The Science of Creativity with MOLECULE Nathaniel Barr

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https://quiz.eartharchetypes.com/

When I ran across the “Illuminating Climate Era Mindset” report, it was similar to when I discovered the scientific study of emergence and awe.  A deep curiosity of what science could tell me about experiences I’ve had for decades.  This time about creativity.

Created for COP28, it showed the correlation between optimism and creativity – specifically for encourage work environments that would nurture climate innovations.  Diving in, I found out that one of the scientific advisors for the report is an expert in the science of creativity, Nathaniel Barr.

Instantly, I reached out and found a wonderful human on the other side.  Here we continue the conversation with questions about the definition of creativity, inquiry in science, and transparency in research.  Talking about the report, the video version even shows 2 of the pages – including the cool graph showing the correlation between optimism and creativity.  

Then during the grand finale, Nathaniel shares where he falls on that spectrum.  

Join us for the journey!

Resource:  Illuminating the Climate Era Mindset Report

Listen to how the Earth Archetypes came to be. Check it out right here.

And if you liked this episode, listen to Episode 6 with Molecule Type Bernadette Rodgers

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We are really odd primates that somehow, some way, figured out ways to manipulate the environment around us to collaborate and use this disproportionate horsepower we have within our heads to make the world more amenable to our survival prosperity and collective well-being.

(00:24):
A lot of my work lately has been focused on this question of, but at what cost? As we stare down, a changing climate, as we look to the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we can see that human creativity and innovation brought us many great things.
We live longer than ever before. Here we are talking across the continent in more or less real time. It's freezing cold outside, I'm toasty warm. But what are the costs of those creations?

(00:58):
So for me, it's this funny puzzle of all the good and the bad that come with having these incredible brains that allow us to shape the world to our liking.
Welcome to the EarthMates podcast together. We explore how to find your path from climate anxiety to community action by asking, who are you? Because just like any relationship, that matters.

(01:29):
So get ready to be raw and real, but also playful and silly with me, Chief Relationship Officer Amber Peoples, as we discover what's possible through the lens of the five Earth archetypes.
Curiosity and subscription buttons highly encouraged.

(01:53):
Welcome, my friends. Today as we record this session, it is winter time here in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, here in Oregon, we are getting hit with a winter storm.
We get them up once a year and normally we call them a snow apocalypse because it kind of shuts down the whole town because we're not really used to or have the infrastructure to really deal with it, except for hunkering down and making sure everything stays safe.

(02:20):
In fact, tonight, we are preparing for some serious icy rain that will see what happens to power lines and pipes and all kinds of things as we prepare to hopefully stay warm and cozy and care for the things all around us that are going to be experiencing this weather in a very unique way.

(02:41):
So wherever you are, perhaps it is at the same time of year, but you're on the Southern Hemisphere and so you're enjoying summertime or perhaps you're listening to this six months later and you are in the Northern, Northern Hemisphere experiencing summertime.
But what I just encourage you to do is to take a moment and perhaps even close your eyes.

(03:02):
And inside my head, I'm going to count to five silently while you just tune into what is it that's around you? What is the environment have to share with you if you give it a moment to listen.

(03:26):
Thank you.
Now, I'm delighted to introduce you to our Molecular type Nathaniel Barr. I met Nathaniel via LinkedIn after a leading behavioral science firm called BeWorks, which Nathaniel is the scientific advisor for, released a fantastic report called “Illuminating the Climate Era Mindset” during COP28 in Dubai.

(03:52):
It is a 37 page report that is designed and written in a way that practices what it preaches creativity.
Trained in cognitive psychology and published with studies around the mechanics of thought, Nathaniel has been doing more applied work lately.
So today, I'm excited to learn about his scientific mindset and how it's turned towards this climate area, era mindset.

(04:17):
So welcome Nathaniel. I'm curious what your version of the story is.
Yeah, thanks for having me. And your story checks out to me. I seem to recall a message on LinkedIn, where we connect it over the report.
And your enthusiasm about some of the findings there.
You know, the rest is history. Here we are.

(04:38):
And that's, that's what's so fabulous about these, these ways of connection. And I often talk about technologies of belonging and connection.
And instantly people often think about the ways that you and I connected these amazing reports, these ways of sharing LinkedIn, social media.
And what I'm excited to do today is get into more of those technologies of belonging and connection that are about, about conversation and about tone and about connection.

(05:05):
And to see how it is that when we have somebody with your incredible abilities to understand the science and how to break down the science corresponds with somebody like me who's often thinking and metaphors and imagining fantasy worlds in my head.
And so I'm excited to see what kind of creativity we spark in that way.
And so before we dive into some specific questions about the report or your impressive list of studies listed in Google scholar.

(05:33):
I would love to hear what is a scientific study of creativity.
I'm guessing it's quite a bit different than how I studied either method acting or picking certain colors to create a mood within a theater.
So I'm wondering how does it go over for you maybe if you're at a bar trying to explain if somebody or a party or when you're in the thick of things when you're working with your fellow scientists, how do you study creativity.

