Towards a Theory of Creativity
The paper that coined psychological safety, in a theory of creativity rather than of teams. Rogers opens on what he calls a desperate social need, arguing that a culture producing conformists will not keep pace with its own scientific change, and worrying in passing that in industry creation is reserved for the manager, the designer and the head of research while for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavour. His definition of the creative process is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on one hand and the materials, events, people or circumstances of their life on the other. He is deliberate that it carries no moral content: relieving pain and devising a subtler form of torture both seem to him creative acts, and the discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus were judged blasphemous and wicked in their own day and basic in ours.
Three inner conditions are set out (openness to experience, an internal locus of evaluation, and the ability to toy with materials), and then the move that matters here. Inner conditions cannot be forced, only permitted to emerge, and the image is agricultural: the farmer cannot make the seed sprout, only supply the conditions that let it develop its own potentialities. The external conditions he believes make this more likely are labelled X and Y, psychological safety and psychological freedom.
Psychological safety, he says, may be established by three associated processes. Accepting the individual as of unconditional worth, whatever their present condition or behaviour, which lets them learn they can be whatever they are without sham or facade and so need less rigidity. Providing a climate in which external evaluation is absent, on the argument that evaluation is always a threat, always creates a need for defensiveness and always means some portion of experience must be denied to awareness. And understanding empathically, which is what provides the ultimate in psychological safety when added to the other two, since to accept someone you know nothing about is a shallow acceptance that might change on acquaintance. Rogers is careful that ceasing to evaluate is not ceasing to react: saying you dislike an idea is a reaction and leaves the other person their own locus of evaluation, whereas a judgement that the thing is bad or good, assigned from some external source, tends to put them at the mercy of outside forces whether it praises or condemns. Psychological freedom is complete freedom of symbolic expression rather than of behaviour, which he says may in some instances be limited by society, and rightly so; he adds that he feels unsure of the passage, calling it the best formulation he can give at the moment.
It closes with seven hypotheses offered for testing, including that groups with more of these conditions will form more creative products, judged more significantly novel, that the conditions are not of equal importance, and that such a group should also have more effective and harmonious interpersonal relationships. That sixth hypothesis, proposed in 1954, is close to what the field spent the following seventy years investigating. The seventh asks how far groups including families, school and college classes, social clubs, military groups and industrial groups actually provide the conditions.
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Neighbours (7)
- Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work
- What is PS?
- On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
- Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach
- Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature
- History of PS
- PS & Creativity