Managing Yourself

Cultivating
Creativity the Four Kinds of
by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman
From the Magazine (January–February 2023)

Daniel Creel

Summary. In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well.
In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative... more

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One island of stability in the sea of conversation about the future
of work is the conviction that our jobs will become increasingly
creative. The World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and nearly
every major think tank seem aligned around this hypothesis,
offering heaps of data to support it. The trend is not just about the
delegation of rote tasks to automation; it’s also about the
accelerating pace of change and the increasing complexity of
business, which demand original responses to novel challenges
far more frequently than ever before.

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Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for

employees at all levels—especially those on the front lines—and
across all functions, from sales and marketing to accounting and
operations to customer service. Individuals and talent managers
must therefore get smart about what it takes to foster and manage
this skill. Although the science of creativity is young compared
with other areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, our
growing understanding of it points to new directions for creative
development. In this article we offer a typology that breaks
creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two
things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how
things that look the same are actually different or more usefully
divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is
crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal
thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different
from the here and now.

Most of us tend to think in just one of these four ways, and we

benefit from knowing which one comes naturally to us. We can
also learn to hone our creativity in the other dimensions.
Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how
to balance the types of thinking across their teams to execute
creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to
increase innovation across the workforce.
Integration
Integration may be local—stitching together a few concepts—or
sweeping: a grand unifying theory.

The 17th-century mathematician Isaac Newton was a genius at

integration. After coinventing calculus, itself enormously
integrative, he happened upon the idea that would make him
even more famous. The story does involve an apple, but it didn’t
fall on his head. Instead, looking out a window one night, he
noticed that a two-inch piece of fruit on the ground 20 feet from
him occupied the same amount of visual space as did the faraway
moon. He wondered not about the trick of perspective but
whether the force drawing the apple to the ground was the same
as what held the moon in orbit—an idea that gave rise to his
inverse square law: that the gravitational attraction between two
bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
separating them. Integration is often at the heart of scientific
discovery.

It’s also a key form of corporate innovation today. Consider the

Apple iPhone. Its designers’ success lay in recognizing that when
tools such as cameras, phones, and music players are digitized,
they are all capturing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting data in
the same way, through semiconductors and liquid crystal
displays; therefore, they could be combined in a single device—
perhaps the most powerful tool now at our disposal. Four decades
ago the phone hanging on your wall had nothing to do with the
boom box sitting on your console or the camera filled with film
you’d soon drop off for developing.

How does integrative creativity show up in everyday work? Let’s

consider a hypothetical office-supply retailer, Capella Paper, that
wants to attract more Millennial customers. Jerome, an email
marketer, is an employee working on the problem. He finds
several studies showing that professionals in their twenties and
thirties are vocal advocates of preserving hybrid or remote
working arrangements postpandemic. He hypothesizes that two
groups Capella treats as distinct—Millennials and remote workers
—may in fact align as buyers of office supplies. Jerome retrieves
an analysis by his team on a spike in home-office purchases in
the spring of 2020 and looks to see which email promotions—all
targeting newly remote workers—were most successful in that
period. He selects an old promotion offering free printer-toner
refills with bulk paper purchases and makes a few tweaks for the
new target demographic, resulting in a 35% higher click-through
rate compared with the company’s average for Millennial
customers.

Splitting
The opposite kind of creative thinking is splitting, and the history
of science is full of examples. The periodic table of the elements
splits earth, air, fire, and water into 118 parts. Medical
breakthroughs regularly result from the separation of what was
thought to be a single disease into several, each of which can be
more precisely treated. One of the greatest manufacturing
innovations of all time—the assembly line—involved splitting.
Before the Industrial Revolution, one craftsperson might oversee
the production of a good from start to finish. Guns, for example,
were made by individuals skilled in both woodworking and
metalwork; the same was true of steamer trunks and clocks. But
then the Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem introduced the
concept of interchangeable parts, which could be made separate
from a whole and used for a wide variety of products. At first
many people were skeptical: When, in 1785, the Frenchman
Honoré Blanc publicly demonstrated that he could assemble a
working gun by selecting components from a large pile of
interchangeable parts, audience members were shocked. This
idea led to further division—of human labor—allowing for faster,
more consistent, and scalable manufacturing that is still in use
today.
A more recent application is quantum computing, an important
application of particle physics, which breaks matter down into its
smallest components. Whereas in classical computing a bit can
occupy only a single position, quantum computing’s qubit can
occupy multiple positions simultaneously, exponentially
increasing computing power. In 2019 Google’s quantum
processor Sycamore took 200 seconds to finish a task that would
take a classical computer 10,000 years to complete.