(06:02):
Yeah, that's a great question. And if you'll forgive me, I'm a bit of an history buff and I think the answer begins a few decades back because for most of human existence, despite creativity being a thing that was all around us.
No one really approached it through a scientific land.
Most of the time, if we're thinking about human ability as a relates to creativity, the word that was used and most commonly researched was intelligence.

(06:31):
And it wasn't until around 1950 that a researcher named JP Gilford took an interest in this concept of creativity, specifically as a result of his experiences working with the military during World War II.
And he made anecdotal observations that, you know, we have these measurements about human ability related to intelligence problem solving capacity.

(06:54):
But there seems to be something missing from the equation here that's accounting for the best performers under pressure when you're facing some scenario you've never learned a solution to.
And he coined this distinction between divergent and convergent thinking.
Convergent thinking is the type of question you would be answering on your standard IQ test, you know, there's, you're given some problem and there's a finite correct answer.

(07:21):
Whereas with divergent thinking you have some starting point, there's a multitude of ways you could branch out.
And those are going to vary in terms of their origin, how it.
And so he gave an American Psychological Association address in 1950, which really was the catalytic moment for creativity research where psychologist in particular took up a mantle to try and put something that had long been held to be a femoral perhaps mystical by many.

(07:50):
People throughout history and then in turn was subsumed under this label of intelligence on its own kind of pedestal and as a topic worthy of inquiry.
Now for how it's studied today, there's a huge range of approaches.
You can find everything from granular studies looking at neural activation as you generate words that are farther apart from each other.

(08:19):
You can find people that track using diary studies, the outputs of different types of artists or scientists that are doing creative work.
But I think the essence of the pursuit of studying something as tricky as creativity first is trying to decide what we even mean by creativity.
That's arguably the biggest obstacle.

(08:42):
And the most common way is something that's novel and useful.
And as you can probably imagine that subsumes a huge array of things and how you actually translate that conceptual definition into tangible things to study opens up a whole can of worms as well.
But philosophically speaking, it boils down to, okay, are we in a green set where we're talking about is creative and then in turn, how are we going to try and quantify something that's pretty tricky.

(09:15):
Wow, there's, there's so much good stuff in there. I want to ask about this idea of worthy of inquiry in this definition you used and this idea of,
it first is it and then how do you quantify that that's such an interesting way of viewing how to study this, this form of social science.
And I think that's where I want to start with is, is this idea of the role of inquiry. I know within the scientific realm how questions are structured is such an important piece to what you do.

(09:50):
Because it forms the hypothesis informs the methods that you use when you have the study you then look at, you know, were these the right methods after all, or do we have to switch them around.
I'm curious about this, this idea of what I've been, what I've been hearing as a term that's called good science. And, and within that, the, the role of question asking because it is a creative process, what it seems like, you know, based on your, your two pieces of novel and useful.

(10:22):
And I think it's fit both of those, so it is that, that creative process. And I'm curious for you, what is it that, that is that process of, of creating those questions that give you the launch point to continue the, these studies.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think when I think about at the highest level, this, this question of good science, I think the primary fundamental there is transparency.

(10:51):
And that goes all the way down the line in terms of what is it you're purporting the study, how are you defining your terms, maybe just give another example before I move on from that, you know, creativity is pretty complex.
But think about something like happiness, right, or trust. There's a lot of these words that we have, which relate to different states of being for human beings that might mean slightly different things to different people.

(11:19):
And so, rather, we may disagree that some measurement we came up with as a means to index that concept is an appropriate one.
Just for example, we could say the number of times I smile throughout this interview is a measure of my happiness. Maybe I'm a person who smiles when I'm nervous, right.
There's debate that can be had about whether the definitions were using and then in turn, the way we're instantiating those definitions and some sort of quantifiable way is agreeable.

(11:51):
So I think when we talk about good science, you need to be able to trace back the thinking of the person doing the research so you can come to agreement or disagreeing it on whether you're on the same page conceptually.
And there the transparency also comes down to sharing the way that you ask the particular questions, sharing the way that you gathered your data, sharing details of the sample that you're focusing on, sharing details about what you thought was going to happen and what you didn't think was going to happen.

(12:23):
This is a much bigger conversation going on around the best standards for psychological science and science more broadly.
But to me, the key boils down to that transparency piece because it means anyone examining your research can take a look at it and retrace your steps inside if they follow your story or not.

(12:47):
Yeah, I really appreciate that honing in on transparency.
I know that one of the fields that I work in is marketing and it's so interesting how numbers and statistics will be thrown into ad legitimacy and credibility, but if you look under the hood a little bit, it's like, really what that was saying.
So I really appreciate that that when I asked about questions you focused really on the transparency so that you can see not only the question, but the thought process that led to that question and then the evolution of that question through the study.

(13:23):
And the things that I am really curious to look more at as we as we dive into the illuminating the climate era mindset report is because it was so beautifully designed and it was so beautifully put together and it also left a lot of literal white space on the page because the design, you know, didn't have a bunch of, you know, Google scholar information to go with it, which is, you know, has its pluses and minuses.

