Criatividade

CREATIVITY
Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi one of the less well known but probably one of the most serious management scholars of recent times. He brings out the importance of creativity, outlines its building blocks and explains how we can all become more creative.

Introduction
Without creativity, it would be difficult to distinguish humans from other animals. Creativity leads to a fuller, more satisfying life. Without creativity, mankind would not progress.

Csikszentmihalyi points out that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Creative ideas need a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, we cannot decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.

Creativity results from the interaction of a system consisting of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.

Creativity is the process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. So we must learn the domain well. To master a domain, we must pay attention to the information to be assimilated. Bulk of our attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. And we do not do much with the small amount of attention left over because of the lack of focus. Diffused thinking leads to lack of concentration. Creativity is possible only when we are able to focus attention on the problem at hand.

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk. We need both. But whereas the first tendency requires