1. What is the creative class?
Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, wants to know if you are a member of the creative class. With 38 million members, and more than 30 percent of the nation's workforce, he defines the creative class as those people who are purveyors of creativity. That's important because Florida says that creativity is the driving force in the "new economy."
But specifically, who are the members of the creative class? Florida says that there are two branches of the creative class, the super-creative core and the and the creative professionals. The super-creative core comprises the following professions: computer and mathematical; architecture and engineering; the life, physical and social sciences; education and training; and arts, design, entertainment, sports and media. The creative professionals comprise the following professions: management, business and financial; legal; healthcare and technical; and high end sales and sales management.
2. Why is it important to be creative as well as professional?
The psychologist Csikszentmihalyi says that creativity involves three elements: the person, the discipline, and the audience. In his scheme, a person, a creative professional, works a certain discipline, and in the process of working that discipline the person produces a creative product or idea that is received by the audience. The third element, the audience, takes creativity out of one's head and makes it very specific -- it has to have an audience that receives the creative output and perceives it as new and useful. In this sense, newness and usefulness and their acceptance are all hallmarks of creativity.
That's why Florida and others see creativity as the driving force in our economy. After all, it's easy to replicate things these days; it's the newness, the ability to adapt quickly and come up with new ideas, products, and ways of thinking that are rewarded in our society. The rest can be readily off-shored or delegated to cheaper labor. In this view, it's the creatives who are truly rewarded.
3. What does it actually mean to be "creative"?
According to Florida, the super-creatives produce new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful. New products, strategies, or music, for example, that can be widely disseminated and used over and over fit that bill. The creative professionals are "knowledge" or "information" workers who manipulate ideas in ways that are both new and useful. They think on their feet and exercise a great degree of independent judgment. They apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways that fit the situation. Both groups, according to Florida, live the creative life.
People in these groups value education, individuality, meritocracy, and openness. Their lifestyles lean towards the no-collar workplace, personal experiences, a blurring of time through erratic schedules, and a gathering in communities of like-minded creative.
4. How can I tell if I need to be creative?
There may be many ways to see if you need to be creative. Here's one way. First, see what class you are in, the creative professional or the creative super-core. With that in mind, determine if you are a producer of new products or a manipulator of knowledge. Okay, now you know what kind of creativity is expected of you.
Next, see if your work actually requires you to be creative. You can do this by using a distinction that Dave Snowden and others have made about complicated and complex worlds. Complicated worlds deal with things that are known or knowable. How to attach the wires to your stereo may be complicated but it's knowable -- it can be figured out and correctly accomplished through a logical procedure. Figuring out your teenage son's real message when he asks if he can have the car on Saturday night is another matter -- that's complex. There are many elements involved and there may be no one right answer. If you're in that world, you're in the creative world. The parts of your work that are complicated require one approach, while the parts that are complex require another, more creative approach.
Finally, look at your situation. If you are in the early part of your career, chances are what's expected of you is a solid performance in the complicated world. But if you are in the mid or later stages of your career, chances are you're expected to be a bit more in the complex world, where creative actions are more expected. Furthermore, no matter what your career stage, you may find that -- by your own choosing or by fate -- you are expected to respond to more complex situations. In these case, you'd be expected to be a more creative professional. Finally, you may have already reached some of these junctures and decisions in your life. It's not at all unusual, for example, for someone to reach the point where more creative actions are clearly required and that person decides not to go that way. In these cases, the person can make a decision to stay less creative, to settle; the person may even decide to be less creative in one part of life, say work, and more creative in another, say a hobby or a vacation. Knowing what fits can be a healthy choice.
5. Do I have to be different to be creative?
We tend to think of creative people as somehow different than us. We have, I guess, a mental model of creative types like Picasso who lives on a beach, goes around bare chested, and has many women in tow as he touches paint to canvas in way that no one has done before. Same too with Einstein, only it's the hair and the pipe and the strange doodlings that will change how we think of the world, all developed after a pleasant day of sailing. And yes, there's an element of that to creativity; creatives have to go to a side of themselves that they may may not normally go to.
Yet there's a good deal of literature in psychology that says that people become creative, really and truly creative in the Csikszentmihalyi sense where they are working a disciple and appealing to a sophisticated audience, only after they have worked that discipline for a number of years. About ten years, in fact, give or take a bit depending on the discipline. Which means that these people were first just like us; they learned a profession and worked it in a straightforward way for a number of years before they began to manipulate things in new and exciting ways. So they made a leap, but they made that leap from the same place that all of us who are educated and working a discipline currently now occupy.