In Defense of Little C Creativity

We were recently asked how we can use elements from Amabile's article about fostering business creativity in our own lives to push us to be more creative people, and I answered accordingly, addressing what management techniques I can apply to my life in order to be an individual that produces something novel, inventive, something middle-sized to big C creativity.  

Well dammit, what if I do not want to be that person?  If I have no desire to amass a pile of knowledge and work furiously to manipulate it for some kind of social gain, then am I a stranger to creativity?  I think that I am not.  Despite its lack of objective verification, I'd say that little C creativity is just as much creativity as Big C.  In fact, I would like to propose that we stop using the word "creativity" to name what is apparently the socially-situated process of innovation.  I would also say that one can be a successful innovator in the social context (a.k.a. a Big C creator) without being "creative" as such.

I would say that our conception of little C creativity is central to many lives, lives of people who will never make discoveries or innovations of widespread, societal proportions.  To be creative is to have an interesting outlook on things, to enjoy playing with common-place perceptions of common-place things, to push oneself to take on new projects, to delve into new, unexplored territories.  Creativity is the search for uniqueness, but uniqueness in a way that it is enriching, not necessarily "progressive."  

When we call a kid creative, we seem to mean that the kid exhibits a passion and curiosity for discovery and creation.  When we call a friend creative, it is because when we are around that friend, she brings up things perspectives we've never thought of or because she engages us on multiple levels when we're only ever accustomed to evaluating something linearly.  One finds oneself actively searching out ways to interact with one's world in a dynamic, different way after being around creative people, and this attitude is part of the foundation for an interesting life. 

This kind of creativity isn't studyable.  It's definitely "new-age-y" as Sawyer would say.  But I think it's the kind of creativity towards which we ought to strive, more-so than the "Big C" kind.