Flow and Creativity
In 2015, we began thinking hard about better ways to evaluate flow’s impact on creativity. Work done by Csikszentmihaly (described in his awesome book Creativity), coupled with independent studies done by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile and University of Sydney professors Allen Snyder and Richard Chi, show that flow can significantly boost creativity and that that heightened creativity seems to outlast the state by a day, sometimes two. But no one has figured out exactly which specific creative skills (i.e., idea generation or problem solving etc.) are impacted the most, nor which triggers are most useful in determining how to trigger a creative flow state. In early 2016, we undertook a giant meta-analysis of 80 different creativity studies to determine what exactly we wanted to measure. Then, in October of 2017, we launched our study. Data is currently being compiled and reviewed, but we’re hoping to have a white paper completed by February 2018. Stay tuned….