Daniel Creel
This type of creativity can be useful in many professional
scenarios. Back at Capella, for example, a product manager,
Carmen, has been studying which of the company’s offerings are
most popular with Millennials. She first separates consumer
buyers from business buyers; the latter typically purchase for
their small companies. Business buyers can be further divided
into people who order a variety of supplies and whose purchases
are waning, and those who buy just one or two products in large
amounts and whose orders are holding steady or even increasing.
Focusing on this second group, Carmen arrives at her “aha” by
zeroing in on the product most frequently purchased by 30-
something business buyers: Capella’s trademark 6″ x 8″ grass-
cloth-bound notebook. Through interviews she learns that people
buy this item for two reasons: for note-taking by employees and
for client gifts. Because Capella sells the notebooks only in bulk to
businesses, they have become coveted. With that insight Carmen
pitches a new line of luxury notebooks in a wider range of sizes
and colors, available to both individual and commercial buyers
with an option to emboss initials or a corporate logo on the cover.
Thus a single product is split into several lines for distinct
purposes.

Figure-Ground Reversal
The term “figure-ground reversal” comes from the study of vision
and refers to our ability to shift focus from the foreground to the
background to produce a radically different picture. The well-
known black-and-white silhouette of two faces in profile—or a
vase in the middle—demonstrates how our minds can toggle
back and forth between the two.

One of the most important neuroscientific discoveries of our

lifetime was the default mode network, a set of brain regions
involved in our mental downtime, and it happened owing to an
accident of figure-ground reversal. Functional-imaging
researchers were mapping the brain’s “task positive” networks—
the regions that light up when we engage in focused activities
such as solving anagrams and listening to lectures. In most of
those experiments a control condition consisted of rest periods,
during which the brain might be expected to go dark and quiet.
Instead, scientists across numerous studies found that certain
midline and medial-temporal-lobe brain structures consistently
lit up during rest, suggesting not stasis but vibrant activity. We
have since learned that the same thing happens when we
daydream, and what we do during those periods is imagine and
plan. Researchers weren’t trying to find the state in which we do
some of our best thinking, but they did.

Here’s another example of figure-ground reversal: In 1957, when

the Soviet space program launched Sputnik, the first satellite to
orbit Earth, the U.S. military used two widely separated points on
Earth to track Sputnik’s speed and position by means of the
Doppler effect. But only in 1958 did it become clear that the far
more profound application of the technology was for the exact
opposite purpose: using points in space to track objects on Earth.
In that year the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed
Transit to calculate the position and speed of any moving object
using two widely separated satellites in space. Today we know
this technology as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

We see figure-ground reversal all the time in industry, too.

Amazon Web Services was developed in response to Amazon’s
need to scale up its infrastructure. The software developers Chris
Pinkham and Benjamin Black, who led the work, realized that
others would want the solution they were envisioning—that it
could be a compelling product to offer externally. Today AWS is a
foreground business for the company, accounting for $45 billion
in revenue in 2020. Similarly, Slack, the ubiquitous messaging
platform, started as an internal product to help Stewart
Butterfield’s company Tiny Speck develop a video game. That
business fizzled out, but the team pivoted to the messaging app,
and Slack went public in 2019. In 2021 Salesforce bought it for
close to $28 billion.

Imagine that Robert, a manager at Capella’s Chicago store, has

just returned from a leadership meeting where he learned about
the company’s push to attract Millennial customers. Over the
next several weeks he spends time observing patrons’ shopping
habits in the store. He focuses on customers in professional attire
who appear to be in their late twenties or early thirties, but he sees
very few of them, and he can’t identify any particular patterns in
what they’re buying. Though Robert normally works weekdays,
he’s called in one Saturday to cover for a colleague and continues
his observations. At first he doesn’t see anyone in his target
demographic, but then he recognizes a repeat customer from
earlier in the week, this time not in business casual but dressed
down and shopping with what appears to be his school-age
daughter. Robert realizes that he’s overlooked a half dozen other
Millennials that day alone because they were shopping not as
professionals but as parents and were consistently looking for art
and school supplies. He decides to stock those items in the
middle aisles, with office supplies flanking them, and within a few
months his store leads the region in sales to the target
demographic. Robert explains to Capella’s leaders that it came
down to focusing on the broader, whole-person context of
Millennials’ lives.

Distal Thinking
Finally, distal thinking involves imagining things as very different
from the present. Many a creative genius has been characterized
as someone who envisioned a radically new future that the rest of
us initially couldn’t see. The inventor Nikola Tesla, for example,
once described his process as building and refining an object
entirely in his imagination—even operating it in his mind. His
distal brainchildren included the radio, the neon lamp, AC power,
and hydroelectric power.