(13:52):
And the thing that I want to do is is that more people can ingest it. And so I want to dive into this a little bit into this. I know this shift that you're mentioning about going from this more mechanical, mechanistic thought process around science to a more applied version.
And I'm curious what this shift was for you and how would you define the difference and why do you think it's important.

(14:17):
So for me, it's always been a question of both rather than or in the sense that I think basic, mechanistic research into human cognition, I'm a cognitive psychologist, so I have been trained in such way the biases need, but the more we can understand the building blocks of the mind and use tight experimental controls to try and see

(14:46):
the inner workings in a way that's not possible in the noisiness of the wild or the real world, whatever you want to call it that that kind of research is important.
On the other hand, we don't fully apprehend the influence of all these contextual factors until we can observe and study behavior in the real world.

(15:08):
And in turn, the more applied realm is the applied research, but then the applications of research. So there's research that's in situ that we can do where we're studying, for example, imagine we're trying to move people's behavior in a certain direction, say, living more sustainably broadly can true.
You can try things and with all the noise of the world around them, you can see what does something the other way to go to is to look at past research and try and take learnings from that and deploy that in the world and hope for the best.

(15:43):
The ideal is that we can take the basic building blocks of understanding from robust areas of science, translate that into some kind of actionable thing to try out in the real world and then measure rigorously whether what we proposed had the effect we intended.
And for me, there's always this give and take between more hyper controlled laboratory type experimentation where you can strip away all that noise and then the examinations out in the noisy real world and you have to find a way to find what will be called conversion validity you want evidence from the more mechanistic studies of, for example, creative thought, but then you also want that to converge just as an example, imagine if the body of research.

(16:31):
That came out of laboratories are in the world studying creative ideation totally didn't jive with auto biographical reports and the experiences of people working in yards and the sciences.
Just because it is counter intuitive doesn't mean it's wrong, but at the same time, I think there's this tapestry of evidence that comes together from a huge array of different types of inquiries.

(16:58):
In fact, some of the leading researchers in creativity, for example, have argued that if we are to fully map out creativity as a whole, which is probably never going to happen.
There's always going to be those dark spots of misunderstanding, but their view, we need a systems approach, meaning that we need to first recognize as many different levels of analysis to look at any single thing that we're interested in studying.

(17:23):
We need to recognize that many of us are speaking different languages.
And so the step we have to take is to recognize that there's a broader system and then take steps to try and integrate that knowledge. So for example, the authors, a henacenium, a bully wrote this paper and annual psychology and they may diagram with concentric circles where it's like in the very center is neurological or the neuroscience level.

(17:51):
What's happening at the level of the brain next, what's happening at the cognitive level or at the level of emotions.
What's happening at the individual personality level is a ability to creativity. Then you can expand beyond to groups, small groups, what happens once you inject a group dynamic and then you can think, you know, organizations, countries, cultures, and then beyond and sitting outside of that is this recognition.

(18:15):
But if we're to ever understand anything complicated, it's going to take a whole lot of people coming at it from a whole bunch of different ways, collecting data and observations, varied forms and then thinking about what is that, you know, patchwork of evidence look like if we look at that a bit more holistically.
It's tough, but it's fun and interesting.
That's part of the reason I think that it's so fascinating to talk with somebody like you is, is that you do find the fun in it. And and I'm curious, you know, talking about this, this kind of trend, this, and I love that you use the word systems too. That's, that's a big piece of, of how I view what I'm doing and bringing people together is how do we have these different nodes and find the connections between them.

(19:00):
And really my, my understanding of systems was really influenced by physicists, Fritov Capra, who has now written like a kind of a seminal textbook on a systems view of life and and works out of Berkeley.
But does this, this online thing for community members like me twice a year where it's, you know, for artists and fair housing authority people and mental health professionals to really understand how do we take the systems theory to and apply it to these other systems that we're working on.

(19:33):
I appreciate you bringing that to the surface and this place of kind of the ubiquitousness of creativity as it's coming together from these different angles and triangulations is how do you feel your study of creativity reflects your real life experience of creativity.

(19:57):
It's a tough one too. I mean, perhaps as an example, I never really set out to study creativity and I think serendipity is always a funny thing to think about in this sense, but I started out, I was working in the reasoning and decision making lab at the University of Waterloo.

(20:18):
And we had done work on causal knowledge, how we come to know that one thing causes another and I was also doing work on analogical reason and how we can process analogies.
And I was interested in this in a somewhat simplistic way arguably where we're sort of looking at it from a complexity point of view.

(20:41):
But it just so happened that Adam Green who's now at Georgetown, someone's called published a paper coding the very same analogies that we're using is the stimuli in our experiments as a function of how creative they were, how semantically distant, so how far apart in sort of meaning space for the elements of the analogies.
And so we kind of my supervisor Jonathan Feudal sang and I looked at each other so well, we better run this as a function of how creative these are and sure enough we found all these interesting interrelations between reasoning style and the creativity of the analogies.

