Balancing Creativity and Caution

I just finished The Creativity Crisis by Roberta Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health, and also author on innovation in the sciences. While the title of the book sounds “alarmist”, the message is not. In my opinion I found it well-balanced, perhaps displaying my bias as an academic. (Who doesn’t have biases?) The thrust of the book is to examine the balance between creativity and caution in the scientific research enterprise through three lenses: economics, sociology and ethics. Each chapter ends with an executive summary with practical ideas, and peppered throughout the book are clear proposals of how to promote innovation while exercising sufficient oversight.

Each of the three main sections concludes with a chapter that exhorts organizations, both government and private, to participate in the promotion of creativity and innovation. The economics section closes with “Reinventing Meandering Exploration”, sociology with “Reinventing the Power of the Group”, and ethics with “Reinventing Freedom”. The economics section draws from an excellent book that I read maybe three years ago, Paula Stephan’s insightful How Economics Shapes Science.

The road to innovative discovering is often meandering, but as the forces of efficiency and shorter-term assessment bear down, the pragmatic scientist often chooses the road of caution instead of the risk of meandering. I can see this in my own research; I only started to take on more risky projects post-tenure. They are less likely to get funded, and may not lead to a slough of publications. Therefore I risk falling out of the virtuous (or vicious) cycle of grants and publications. Once you fall out, it’s hard to get back in. Even then, I still have a stream of low-hanging fruit projects that will continue to yield publications – and are also more amenable to undergraduate research. But if my recently submitted grant gets funded, I might try and put a band of undergraduates on a more challenging complex project next summer.

The book is chock-full of interesting data, vignettes and thoughtful suggestions. It also has those moments where I nod vigorously in agreement. I’ll share one from page 160. The context is increased government regulations in a variety of reporting areas. “Effort reporting is yet another questionable federal requirement. Investigators must regularly certify the time spent on each funded project. A survey [concluded that] ‘effort is difficult to measure, provides limited internal control value, is expensive, lacks timeliness … and is confusing when all forms of renumeration are considered.’ In a word, effort reporting is useless.” My institution, like many others has seen an increase in the number of administrators hired, partly because of increased compliance measures across a slew of areas. A few bad actors cause extra paperwork for everyone. I expect this compliance trend to continue, unfortunately. The book cites an estimate of 42% of a scientist’s time going to administrative measures – much of which could go to actual research instead.

As with the rest of the book, the closing chapters also provide food-for-thought and helpful suggestions. Ness suggests that “science would benefit from a common definition of what is innovative”. She suggests “surprise with a use”. Rather than using creative or innovative, the practical use of the word surprise makes it clear because “when we see true novelty, originality and innovation we are struck by its cleverness, its unexpectedness.” The use part is equally important. Creativity isn’t just an idea, but it steeped in a social context. “Culture is the arbiter of what is considered useful. Only those things that are socially accepted and impactful can be useful.” So to some extent, innovation will be seen in partial hindsight as it is adopted, rather than when it is first presented or unveiled.

At her institution, a survey among faculty members resulted in the following barriers to creativity. “Innovation is a great thing until you try to get funded. It is difficult for a junior faculty member to take that kind of risk. Emphasis on short-term performance undermines risk taking and departing very far from what has worked in the past. We need to have time to be innovative.” And the best one: “Challenges to innovation are mandatory annual training, administrative drudgery, silly paperwork.”

As I have been attempting to inject a dose of creativity into my General Chemistry class, I wonder if I am providing sufficient incentive that allows students to take risks. My attempt a couple of years ago to de-emphasize grading didn’t sit well with the students – many of them were much too focused on doing what was needed to earn the grade (they were Honors students after all). But I don’t think I provided sufficient incentive in the grand scheme of things to incentivize risk-taking. I tried to improve on this in my recent Alien Periodic Table assignment. I gave the top grade to a student who didn’t get the “ideal” answer, but came up with a very creative and well-justified solution. I will have to think about this more carefully when I evaluate my next scaffolded assignment due next week. (The students invent new compounds using known elements and discuss structure and properties.)

The other obstacle I face is how to allow some meandering exploration. The syllabus feels so tight in chemistry particular when your class is pre-requisite to the next one in the sequence. I introduced take-home exams as a self-test (for more classroom time), and I have some room for creativity in my problem sets, but after grading the most recent exam and problem set, I wonder if I’m pitching things at the wrong level, or if my expectations are unrealistic. That will be the subject of another post.