Creativity and Entropy

Charles Debelak
This series of blogs is taken from articles by Charles Debelak in the Birchwood School of Hawken's Clipboard during the 2012-13 school year. The purpose of Mr. Debelak's Clipboard articles is to provide parents with information about sound educational principles and child development issues gleaned from history, contemporary research, and Mr. Debelak's 40+ years educating, coaching, and counseling children, young adults, and parents.


There is a second reason for addressing creativity. It goes to the core of how we are “wired.” As we discussed last month, one aspect of human nature aspires toward growth, exploration, and personal enrichment. This is the creative yearning and potential within us. Our brains are self-organizing systems, deliberately making sense out of the world, driving us to be self-directed and self-regulated. When this impulse is directed in a positive direction, we do creative things, we make things better, and we help things become new. This capacity does not only belong to history’s great creators. Every man, woman and child has the capacity to be creative.

Working simultaneously, however, is another basic human impulse. It is more conservative and tends toward self-preservation. It clings to familiar terrain and resists change. Unfortunately this tendency is our default mode.

Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, author of Creativity and leading scholar in creativity studies, writes, “Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk – the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set . . . the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated.” He continues, “we [have] this propensity for enjoying whatever we do, provided we can do it in a new way, provided we can discover or design something new in doing it. This is why creativity, no matter in what domain it takes place, is so enjoyable . . . But this is only part of the story. Another force motivates us, and it is more primitive and more powerful than the urge to create: the force of entropy.” Entropy is a survival mechanism; it encourages the preservation of energy.

Understand that entropy is a necessity. Clearly it is good to survive. Yet at the same time this involuntary impulse can suck the energy out of life. At its worst, it is just plain laziness. We waste both time and energy avoiding responsibilities and then afterwards feel flat, empty, and bored. It is amazing that when these impulses to “conserve” come over us, we don’t even have to try to accommodate them. They just happen. (Note: creative and productive people often require periods of mindless and effortless activity. These periods can even help foster creative thought, but we will discuss this in subsequent essays).

But entropy has its more subtle effect. It quenches the energies we need for newness and growth. It hinders creativity and innovation. It is the impulse that avoids those problems, challenges and opportunities in life, that, if we were to dedicate ourselves to solutions or resolutions, we could make important gains in our own lives, in that of others, and in the institutions and workplaces that we inhabit. When we aspire toward creativity this form of entropy undermines our efforts.

Herein lays the need to talk about creativity – especially with children who are in their formative years. Children are also wired for innovation, exploration and productivity. They are also wired to avoid the expenditure of energy. To develop the former, nurturing is required. To develop the latter, simple neglect will do the job. Without self-awareness, without the cultivation of skills and attitudes that lead to creativity, children will slip into their default mode – do nothing, avoid opportunities for growth, indulge their immediate pleasures, waste their time and energy. A very few will find the willpower to become productive. But too often many give entropy a nod, and squander their time and abilities.

Understanding the human impulse toward creativity and toward entropy is central to crafting an educational program that teaches and trains creativity and innovation. This is our starting point.

E. Paul Torrance, one of the foremost scholars and practitioners in the cultivation of creativity, remarks about the future acceleration of social and technological change, “Genius of the future will be the creative mind adapting itself to the shape of things to come . . . Creative thinking skills must be recognized as mankind’s most important adaptability skills.” He adds, “. . . images of the future held by students will determine what they will be motivated to learn and achieve: their ability to live, cope and grow in a high change society . . . the genius of the future will be the creative mind adapting itself to the shape of things to come.”

I believe this “genius” should be the legacy we parents and teachers leave our children. In this genius, our children will be equipped not only as business and economic innovators, but also as healthy individuals prepared to lead fulfilled personal lives, capable of making meaningful contributions to the people and institutions around them in a rapidly changing world.

From November 2012 Birchwood Clipboard
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