(21:18):
And so in some ways I don't know that I ever had too much of a preconceived notion it was more of a curiosity spawn by the serendipitous realization that we could look at the very same thing we're looking at through the lens of creativity.
Intuitively speaking, you know I have many friends that are much more prolific than I in different sorts of arts and activities more stereotypically construed as creative.

(21:46):
And so I think around a lot of people who are very analytical and have very good ideas so I think for me the simplest answer to your question is that more than I'm interested in the genesis of a single idea or the creation of a single production of piece of art.
I'm personally just really fascinated with human beings generally we are really odd primates that somehow some way figured out ways to manipulate the environment around us to collaborate and use this disproportionate horsepower we have within our heads to make the world more amenable to our survival prosperity and collective well being.

(22:34):
And a lot of my work lately has been focused on this question of but at what cost as we stare down a changing climate as we look to the rise of the fourth industrial revolution.
We can see that human creativity and innovation brought us many great things we live longer than ever before.
Here we are talking across the continent in more or less real time you know it's freezing cold outside I'm toasty warm but what are the costs of those creations so so for me it's this funny puzzle of like all the good and the bad that come with having these incredible brains that allow us to shape the world to our liking.

(23:20):
Yeah that is a talking about powerful questions I think that is one that almost takes my breath away at that that question but at what cost.
And that leads us really well into the climate era mindset report and as I was research or you know kind of peeking at the different footnotes within the report there was one place where I saw specifically a report that you did back in 2018 brought up and it's where they define creativity.

(23:49):
And the definition that was used in the report was creativity includes our ability to flexibly and imaginatively approach problems how we see connections and patterns and identify new possibilities.
Now the report that that's based on is is kind of interesting it's like a 40 page report on exactly kind of the question at hand which is how do you define creativity and you brought in all kinds of different aspects and and even kind of give a push for looking at creativity from an executive function approach in addition to a more intuitive approach.

(24:31):
But yet what's interesting is I didn't find that quote anywhere in the reports I did a little like find and search kind of function and did find it some curious when coming up with this piece which is a definition which we know is such a complex thing to do all in it all in its own.
How do you how did you land on that definition of creativity for this report.

(24:58):
That's a good question I think there's there's many different tasks and scales and questionnaires that can index different aspects of creativity and I believe the article you're referring to was a book chapter I wrote a few years back looking at the roles of intuition and reason in in the creative process.

(25:19):
In that article I do spend some time talking about different types of tasks that are most commonly used to approach the study of creativity from a cognitive perspective is why we cited it and I included there is is some of the work on distant connections that is creativity sometimes is quantified as this capacity to bridge this distance between ideas that are not superficial.

(25:42):
And so where we landed in the B works research report was almost a reverse engineering of what were the questions of consequence so we asked a whole host of different questions around creativity as it relates to individual behaviors as well as how they found creativity was manifest but then their organizations and teams.

(26:06):
So based on the particular combination of measures we put together we thought that was pretty good summary of what we were talking about and further where we were primarily interested was was connecting the dots between creativity as measured by a number of things including like creative self efficacy how confident are you in your creativity.

(26:31):
Back to one of the most pressing if not the most pressing issues facing society today so there is a desire to find the sorts of ways of looking creativity that we hypothesize would be interconnected with both optimism for humanity in the face of climate crisis and an orientation to action that is are you willing and able and hopeful in the quest to help mitigate some of these.

(27:00):
So that's negative consequence of come about in many ways as a function of our own creativity.
Yeah that's that's super interesting and that is kind of a ground grounds me in in a deeper question that I had about the report is what drives action especially went in an era where.

(27:22):
So the question that I often hear and I feel really driven to try to address is kind of a defeatist question which is well what can I do.
You know and and maybe there's some answers that you know that that move the need a little bit and make us feel good like bringing our own bags to the grocery store and things like that.

(27:44):
But underneath that we know we need much much larger choices and systems that will change and so I find it really interesting that that was kind of that you know that method of inquiry or what is was worthy of inquiry was this idea of what gets people to take action.
And the fact that you first landed on optimism is we actually jumped ahead when we went to creativity because it first started with optimism and I found that so fascinating especially because one of the one of the ways that I serve is there's this incredible organization called the good grief network.

(28:22):
And it actually developed a 10 step process kind of a peer support group experience to help people go from this place of anxiety and almost frozen kind of door so vagal nerve state to a place of oh I can imagine again and I can take action again and it's it's this really interesting process that we take people through.

(28:47):
And one of the things that during that facilitation process that we really looked a lot at was hope and honestly most of us when we started really didn't like that word we were actually like like it kind of gave us the he be jeepies.
And because I think we thought of it in a very poly an away and part of the gift of going through this process is they really showed us interesting new insights we have around hope around critical and radical hope and so I'm curious about this idea of optimism being the key driver to move action forward and you mentioned hope as well.

(29:23):
So I think that how did that come up out of the study to and when we'll talk about its link to creativity in the next question but I'm first curious about how that that arose within the data and the surveys that you did part of the answer that question is a consequence of the collaborators on that report so so I'm an advisor at B works where the team is largely comprised of behavioral scientists which is primarily people of PhDs and psychology like myself.

