Sorting Out Creative Level and Creative StyleHelp

A number of people have asked for some clarification on the difference between creative level and creative style. I must admit, it's difficult to squeeze a lot of depth into a 7 minute video! So, let me see if I can flesh things out a bit here. Basically, creative level is related to your mental capacity both potential and manifest capacity. Potential capacity (potential level) is measured through things like intelligence (in all it many forms mathematical, linguistic, artistic, spatial, etc.), talent, aptitude, and giftedness, among others. In other words, it's a measure of how much a particular person "can" know, learn, and recall and how quickly and completely they will learn it and recall it. Manifest capacity (manifest level) is what you actually do know at any moment in time, and that can be measured in many ways as well - e.g., knowledge, experience, skills, expertise, etc. Of course, manifest level keeps growing from the moment were born until the moment we die with a little loss in there, perhaps, as we grow older! Our creativity is impacted by all of these types and forms of level, in the sense that we are creative within the capacity we have at the moment. In general, the various forms of creative level are measured on unipolar scales from none or a little to a lot. So, for example, you may have a moderate talent for music, while your friend has a high aptitude for math, and your colleague is mildly gifted in learning languages; these are examples of differences in potential level. Then, you may have a lot of experience and knowledge about hiking in the mountains, while your colleague earned a special certification in the martial arts through years of study, and your friend has certain skills in wookworking; these are examples of differences in manifest level. Creative style, on the other hand, is independent of creative level (both theoretically and empirically scholars have tested this in many different ways). Creative style is a stable cognitive preference - a particular way that your brain is "wired" so that it prefers to manage your knowledge and learning and experience and action in certain ways. Interestingly, your creative style (i.e., your cognitive preference) does not change over your lifetime (this has been empirically tested too). We can measure creative style in various ways (just like creative level), and many of those measures have some relation to the amount of structure you prefer in your thinking and actions. In this course, you'll learn about one particular way to measurecreative style (Kirton's A-I spectrum), but there are plenty of others as well (including several parts of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). Note: You CAN behave in ways that don't align with your creative style (i.e., your cognitive preference), but it comes at an extra cost to your brain and to you, so you need extra motive to do so. Finally, creative style is measured on a bipolar spectrum - in other words, on a continuum between two ends/extremes that are different but of equal value in general. And it isn't just the extremes that count; measuring both level and style on a continuum means that every point along the way is important. We don't want to start making "piles" of people! Putting the two together, we find people of any creative style all along the creative level spectrum, and people of any creative level all along the creative style spectrum! Thats what it means for the two variables to be independent. And that's just part of the creative diversity story ... there is still the diversity of motive and opportunity to think about. I hope this has been helpful ... do let me know! Best regards, Kathryn