Going from creative potential to actually doing something impactful in the world
A conversation with Ron Beghetto and Maciej Karwowski on their latest work "Creative Agency Unbound" (2025, Cambridge University Press).
Ronald A. Beghetto is a Professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, where he holds the Pinnacle West Presidential Chair. He is an internationally recognized expert in the psychology of human creativity, possibility thinking, and Generative AI within educational settings.
Maciej Karwowski, is a Professor of psychology at the University of Wrocław in Poland. He is an internationally recognized expert in creativity, a founding board member (2019-2023) of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation, and is the current editor-in-chief of the Journal of Creative Behavior.
They sat down with Professor Anna Abraham and Dr. Desiree Sharpe from the Torrance Center at UGA to discuss their latest book which was released last week - CREATIVE AGENCY UNBOUND (access the book at this link).
Below is link to the full audio interview. We recommend listening to the interview while reading through it. Video excerpts are embedded within the interview transcript if you prefer a brief listen. Enjoy!
Anna Abraham
Hello everyone, welcome to the Torrance Center Substack. We have a wonderful lineup today, two for the price of one, so to speak. We have Ron Beghetto and Maciej Karwowski with us. They have just released a book through the Cambridge Elements and Creativity and Imagination that was officially published last week and is available for free download for the next couple of weeks. It’s a very interesting book that builds on a lot of what they’ve recently worked on together. So, we thought it would be wonderful to get a sense of why they wrote this book and where they want to see it go after this. So, first of all, welcome to both of you! It’s wonderful to have you here with us. Joining me is the Torrance Center Program Coordinator, Desiree Sharpe. We would both of you to start with a general introduction. Tell us about your academic journey so far through the period of university to present day that kind of captures what it is that drew you to the study of creativity and the decisions you made on the way that got you to where you are today.
Ron Beghetto
Sure. That’s a nice, profound philosophical question. Who am I? I think it’s a question we visit throughout our lives. Who am I with respect to my trajectory in creativity research and the other things I look at I guess started in childhood unbeknownst to me. My dad was an inventor, but in a tiny small town. He had a lot of prototypes. He had a couple of patents. But I saw that my extended family were not very friendly to new ideas. Creative suppression happens a lot there. And he just didn’t have a context to get his ideas out. He had a lot of prototypes. And I didn’t realize that that sat with me for a long time until later, many years later after I already became a creativity researcher.
I guess the first time creativity really got on my radar consciously was when I started out as a school teacher and this was before they had highly qualified requirements where you had to have like a degree in what you’re actually teaching. So, I was teaching middle school. My background was in like English literature and communications. And I was teaching middle school, every subject really except for literature. It was kind of interesting because there were a lot of exploratory things going on. This was in a tiny town and this group of students approached me and wanted me to coach them in The Odyssey of the Mind, which I had no idea what that was at the time. It’s a creative problem solving program. And so I said, I don’t know what that is and that if they wanted a coach, they needed find a coach that knows something about what they want to be coached in. And they said - we’ve asked everyone and nobody wants to do it. They were so motivated and I said, okay, why not? So, we did it. And the nice thing is that that program was very structured as far as what I was supposed to do as a facilitator, which was basically stand back and let them do their thing. And I was absolutely blown away with what these students did. And it really caused kind of an existential crisis for me as a teacher. You know, I thought I was a pretty innovative teacher and so on, partly out of survival. So, I did a lot of interdisciplinary stuff and student-directed work.
But what was really distressing to me is here was this group of students that were in my classroom, same teacher, same classroom, same students. And during the day when I was teaching them, they were basically like zombies. They were so checked out. They were not even present. But just a little bit later in the day at 3.30pm, completely different, just filled with ideas!
They ended up winning the state championship. We competed in the world finals. I was coach of the year, which was so ridiculous because I didn’t do anything. It was really all them. But it really made me think about whatever happened in that hour, hour and a half after school - why aren’t we doing that all the time in school? And if this thing is called “creativity”, then we need to bring creativity into the schools. But how can we do it? What are the constraints?