(29:52):
Although we have fabulous designers as you noted who helped as well in a variety of strategic thinkers but we we had a whole host of partners that helped us conceive and execute this work first and foremost was the queue collective which is the partner B works as a partner within the queue collective so includes firms like ideo simply as well partners a whole host of others that are

(30:18):
that joined us at COP and are united in trying to find human central ways to address climate so we had a number of stakeholders there that were were involved we also partners from the hat photo Institute of life and living and hack a photos of brilliant company from Japan that that focused on this idea of the say cats of shot which is that rather than look at people as consumers we must look at the most whole beings.

(30:45):
So very much attuned to understanding the broader elements of human experience when when thinking about these challenges and we also have the help of futera who is a sustainability agency who is noted for their incredible orientation optimism for example they they had a campaign make the Anthropocene awesome and I would say that that particular collection of measures and questions that we had was the brain child.

(31:14):
And that was the brain child of a lot of really interesting discussions amongst people very different professional backgrounds areas of expertise and through conversation collaboration we started to think along these lines both for the sake of of discovery but also you know if these hypotheses did happen to follow through what sort of findings would be inspirational to the types of people convening at the world's

(31:43):
largest climate change conference so that's one thing about research is is you asked things for the sake of discovery but you can also think about what sort of discovery would be interesting to who and that doesn't necessarily change anything about how you do the work but rather the sort of conversation you hope to emerge from it you know as an example we might have found it could win the other way this is the beauty of empirical inquiry could have gone the other way

(32:11):
the people who were super pessimistic wanted to get to work immediately because they were like if we don't start cracking into this we're screwed like let's throw up our sleeves and get to action but it wasn't that way and I think there's good reason to believe that would have been the case but hypothesis is simply that but the short answer after my my long rambling one is

(32:36):
you know that was a confluence of many minds for many different countries around the world that we're trying to think about you know what what is likely to be found in such a study and and what sort of research really matters in this time because so many people I think are looking purely to policy or purely to some sort of long shot

(33:14):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's really powerful to kind of once again show some transparency of all the different elements that came together to bring this study together. And and there and I don't know if the term bias is correct, but I thought that was a really interesting thing that you brought up around who is this report for.

(33:35):
Because that's that's another, you know, I think really important part of creativity as well. I know it's sure once again talking about from a marketing lens, we do it all the time. And so I think that's that's a really important.
Qualifier is that when you're going to cop, you know, and this is a part of the report that is interesting is that it's really geared towards how can you have places where people work.

(34:05):
Make a difference in the climate change that we're that we're going through. And that makes sense at cop because it's a it's a business place. It's an economic driver place. It's a place where I think it really lives up to the phrase that I keep hearing more and more again, which is every job is a climate job.
Because we live in a climate. And so how can it not be just like every story is a climate story. Because once again, we live in it. And if you don't have some mention of it, like it's science fiction because because we're in it.

(34:36):
And so I think that's a that's a really interesting point of view that that came together to bring optimism to the to the surface.
And then what is really interesting and with the magic of editing, I'm going to see if I can bring the the plot graph up that you have of optimism and creativity within the report.

(34:58):
How that was a direct line that could be plotted that more optimism included more creativity.
And that's how we kind of landed here in this conversation today. We've been having about creativity is because of that. Would you call that a correlation. Would you call that a causation. Would you call that within your world. What verb would you use to describe how that came to be. And then how did it come to be if you're asking me as a reader of this report to take that leap to to go, OK, I see this.

(35:33):
I feel convinced enough to to experiment with this. How how did that end up getting reached within all the different inputs from these organizations.
Yeah, yeah. So the this was a correlational study. So as researchers, you have to be a bit careful about what you you claim on the other side of this. You can have your hunches about the way things go, but given that the findings are correlational. We can be sure

(36:02):
whether being more creative causes you to be optimistic. You don't know if being more optimistic, cause you to be more creative. Or is there some third variable that maybe we're not measuring.
That's causing an increase in decoding some both. So correlational studies really what you do is you ask people a bunch of different types of questions or have them do a variety of different sorts of activities.

(36:24):
And then you see with which people do things go up or down together. So in this case, you take people's we measure both general optimism as well as climate optimism. And in both cases, you find that as people are higher in optimism, they also are higher in creativity relative to others. So those that score lower on general or climate optimism happen to be lower in creativity is measured.

(36:50):
against the comp gets stat wise, because we compiled a few different measures of creativity. But but basically that's the gist of it as one goes up the other does to across our sand.
And we had thousands of people from from different countries, participants. So our sense was, this is a pretty interesting and important result that's worth featuring prominently in our report.

(37:14):
And and how how that correlation is is through surveys. And so basically a well done set of questions that all these different kind of vantage points and organizations look at and and give input on how to to craft these questions was was the foundation of of this correlation. Is that correct.

