Arkaro Insights

70% of People Are Wrong About Creativity | Yale Researcher Dr Zorana Ivcevic Pringle Explains

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 44

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Do you believe creativity requires complete freedom? You're not alone — 70% of people think the same. But Yale research reveals the opposite: constraints actually enhance creative output.

Dr Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of The Creativity Choice, joins Mark Blackwell to explore why creativity is a learnable process of decision-making, not a gift reserved for geniuses.

In this episode, you'll discover:

  • Why the most creative teams spend 53% of their time on problem framing, not idea generation
  • How to match your mood to different creative tasks — use grumpy mornings for critical evaluation, upbeat afternoons for brainstorming
  • When to tap weak network ties versus strong ones in the creative process
  • What AI can and cannot do creatively — and why top human performance still outpaces machines
  • Three practical actions leaders can take to unlock team creativity

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Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Recently, colleagues of mine have done a research study across six different countries, and this is all over the world, really from the US to Poland to China and Georgia. And they found that across these countries, 70% of people think that creativity is greatest when we have full freedom of action. And if you ask creativity scholars, they would say, oh no, it's really quite the opposite.

Mark Blackwell:

This is Mark Blackwell. Welcome to the Arkaro Insights podcast. This is the show where we help business executives with tools and techniques to thrive in a complex world. Taking us one step further on our fabulous journey, we have today Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle. Dr. Pringle is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where she directs the Creativity and Emotions Lab. Drawing on her 20 years of experience and dedicated research, her work focuses on the intersection of emotion, emotional intelligence, and the creative process. Zorana is the author of the book The Creativity Choice, the science of making decisions to turn ideas into action. Her central thesis reframes creativity not as an innate trait or a spontaneous burst of inspiration, but as a continual, deliberate choice to take action and persist in bringing ideas to life. She offers psychological and emotional strategies for transforming initial ideas into tangible outcomes, emphasizing that emotions are vital information that can be decoded and utilized to navigate uncertainty and creative blocks. Zorana, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Thank you for having me, Mark.

Mark Blackwell:

How did you get the passion for working in what is fundamentally quite a messy idea of creativity?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

I like the messy part for sure. And I like complex questions. I find it challenging and I find it intriguing. But as once upon a time, I was a student looking for ideas, for research, reading very, very broadly, and I kept coming across creative individuals and had this sense of this is so complex that I want to study it in depth.

Mark Blackwell:

And I think many people traditionally think about creative people as being that narrow 1%, you know, the Galileos, the Leonardo da Vinci's, the Einsteins of this world. And the rest of us aren't capable of achieving it. We're just mere mortals. But I think you argue something differently in your book. You say that creativity is something that can be a choice. That's the name of the book. Can you say more about that?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yeah, you are touching actually on two very important things. One is who is creative. And certainly the first people who come to mind are those that you mentioned, these greats who have changed our culture, changed the world we live in in revolutionary ways. And certainly they are creative, but that's not the end of it. And it turns out thinking of them as the only creative ones does a great disservice to the rest of humanity because, well, obviously we are not that. Therefore, do we even try? So rethinking how we see creativity, where we look for it, and where we recognize it is crucial. And I came to understand creativity is a process of decision making. And you are particularly focused on leadership and creativity and innovation and organizations. And I think that's where this idea is particularly important. We all know that decision making matters and that quality of decision making matters. Now, when we talk about creativity, the issue is what kind of criteria for decision making we are applying. In talking about creativity, we would be thinking of making decisions towards something that is original yet also effective. And sometimes leaders get, in a sense, afraid of creativity because we we think of it as something that is just completely out there and that we are sacrificing productivity or effectiveness for the sake of creativity. We are not.

Mark Blackwell:

You're talking about choices that we have to make in the workplace. And goodness me, that's clear. We all often have constraints. You know, there's not enough budget, not enough time, the regulatory world is moving against us. As you we think about what you bring in the book and how we can apply it in the workplace, that you think of this as there really is a creative process that we can bring to this, and recognizing constraints is a positive, not a negative. Can you talk about that?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Of course. So I really talk about creativity as a process and analyze it in three different ways, in three big buckets. One is, well, sometimes we do not embark on that process. Sometimes we even have an idea, but don't do anything with it, or down the road it gets changed to a point of becoming less original and less creative. What are the barriers? Can we identify barriers to the creative process? So my first set of questions is what are they and how can we overcome them? And then as we embark on the process and start doing something to transform ideas into something tangible, we need a know-how. We need a know-how that is not just a know-how of our particular domain of work, computer science or writing or whatever that might be, but it's a know-how of creativity. What do we need to know about creativity to make it happen? And finally, I asked the question of what do we need to know about the organizational climate and culture so that creativity that has succeeded once does not become a one-hit wonder. You want creativity that is reliable and sustainable. What do we need to know there?

