndrome that keeps us in a perpetual, accelerated present. Trapped in today on a speeding train, we get dizzy and scratch our heads, wondering why we are not more imaginative because inventiveness takes time, to begin with.
Igor Ansoff, the father of strategic management, sets out five possible levels of turbulence in which an organization (including the most diminutive form of human organization, the individual) can be immersed. The greater the turbulence, the less familiar the events and the more creative the organization’s response: we live in a perpetual Level Five, where the world demands an ingenious and flexible attitude from us.
Judge for yourself whether or not this is a crucial issue for our creativity to flourish.
References
Ahrens, S. (2022) The Zettelkasten Method: How to Take Notes Effectively to Boost Writing and Learning for Students, Academics, and Nonfiction Writers. Sonke Ahrens
Ansoff, I. (2018) Implanting Strategic Management. Palgrave MacMillan
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Guilford, J. (1977) Way Beyond the IQ. Creative Education Foundation
Krznaric, R. (2020). The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking. Experiment
Rushkoff, D. (2014) Present Shock: When Everything Happens. Current
Torrance, P. (2012) Guiding Creative Talent, Literary Licensing
*While fluency refers primarily to generating many ideas, it also implies smoothness and continuity. More about quality than quantity, fluency is flow’s first cousin.
**In this regard, I suggest you check Michael Burnett’s The age of Agile must end.