(37:36):
Yeah. And then if you look later in the report, we make prescriptions where organizational leaders might have the chance to figure out causality because when you think about experiments where you hold a bunch of stuff constant change something and get a better sense if you're changing one thing if the other goes up. And in particular, we we talked about the various ways that the research has shown.

(38:03):
By which you can enhance the creative potential of people. So if you look at that and you say, OK, so if we buy the correlations true, maybe one way this goes is that if I can facilitate the creativity of my employees that might become more hopeful, they might become more oriented to sustainable action. Now, of course, that too is is a reasonable gas given the current data, but we think there are so many ancillary benefits to trying to foster more creative culture.

(38:32):
And there's a different environment within an organization that it's a win win. There's there's direct benefits to your business, but there might also be these downstream effects where you're equipping your organization to be more finely tuned for addressing the climate crisis.
And then we're willing to take the time and energy to think of ways that, you know, they're typical day to day job might intersect with corporate climate initiatives or intersect with other organizations and find partnerships or who knows what, but, but that was the logic was that this correlation is suggestive.

(39:09):
So if you can try and take steps to enhance the creativity of your organization, what's curious about the steps that you kind of just took us through there and and kind of the the purpose of the report is almost bringing us back to the beginning of the conversation, which is you had the survey, which had these more mechanicistic ways of getting at the study and asking the questions and having the survey.

(39:35):
And then the final part of the report, the suggestion the report moves it into this applied science way of, hey, this is what we know, this is what we suggest go out there and try it, you know, go see how this helps.
And even if it doesn't help in this particular way, there's a lot of really good information here that's going to help your organization. So it's worth giving it a shot and seeing what happens and I find that really fascinating.

(40:04):
There were, there were both within the report, both five characteristics to try to cultivate as well as three questions for leaders to ask themselves and I thought that was a really interesting.
Double, double way of looking at it and the ones that I recorded were the five characteristics here in my notes.

(40:25):
And for the sake of people listening, I'm going to try to kind of read them relatively quickly and the question I have for you, Nathaniel, after I'm done with that is which one surprised you left a kind of hone in on one of them once I read all five here, which are number one collaboration between co workers to risk taking three innovation for supportive hierarchy.

(40:54):
And five organizational support, some curious of those five Nathaniel, which one kind of pops for you for some reason in my role at Sheridan College, I teach courses that are designed for people from any degree program across college to try and learn about creativity and innovation and handsome.

(41:18):
So full disclosure, I certainly know the papers, those are drawn from so I wouldn't say any surprise me. I think what what's been interesting is thinking about which ones might be seen as organizational leaders as the ones they should probably focus on.

(41:39):
And for me, that's a process of discovery through talking to people about this research, I would say, you know, the maybe the hardest one to get right another way to look at this question is like, what does collaboration really look like it's it's incredibly complex just to understand how an individual solves a problem.

(42:05):
Compoundingly more complicated when you start to think about integration, not just of a couple of individuals together, but then you make the complication for example you said you come from marketing back around like marketing needs strategy or marketing needs operations or marketing needs whoever and then you can compound that even more when you start thinking about organizational collaboration.

(42:28):
So one of the research I do at the college votes or features industry, academia, nonprofit collaboration, sometimes public. So I guess where I'm going with this is that what we offer some prescriptions, there's quite a lot of exploration, experimentation and reading and doing and trying that's required to figure out any of those piece of advice fit within what an organization.

(42:57):
What an organization is currently doing and how they can orient their efforts to do better on anything. So as usual, I'm staggered by the complexity of the systems that we as humans creating and there's there's nothing easier there for us to do everything is is couched in uncertainty complexity.

(43:20):
And that's quite frankly mystery still because we can run as many studies we want, but the world keeps changing and we need to keep gathering new observations to learn and then try something and measure again.
That's something that continues to really intrigue me about how you work is that you really value this this role of definition and how critical it is to to get people converging towards towards solutions.

(43:48):
And then we can expand to this idea of kind of the more applied side of things of all the different inputs and all the different complexities that go into it.
And it really highlights just this this overall I guess you could say superpower that I've really been enjoying talking with you about to probe into the details and have deep analysis and be open to discovery.

(44:12):
Part of the conversation where we go a little bit in a different direction where we look at well, OK, if these are our superpowers, there's often some crypto night somewhere in there, there's something that is more challenging for for each of these different ways of kind of viewing the the world to to understand or to experience.

(44:36):
I'm going to just ask you and and you can choose you know what what feels safe for you to share and be vulnerable about or not or perhaps talk about ways that you've seen it within your students or within others.
That are more the ways of how can people from with different points of view really support you as as you work through elements that are that are more challenging in regards to how you view the world.

(45:04):
And some of those can be sometimes when you're really zeroing in.
Do you ever you know miss the forest for the trees as you're trying to really identify you know that that one little piece on that bark of that tree, do you miss this larger amazing ecosystem that's around it or is there almost the sense of this superpower that you have almost gives you permission to like dominate the world because you're like I have this thing.

(45:33):
It's going to be incredible and it's going to be in refutable and it's it's going to be the answer that dominates at all or one of the things that I have found that I'd be super curious to hear what you have to say about is when I talk about these different types.

