How punishing mistakes kills creative thinking

Giovanni Corazza speaks about creativity at TEDxRoma. He argues that a quick foray into creative thinking offers us more insight than a lifetime of standard thinking and posits that creativity is not a luxury but a necessity.

“And we in the end all possess the same information. That’s the end of it. And that is a scary thought. If we all possess the same information, what makes a difference between ourselves? Where does our dignity as human beings live? It really depends on what we generate with that common shared information. So to think creatively, to go out of the box is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for us and for our dignity as human beings.”

But what is the ‘box?’ He goes on to define it: “So which box are we talking about?… It’s not our mind we cannot think out of our minds. It’s a boundary within our minds, a boundary between what we know and what we haven’t yet thought about.”

He acknowledges that thinking outside the box is not always possible, because to think outside the box is to challenge the norm, and that sometimes means challenging authority; “Well, first of all, if the environment punishes mistakes. You will never be really tempted to go out of the box… So if you want to stimulate an environment which is creative, you need to allow that diverted the existence of divergent information.”

Corazza is a full-time professor at the University of Bologna and the founder of the Marconi Institute of Creativity. He teaches science and the applications of creative thinking.