Mark Blackwell:

And you mentioned identifying the constraints and working about how to overcome them. Can you talk to more about that?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yeah, the idea of constraints really comes across the whole process. So we have constraints that are already there at the very beginning, some constraints that are of the financial nature, regulatory nature, nature of different kinds of resources we have. And they can become barriers because of how we perceive them. They tend to be very frustrating in our experience. So that is one kind of emotional barrier we have to get around. Then constraints are also something that we can look at in the process of that creative drive and making decisions where we can find out that they can be even beneficial to direct our thinking and direct our doing away from what is obvious. So sometimes I hear people say: if you have, if you were completely unconstrained, if you were fully free to do anything you ever wanted, what would you do? And it turns out that seems to be a liberating question, but actually it's a question that leads us to more obvious answers than if we said, well, let's put some roadblocks and let's put some even personally, personally devised constraints that are intentionally put there. Recently, colleagues of mine have done a research study across six different countries, and this is all over the world, really from the US to Poland to China and Georgia. You think of how to sample the world, they sample the world. And they found that across these countries, 70% of people think that creativity is greatest when we have full freedom of action. And if you ask creativity scholars, they would say, oh no, it's really quite the opposite. Think of examples. Think of examples of what happens when we have constraints and we do not have constraints. I when I talk to leaders, I give a very, very simple case. It is common in creativity studies to ask this playful question: how would you use a brick in different ways? So imagine just a plain brick, how would you use it? So I give them very little time and say, okay, what are the first things that come to mind? You have complete freedom. And what is the first thing? Well, try it yourself. What is the very first thing that comes to mind when you hear how do we use a brick?

Mark Blackwell:

To break a window.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

There you go. That is usually the very second one that people give. The very first one is build something, build a house, build a wall, build a path. And that is not because we are not creative. That is because the first ideas we have when we are completely unconstrained are very obvious. And it's just because how the mind works. The mind works as a network of connected ideas and thoughts. And those that if you activate one of those ideas, the idea of a brick, the very next one is going to be the most obvious one, most clearly related to it. So you say brick, you say building. You say brick, you say smashing. Turns out the same thing happens when we are thinking about our areas of work, whatever we are doing, we start completely unconstrained, and our first ideas end up being very commonplace. So to get around that, we can put some constraints. And if I told you, okay, let's think of ideas for a brick, but you cannot think of anything that comes to mind. It has to be something that deals with gardening, or it has to be something that deals with arts and crafts. Now you are going places that are not obvious.

Mark Blackwell:

I can think of a brick now, maybe, as a source of material to make paint for a painting.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Exactly. And now that's not going to be obvious, and that is going to be much higher in that idea value hierarchy.

Mark Blackwell:

Another idea that I loved in the book that might resonate is we are bound by our assumptions that can be constraining. And you were really encouraging people to challenge their assumptions. Maybe you can recount the story of the holiday dilemma about the child going to Croatia with the with the grandparents and you having different and how did you reconcile what uh appeared to be complete competing ideas by thinking about constraints in a creative way?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

So take this take this example. It's an interesting example that you picked because it's an example from everyday life that we all have crazy schedules and we all have multiple things going on in the same time. And I grew up in Croatia, and so my child goes to see grandparents every year, and we were trying to balance different constraints. I had constraints with my travel and speaking, my husband had constraints with his travel and professional conferences, and then child had his own constraints of summer camps, and we had to make it all work in the same time. And it seemed an impossible problem because these seemed to be contradicting. So, what is our problem? And once my husband said, okay, let's approach this as a creative problem, we started thinking about it in a different way. We said, okay, how can we incorporate multiple seemingly contradictory things? It has to be this and this also. And we broke an assumption that both parents have to take the child, he was young at the time, to Croatia to see grandparents together. So we broke it so that one parent took him there, the other parent took him back. So he could spend long time there, and each of us could spend a relatively short time there. And it all became possible when we broke the assumption of parents have to go with the child, because a parent can go with a child, and their and back can be different parents.