(45:54):
And I think that's the kind of activity purposefully because I think all of them are creative. I often talk about how do we feel like we belong or feel like we can connect with others.
But one of the things that I have found with people that are more scientifically minded and inquiry minded is that when I talk about this, they actually get mad at me thinking that I'm accusing them of not being creative.

(46:20):
I don't know if that's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that's the kind of thing that I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.

(46:42):
I'm trying to do that.
I'm trying to do that.
are more interesting, the big picture. I'm actually probably much further on the
spectrum of looking at the forest rather than the trees and I have some great
collaborations where I have friends that are very adept with things

(47:04):
like the statistics and extremely tight on the research methodologies and and
make sure I wouldn't ever misstep because if you start thinking too big you can
subject yourself to making mistakes where your inference is
can't be as tight as you'd like and then part of the game is thinking about well
what is a reasonable inference given this more micro observation about the world

(47:26):
and so that's something I've always enjoyed but I am very much of the belief
that the definitional clarity is essential for the world broadly to paraphrase
I'm not gonna get exactly right so I don't have a before me but there's a quote I
like by Willard Van Orman-Quine who is a philosopher of science who said something

(47:48):
along the lines of the less a science has advanced the more its terminology
rests on an uncritical assumption of common understanding something like that
and what he means by that is that the longer people focus upon a singular sort of
concept the more definitional and terminology clarity naturally evolves you know

(48:12):
think about the word creativity means many things to many different people and if I
seriously want to affect change in the world going to the applied thing we need to
have some sort of common understanding about what it is we're trying to change
and in my experience you can't even know if you changed it if you don't have
some of that precision because you're not gonna be able to effectively measure

(48:33):
the change you want to see in the world and so often the history is wrinnelled with
examples of well-intentioned people trying to accomplish something but
are not going the way they wanted so based on my read of past social causes and
all these things it's imperative we have that precision and that in turn some

(48:55):
measurement because otherwise there's a lot of people you know you can arrive at
completely opposite strategies for changing the world for the better and have
good logic behind it but you know the data will show you what was important so
for me I think most things entail some sort of trade-off but I'll mention one

(49:21):
piece of research that I think is really important for the type of work you're
doing with this series and the speaker question is me high chick sent me high is
one of the more prominent creativity researchers that's ever lived pioneered the
concept of creative flow did some really interesting work on socio-cultural

(49:42):
theories but I was really fascinated one of his books he looks at I believe it was
91 eminent creators these are people that had huge influence on the world and he
dissected many of their characteristics as a consequence of what he's learned
through decades of research on the creative mind and what he thought was rather

(50:03):
than say creative people tend to have this sort of trade or this sort of
attribute or this sort of way of being in his experience the most creative people
on earth are a multitude meaning that they can embody in different instances
and at different times as needed can embody the polar opposite sort of thing so

(50:24):
saying where's your your average person is more like this or more like that he's
saying that creative people have this incredible fluidity so as an example he
talks about the need to be simultaneously both conservative and rebellious you
need to be conservative enough that you can you can embed in your mind enough
of established society that you know what's going on and you can be rebellious

(50:47):
enough then to project parts of it and make a leap you need to be both humble and
proud you need to be you know extroverted and introverted you know you need to be
willing to disappear and do the work but you also need to care to tell people
better if it's gonna have a meaningful difference and so that really resonated
with me in the sense that when I think about myself and people around me it's never

(51:10):
the case that even if you have a disposition to think a certain way that you can't
pause self-reflect and embody a different way of viewing the world and adopt
that perspective as needed to garner a bit more fulsome and and wide-ranging view
of both the challenge and in the world around you and and also appreciate all the

(51:32):
other people have you know different experiences different ways of processing
information and and in some I think we have to embody the best of everyone we
need in ourselves in some small way but we also have to work together you know I
surely have my weaknesses and you know I overcome many of them by virtue of
working with people that are smarter than me more mostly attuned than me or

(51:56):
whatever all these other things are so yeah I mean we're all this weird
collection of electrochemical systems that allow us to be whatever it is we
are but the cool thing about being human as we do have I think this gets a bit
philosophical but like we can adapt and and do we need to do to work on the problems

(52:17):
that matter yeah I really love that and that is that is a key piece of of this work
that I'm working on which is you know it is starting with that defeatist
question is just what can I do and then go and then answering with well who the
heck are you like let's start there you know because what I can do and what you

(52:40):
can do might look slightly different and then once we kind of figure out how to
roll with that how do we open up to more and more ways of being and that might be
as you're saying other people that we can really lean on that have strengths and
certain areas that we don't have and then can we build that muscle within
ourselves and I think that is a really illuminating way of looking at creativity is

(53:03):
across the spectrum and is actually the next evolution of of the work that I'm
doing where there's you know this the structure of the survey that I'm creating is
gonna eventually give people a pie chart that says like you have kind of this
percentage here and this percentage here and this percentage here and and how
does that that show up within you and so I think that's a really key piece that