So that’s when I went back to graduate school. I got my master’s degree, did a master’s thesis in creative problem solving. Then looking for doctoral programs on creativity was almost impossible during that time. But I stumbled across Jonathan Plucker, who was at Indiana University then, and he was the only person that said I’ll work with you and I’m into creativity also. And so that kind of started my kind of serendipitous journey into creativity studies and, you know, starting from that time, just seeing how resistant schools were, and in some ways still are, to really doing creative pedagogy. And so that was kind of my work. I study human creativity in educational settings, but also possibility thinking and now generative AI. What are the implications, for better or for worse, with respect to human creativity and education? So that’s the long and short of it.
Maciej Karwowski
What an opening! Well, my perspective, I believe, is slightly different, although probably will echo some of Ron’s ideas. The first thing, when I start thinking about creativity as a thing that interested me, I probably first became interested in creativity during high school. And that was a fun thing because I read a small book that was “anti-creativity” in essence. It was about barriers. It was about blocks. It was about fixation. It was about everything that makes us uncreative or that stifles our creativity. There was not so much about school, although school was criticized quite heavily in this book. But the fun thing was that when I started my university studies and my first program was in education, quite randomly, because it wasn’t planned at all, I realized that the guy who has written and published this book is the professor who is giving the introduction to Psychology lecture. That was really amazing. I went on to do my PhD with him and my interest in creativity started there in Poland. He was a really creative guy. He didn’t publish almost anything in English, so he is completely unknown. But the book was pretty eye-opening and really interesting. Given my school experiences, I believe that’s a sort of fun association.
My school years were in 80s and 90s in Poland. It was a country that was during this time undergoing great social and political changes. Everything was gray, sad, etc. But school probably was the only place that was quite fun at the time. Perhaps necessity is a matter of invention. I was always therefore quite skeptical when criticisms towards school as a whole or education were raised, mainly because of my own experiences that were quite positive. I believe, of course, it was rigid, as it still is, but there was also some space for exploration, some space for experimenting, space for errors, which are really to be appreciated. So that wasn’t that bad even if surroundings were catastrophic. But regarding the next steps or more scholarly approach, it began in high school years, when I realized what creativity is and started to explore it from different angles. So first educational, then psychological. I was also interested in more sociological perspectives and approaches. So that was fascinating, pretty complex topic of research. During those 20 years or so, we collaborated, me and my team, with schools, some interventional programs, worked with the same contest or program Ron mentioned, which is international, pretty big one. So, my interest started with a happy accident, I would say. A small book about stifling creativity, but it somehow transitioned into a career-long research program that is centered around creativity taken from different perspectives. So, that was my path.
Desiree Sharpe
Thank you both so much for sharing all of that. You are both very prolific, well-cited scholars and you collaborate a great deal with one another. We would love to hear about how you met, what led you to want to work together, and what you think makes for a good collaborative practice with each other.
Ron Beghetto
My memories is a little shaky on our actual first meeting. I think we had a very important moment where we spent a good hour chatting, maybe over a beer at a conference in Southern Oregon. But prior to that, I was aware of Maciej’s work because we had kind of similar lines of work. And, probably from our personal histories, I think we both were committed the idea of understanding how do you convert creative potential into creative behavior and creative action and creative accomplishment and achievement? So, there were some parallels already there. And then more specifically, we were interested in constructs like creative self-efficacy but felt that there was something a missing from them. We were both very familiar with Albert Bandura’s work and were fans of his agentic work. And we just realized that there was something off in the field of creative self-efficacy and of course we both did work in this area. So, in a way, we were part of the problem (and now are hopefully part of the solution through this latest book). But the idea of just conceptualizing it and then measuring it? It seemed to be a static scale that was not quite as robust as kind of what Bandura’s work was describing both theoretically and empirically. And so, we started thinking there has to be a more dynamic way of thinking about this and assessing it. And that was the gist of our conversation then.