Mark Blackwell:

In hindsight, all these things look obvious, but they're not necessarily so obvious when you start.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Exactly, they are not obvious when you start thinking about a problem, and they become not obvious because a problem could seem so daunting that we build barriers, we build psychological barriers. And what this particular problem illustrates in an example that is an everyday example is the importance of framing the problem. So it's not just looking for solutions. It might be hard to find a solution if we are not looking at the problem in different ways. And scientists, creativity scholars have found that how we look at the problem is more important to finding a solution than actually spending more time on coming up with ideas. And that is quite counterintuitive. In a recent study, colleagues of mine have worked with teams, problem-solving teams. They had to solve a problem and worked together to do so. So this is relevant to everybody working in organizations. And they recorded sessions, work sessions of these teams, and they have found out that those teams that came up with the most creative solutions were not spending their time, most of their time, on coming up with new ideas. Rather, they spend most of their time, 53% of their time, they could quantify it, on talking about the nature of the problem. And they would start a meeting by formulating what the problem is. Now, think about it in the context of a meeting in your work team. This seems to be a waste of time. This feels like a waste of time. But we've seen with research that it is not a waste of time. It actually results in a better solution in the long run. But in that moment, you have to recognize it feels like a waste of time, but it is not a waste of time. I have to stay with it and the discomfort of it and regulate that discomfort.

Mark Blackwell:

Sarana, there's music to my ears. As a business consultant with clients, now I try to emphasize the importance of really diagnosing the problem and understanding it first. And of course, the initial reaction is I'm in this business, I understand the problem. And exactly. But I try to use that internet meme of Einstein, which he says, you know, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem. But you've actually now given me some science where I can at least spend 53% trying to understand the problem.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yes. Actually, it seems that there is that there is no record of him saying it, but the sentiment is still correct.

Mark Blackwell:

Great. Well, I've now got some science, thanks to you, and I'm going to re I'm going to make a slide of that science. So thank you, Z. Brilliant. Another thing that I really found obviously a new idea that I hadn't thought about so much before. And from your background, it's it's obvious is the importance of mood when we are working on the divergence and the convergent phase. Can you tell the audience something about that?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yeah, so people sometimes in organizations in particular have this, I'm going to say outdated view of emotions. Emotions are something to leave at the doorstep. To be truly professional, you do not bring emotions into your work. Well, it turns out your team members are human and humans cannot do that. It is not possible. So you can attempt to do it, you can attempt to push emotions aside, but it does not work. The emotions come through, and if you try to push them aside, they are going to come through in unwanted ways. So the best practice is acknowledge they exist and then learn about them so that you can actually use them and not have them come in the way. So to be to stay with this theme, I get asked, what are the moods, what are the emotions that are good for creativity and those that are detrimental? It turns out that's the wrong question. And I love saying that because it um it makes people stop. And then you say, okay, why is that the wrong question? Well, that is the wrong question because it assumes there's only one kind of thinking that is creative thinking, that is creativity itself. But if we think of creativity as not just coming up with ideas, but taking ideas, developing ideas, evaluating ideas, improving ideas, doing something with them, all kinds of thinking are going to be involved in this process. And that means that different kinds of moods will be ultimately beneficial. Now we have to learn what those are.

Mark Blackwell:

And what are the moods then?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

So let's go there. Emotion scientists have found out that different mood states are related to different kinds of thinking. And when I say related to different kinds of thinking, it means they enhance different kinds of thinking. So in one kind of mood, you're better at one thinking, in another, different kind of thinking. And let's be concrete. When you are in positive, energized moods, so you are happy, excited in those states, we are really good at very quickly coming up with lots of ideas. And we have this sense of freedom, permission to go um to go wild, to go places where otherwise, in a more cautious states, we would not go. So sometimes people say, oh, that's creative thinking. Yes, that is one kind of creative thinking. But now you want to do something with those ideas, right? You don't want them to just stay as a playful exercise. You want them to leave the brainstorming room. Now you have to do something else. You have to critically think about them and find what is good about them, what may be improved. Well, that you're going to do best. When you are in more subdued moods, maybe even more pessimistic moods. And if you know both of these things, right? If you know in which moods you can be more broad-ranging and in which moods you can be more critical, you can use it to your advantage. This is how I do it. I am not a morning person, and in the morning I am grumpy. Let's just say grumpy. And I use it to my advantage. First thing in the morning, I open up, I do a lot of writing, and I open up those pieces of writing that I have previously done. And I very critically read them. In this state, I can find everything that is wrong with it and make it better. Everything that is wrong with it is a necessary step in that creative process to get a good product to the end. Once we get in the later afternoon, 3, 4, 5 p.m., now I am in more active, more positive state. I am upbeat. And now I can go really broad ranging in my thinking and develop and start putting together new things. This is individual. They are people and who are in different kinds of moods at different times of day. And it's not just that we have moods and a particular time of day, we they also experience them depending on different events. We can use them to our advantage.