(53:26):
that is so wonderful to hear is within like the foundation of the studies that
you're doing around creativity and that leads me to the last two questions we
have because the hour has flown by thank you so much Nathaniel for such an
engaging conversation and my last two questions the first one is gonna directly

(53:48):
tie in you walked right into it so thank you so much the last one will be a bit of
a twist and so for this the second the last one the pen ultimate one as I love to
be able to say is when you look at relationships how do you how do you think of
them in a reciprocal way this could be human to human this could be human to

(54:09):
climate it could be human to a plant it could be a water to air but when we look
at relationships as a whole how do you how do you view them in this this
reciprocal way which which seems to fit in really well with with what you're
talking about about being able to be flew fluid throughout a spectrum of things

(54:32):
huge question you know part of my answer is is informed by the fact you know I I
played many different roles and many different aspects of my life you know I'm
a husband I'm a father to three kids and I guess maybe to play two dogs now I'm a
co-worker to people at the college I'm an instructor to the students at the

(54:55):
works I'm an advisor in my personal life I guess many different things to many
different people and I think that's an essential thing we all have to realize is
that we fit into the world in not just one way but in many diverse and sometimes
intersecting and sometimes independent ways but if you you cut to the core of it

(55:17):
I'm simple is that you know I do believe that'll cliche get what you give and
and if you're very much focused on the transactional and always concerned about
getting a return on your investment in time or energy or all these things you're
to birth, your phrase you know you're missing the force for the trees and and at

(55:39):
least in my personal experience and I've been a very lucky person in many respects
but if you just do your best as it relates both your interpersonal and
professional relationships and give what you think is appropriate and a bit more
good things happen to you so my philosophy is just do what you can for other
people and it usually comes back in an even bigger way. Thank you for that yeah

(56:05):
that's that's an interesting contrast to what you said before which is you know
within this this world of valuing measurement part of what you see within a
reciprocal relationship is perhaps letting letting that desire kind of calm
itself perhaps or maybe even not be the focus as much in regards to relationship

(56:27):
and so I appreciate that that dynamism of of answering that question and
thinking kind of outside the box there for it so thank you and as we wrap with
this very last question it's going to be a place for you to tell me something
which is what is it something that you wish I would have asked what is something

(56:51):
that I missed something that is more personal to you or more in depth in the
research or something that came to mind that I went a different direction when
you thought it might go a certain direction what is something you wish I would
have asked. That's tough I don't know I've enjoyed our conversation I think where

(57:13):
my mind has been a lot lately that maybe didn't come up as much is this
confluence of the human mind emergent technology and how we manage the essence
of our creations and this came up a little bit but I've I spent quite a bit of time
reading about existential risk and then in turn you know what is the mindset

(57:37):
needed to take the steps to mitigate large scale existential risk to humanity
and it's not it's funny because we did this work around optimism and I'll
get fast and something I don't think I've said so far is that I've asked a
late personally on one hand I think human beings are an unending source of
inspiration fascination and admiration for me but at the same time I'm staggered

(58:03):
by in some ways the absurdity and of the complexity of the systems we've
scaffolded together that our collective existence stands on and in many ways the
further we go in terms of building our own realities on top of that first
ordered natural world if you can call it that the riskier things get for us but

(58:26):
also the easier things get in many ways as we start with so I guess maybe I just
leave off by saying you know where I sit on the optimism versus pessimism
continuum is is very much in vassalation and so I may perhaps not be optimistic
but I try to remain hopeful is where I think I come in and and in some ways that's

(58:52):
out of a responsibility I feel to my children those around me to not just be
devastated by some of the challenges we collectively face because there's the
climate crisis we're looking at massive socio-economic disruption
huge technological advance that's upending work as we know it there's a humanity

(59:14):
has a lot going on and you know the question for me in some ways is the mind that
was smart enough to create all these problems through our innovation also have
what it takes to unravel some of that mess and get us to a place of shared
prosperity and security I don't know I'll keep working and we'll see yeah yeah

(59:38):
it seems to come back to that that question that stood out to me earlier in what
you said of but at what cost it seems like perhaps that's a that's a driving
question for you as you as you try to to answer the question in a way that points
us towards a future that really inhabits a creativity that is in our best

(01:00:05):
interest maybe maybe yeah as I say that out loud I'm realizing perhaps in
all these amazing ways that you look at creativity you you can see how we've
used it in ways that have hurt us and of ways that have helped us and that
insight faces you with the reality of both and and puts you it puts you in the

(01:00:32):
middle of that and so thank you so much for the work that you do that puts you in
that place and and the the tenacity and the drive and those three wonderful
kids that you have that help that help can keep you engaged and and interested
in continuing to find these ways to be supportive like working on the the

(01:00:53):
climate era minds that report so thank you so much for you being you and being
willing to share with us today like us appreciate it definitely
hey earthmate how did that episode resonate did it stretch you inspire you or
perhaps urqu you I'm here for it so please reach out besides the socials we have a

(01:01:19):
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(01:01:41):
you
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