Sometimes innovators think so far ahead that the market isn’t

ready for their ideas. The computer scientist and cryptographer
David Chaum invented anonymous digital cash in a 1983 paper,
just as personal computers were coming into vogue, and well
before access to the internet was ubiquitous. In 1994 his
company, DigiCash, sent the first electronic payment. But the
economic and technological ecosystem needed to support
widespread adoption of digital currency did not yet exist, and
DigiCash folded in 1998. Like many other first movers, Chaum
paved the way for followers but benefited from only a small
fraction of his invention’s success.

More-successful distal innovators bridge the gap between the

present and the future in one of two ways. The first is by
accelerating market maturity, through promotions, partnerships,
and focused launches. An example of this is another digital-
payments company, PayPal. When it launched, in 1999, adoption
of its full slate of intended uses was low. So rather than try to
advance an ambitious vision before consumers were ready, the
company focused on developing its user base through eBay, a
platform where such payments were becoming the norm. The
symbiosis was so perfect that eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, but
within a decade, as PayPal usage expanded well beyond its parent
company, the entities split. Today PayPal is used in 200 countries,
and its 2021 revenue topped $25 billion.

A second way distal innovators help their radical vision ultimately

become reality is with “backward” innovation—developing
intermediary technologies that are immediately marketable and
will move stakeholders along the maturity curve toward readiness
for the actual invention. Take self-driving cars, which exist but
aren’t yet prevalent for many reasons, including technological,
infrastructure, and regulatory barriers. Another obstacle is
consumer mistrust: Drivers are not yet ready to hand over the
wheel. Thus we see stepping-stone products such as cruise
control and automatic parking. These are incremental offerings
that people will use and that should make them more
comfortable with a driverless future.

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The electric car company Tesla logged a distal win by selling EVs
as luxury purchases before the economics worked to make more-
mainstream models. It is now trying to pave the way for fully
autonomous vehicles by offering precursors: both traditional
autopilot and something called “full self-driving capability,”
which gives the car even more control. Led by its creative
founder, Elon Musk, Tesla is training us to eventually embrace a
previously unpalatable vision.
Even in organizations where innovation is more incremental,
distal thinkers can often find big challenges that offer them a
chance to shine. Piper, a Capella designer, has for years been
asking her managers how the company will operate when offices
are entirely paperless. Encouraged by the new mandate to attract
Millennials, she describes her vision of this future: eco-conscious
digital natives operating in a fast-paced, mostly virtual work
environment who will eschew office supplies for fully online
tools. And yet, Piper says, many will still want physical products
that link to the digital world for promotional or commemorative
purposes. She describes a new line of memorabilia to honor
project progress: commercial-real-estate “deal toys” with screens
that change as the building is constructed, or customer-
appreciation plaques with displays that show up-to-date
utilization metrics of marquee software products the customer
has purchased. Piper’s pitches make Capella think bigger and
more boldly about what this demographic needs and
demonstrate her unique ability to help the company get ahead of
industry trends.

How to Proceed
Which type of creativity do you use the most? Each one offers a
unique advantage—and potential blind spots. Integrators may try
to see synergies where they don’t exist, while splitters may
overcomplicate a simple solution.

Understanding your strengths as an individual is the first step.

Look for places to apply them and watch out for overuse. At your
next opportunity to innovate, push yourself to think in the styles
that come less naturally to you. Before you settle on a path
forward, challenge yourself to define at least one option for each
of the four styles.

If you lead a team, how do you complement your skill set with
other types of creative thinkers? When receiving proposals from
your team, do you get options that explore all four forms of
innovation? If not, ask for them.

At the organizational level, reflect on your business’s recent

innovations, both internal and external. Do any patterns emerge?
Are your products typically the result of splitting, for example? Or
integration? When was the last time you capitalized on a figure-
ground reversal? Do you have enough distal thinkers in your
midst who are pushing others to expand their thinking? How
often are hiring managers considering the mix of innovation
types on teams as they grow?

Creativity is an imperative for our new world of work. Cultivating

all four types of divergent thinking at every level will afford
greater odds of converting each new challenge into successful
innovation.

Editor’s note: Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman are the
authors of Tomorrowmind (Simon & Schuster, 2023), from which this
article is adapted.

ABusiness
version Review.
of this article appeared in the January–February 2023 issue of Harvard

GK
Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is a physician, the
chief product officer, and the chief innovation
officer at BetterUp, a coaching platform in San
Francisco.

MS
Martin E.P. Seligman is the Zellerbach Family
Professor of Psychology and directs the Penn
Positive Psychology Center.
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