Mark Blackwell:

Fascinating. And so different moods for creating ideas in the divergent phase, selecting, refining, synthesizing ideas in the convergent phase. The other idea that I liked, which is connected to this, I think, was how do we use our networks in the divergent phase, and how do we use our networks in the convergent phase? Because I think there's a distinction.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yes, and creativity is social at all times. Creativity is social even when it does not seem to be. Even if you're doing something that is on its own a solitary activity, there are social influences, either of implied or explicit, conversations with others or things that you have read, influences that you had. But let's say that you are working on a new project and you are in that exploratory stage where you are gathering information, you are coming with new perspectives. At those times, you are going to benefit the most by reaching out to people who are outside of your immediate team. Those people who might be in other departments in your organization or who might be at the edges of your social network, people who you meet occasionally at a conference or an event, but you don't talk to them on a regular basis. Why are they helpful in this stage? Well, because they don't know intimately how you think, you don't know intimately how they think. Chances are they're going to have different perspectives, and that will be beneficial. On the other hand, once you have your idea, you are committed to it, you are working on develop it, you need to work with those who are very close, close relationships on your team, usually. People who understand the matter, people who can show support, people who can say, yes, that's a good idea. Can we also do this? Who are going to build on where you started.

Mark Blackwell:

Great. So that's that's mostly I can see the difference there between the openness and the and the closeness. So maybe not part of our network, but as Vlad Glavano discussed in a uh in the last podcast, the concept of Homo Farber and his tool. And the biggest tool, probably right now for us in the workplace is artificial intelligence. We can we've got we've talked about mood and our divergent convergent. We talked about network in divergent convergent. Can you say anything about how to use AI with it in the process of creativity, which includes divergence and convergence?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

This is a brand new area of scholarship, and there's a lot of excitement around it. And excitement and fear too. So there is excitement of this is a new tool, it can help us in different ways, and it does seemingly incredible things because it comes up with things very quickly. And there is also lots of fear from people who uh whose work is creativity. And um, I think it is useful, I think it is certainly useful. It can put together wonderful summaries, it can do transcriptions, it can pick out key themes from conversations, and I think that's very helpful. What it can do in terms of creativity is a more interesting question to me. There are some things it can do, there are some things it cannot do. So, what can't it do? Well, it cannot take initiative. What we do as human beings, we notice something in the world and we say, hmm, what about? To give you an example, I I love the story of founding of Instacart. It is a service that delivers groceries to your home address uh based on your list and based on your based on your requirements, right? You you say, this is what I need, these are the constraints of it, I want this brand, not that brand, and you get it delivered. Would AI come up with that? Well, I don't think so, because how it uh how it came up with how it uh um happened in real life is that its founder really hated everything about the grocery shopping experience. So this emotional experience became inspiration and became impetus for action. Now the machine does not have that. You have to feed it information from which it can draw something. And it doesn't have at this time, I like science fiction, so I'm not precluding it happening at some point, but at this time it cannot take that kind of initiative. And we know that finding problems and then asking different questions about a problem is what gets you the maximum creativity. When uh these LLMs first came onto the scene, there was a slew of research papers saying AI is more creative than humans. But it's interesting to look at how that was done. So uh a bunch of AI uh systems were given problems of similar nature to what we have discussed before, come up with all different uses for a brick or similar. It wasn't just that question, there were different kinds of questions, but they were of that kind. It has all the knowledge of all the internet essentially in its memory. And there are lots of examples of how to use the brick in this knowledge base, and it can send you a list, it can reproduce a list that is long and that has some creative ideas in it. When we compare it to humans, to human performance, it turns out that the average performance by the AI engine is higher than the average performance of humans. Now that, if you just end up with that as a headline, sounds sensational. However, was creativity, was human creativity ever about averages? Or was human creativity about something that is different than the average, that is above the average?

Mark Blackwell:

Or the quality of the idea, perhaps as well, or something.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Exactly, exactly. And when we take it like that, when we look at those human ideas that are on the top level of human performance, which we really mean by creativity, the AI doesn't reach it. There is no overlap there. Humans are in that higher level, they stay more creative, and that is just coming up with ideas. Now, humans can take those ideas, build something with them, make something in the real world. The AI is not the builder of ideas in the real world. So now we come back to the question from the very beginning. What do you think creativity is? Is it coming up with ideas? Well, then AI can do something that is, you know, average creative. It's it's better than nothing. It's not zero creativity. But if we say creativity is also finding ideas, looking at them from different angles so that we can maximize it, then AI at this time cannot do.

Mark Blackwell:

I'm just reminding myself of previous podcasts and try to connect and validate some of your thoughts. So a while ago we had Scott Belson talk about the jobs to be done pyramid, and there he was talking about emotional jobs, and he's really built and expanded on the emissional thinking of that area. And in our conversation, uh, I think we were pretty clear that in the convergent phase, there's real limitations with AI because, amongst other things, it doesn't have that emotional sense of what is important to one segment versus another segment of people. And so it'll struggle to make the choices of what's important. Had a great conversation with Scott Anthony when suddenly confronted with the need to bring AI into his business school teaching. Key conclusion as man works as the his machine, the wisdom of powerful prompting. It's only humans that can really write the prompts in a way that gets the answers out of the large language models. And sort of the flip side to that was with Vlad and his ideas of slow AI, which was, you know, amongst other things, fundamentally saying, spend more time asking AI for it questions that inspire the human mind rather than answers which dull it, was my takeaway. And I think from your your description just merges, meshes very well into that. So we are slowly getting there on this journey on the Arkaro podcast to really work out how we can work synergistically, perhaps, with AI in the process of creativity and innovation. So thank you for that.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Yeah, and I think that that is the most powerful way of thinking about it. I keep being reminded of a different technology. Well, almost two centuries ago now, photography was invented. And there was a lot of writing at a time about photography is going to be the end of painting, the end of art, the end of visual art at least. And that did not happen, right? If I know my art history enough, that did not happen. And actually, what happened is that whole new approaches to art were invented. You had impressionism that said you can take these shimmers of light and portrayed the sensory richness and discover the nature of the world through that. We had expressionism, which was focused on emotions. We had surrealism that dug deep into the psyche. We have all of these different art movements that had nothing to do with portraying the world the way it looks like directly like a photographer could see it and document it with a tool. But we also had photography as uh as an art form in itself that developed. So new tools do not eliminate uh existing uh art forms, they transform it. So I think there's going to be transformation in using AI. We are going to develop ways of using it. We are going to learn what it can do, what it cannot do. And prompting is a great example. We are now discovering what we can do with prompting. We as humans need to be the prompters, but we also know the limits of prompting because AIs are built in a way that really pander to you. They are going to tell you, yes, you are great. You have a great idea. But we need something that is more adversarial. We need something that is a new perspective. So we need to learn where the limits are and then go beyond those limits. Use it for what it can do and work around it for what it cannot do.

Mark Blackwell:

I think that's a great place now to give some positivity about AI, just to say thank you for that. So and begin to wrap up. Um, listeners, the creativity choice, definitely worth going and getting a copy of. And I hope it inspires you even more than this podcast. As a final question to you, Zorana, what three bits of advice would you give a B2B executive faced with a challenge of delivering more creativity in the workplace?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Well, the first thing would be counterintuitive. Ask people to be creative. Sometimes people don't want to ask directly because they think that is going to limit them. But by being asked, first we know what is expected, and second, we have a permission to go there. So ask people directly. Um consider that emotions are going to happen in the creative process. But when I said happen, that seems to imply we do not have any agents in relation to them. We actually do have agents in relation to emotion and we can use that. So consider at which times you would be best at different kinds of tasks. You are going to maximize your productivity and quality of your work that way. And what you can do for your teams is make sure that you create a culture of psychological safety by acknowledging what is happening with your team members, by acknowledging how your decisions are influencing them, and by giving them that respect and space in which they can share ideas, opinions without consideration of how is this going to be received and might it have consequences that might not be good.

Mark Blackwell:

Well done. Thank you, Zorana. Really powerful stuff. Thank you very much indeed.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle:

Thank you, Mark.

Mark Blackwell:

Bye bye.

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Mark Blackwell

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Zorana Ivcevic Pringle

Guest

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