From my own experience - I’m Italian. My family were restaurant people when they came from Italy. They couldn’t find any good Italian food where they were. So, they decided to start their own restaurant. It was very hard work. I learned how to cook, and I see myself as a creative home cook. Throwing together ingredients and that kind of thing. So generally speaking, I think I would have good creative confidence doing that. But a lot depends on the context. If I was given some strange ingredients or there were some guests at the house that were maybe professional chefs, that might change how I feel. And then as I’m starting to cook, if things start going sideways and again, based on the context, my sense of self-efficacy would change. So, we had these kinds of conversations. For a good collaboration, there needs to be some overlap, but there needs to be some differences too between the collaborators. We each bring different things to our collaboration. Another you need is somebody that’s willing to just be a hard worker. It’s just like anything. That’s what I learned about creativity. It takes hard work, persistence. People that are going to push each other, do their part, and contribute fresh ideas. So, that’s where it becomes an exciting thing. And I think it is kind of hard to find people that you resonate with, that you could be really productive with, is just a joy to work with. And I think I was lucky enough to have Maciej as a collaborator who I really enjoy working with. I like how his mind works. And I think it complements my ideas and it makes for a good balance.
Maciej Karwowski
I think that the role of beers and conferences is quite hard to overestimate in our case. I don’t even remember when our collaboration started. It seems like10 years ago or so, but it feels like forever. I just checked when exactly we published our first paper together. It was almost 10 years ago. It was a book chapter, actually. A quite influential one, by the way. And this particular book chapter, which was published in a book I edited with James Kaufman, was precisely the chapter that gave a rise to this book we are discussing together now. And that’s really true, that on the one hand, there was a certain level of similarity in perceiving those things.
We recognized that we were part of the problem. And we were really dissatisfied with the oversimplification associated with like using self-report scales, especially when treating them as proxies of creative potential. It was never our idea to use them in such a way. We were much more interested from the very beginning in mechanisms; how those constructs can play a role in this bigger path. But unfortunately, people started using them in a very simplistic way.
That was problematic. But I believe complementarity is something that really matters. Ron has always had bold and pretty broad ideas. I started to wonder about how we can use them in research, how to operationalize them in a complex way. We started doing some work together, but there is still much to be done. We’ve got some ideas that were never tested simply because we had no good way how to test them. On the one hand, there is a certain level of common ground. On the other hand, specificity helps in terms of different competences, interests, different books we both read, etc. So, it has been an amazing 10 years and it’s great that we’ve got this small book published now.
Anna Abraham
Congratulations on that! Maybe I’ll take you right back to the start. I was wondering if you could take us through the evolution of your work in simple terms for those who have not read your work. I hope I’m being accurate when I say that the cornerstone of a lot of what you’ve done started with the idea of creative self-beliefs. I feel like this has evolved over time in terms of the way you’ve been speaking about it and the different aspects of self-beliefs that you’ve targeted and operationalized. I was hoping you could take us through your current understanding about what is the best way to think about creative self-beliefs? I think of it as a really useful contribution to the creativity literature because it really moved the needle away from this focus on potential as an ability towards a focus on the factors that spark or fuel us to do things. In this latest book that you’ve written for the Cambridge Elements series, your focus is on agency, like this propulsion towards the generating of ideas. I like the allusion to personality psychology, social psychology, emotion, movement and other topics. A lot of the terms that you use like “self-regulation” are used in other contexts, like in the emotional domain. You have introduced a lot of terms, but it all starts from what I would say this foundation of creative self-belief. So, could you take us through what these are, this constellation of beliefs that we have, and in what different ways are they expressed as we try to be creative?
Ron Beghetto
In this book in particular, we try to provide accessible labels and questions that anyone could understand, particularly practitioners. And then we get really precise and try to build out a research agenda, both theoretically and empirically in this work. I think that’s really important. We’re really trying to understand how to position the ideas of self-beliefs. Yes, those do seem interesting, but on their own, I think they’re kind of ephemeral, they’re kind of empty. It’s hard to understand where self-beliefs would place. So, I think we were trying to answer larger questions.
There are a lot of claims made in creativity studies. Everyone has creative potential. What does that mean? And what are some indicators of creative potential? So, I think we were really trying to clarify, what does it even mean that you have creative potential and how do we know that? What are some indicators? We’re trying to disentangle that because people just use these constructs and measures in a variety of different ways. And we wanted to really try to demarcate where would you use particular measures of creative potential? Well, first, you have to define what are those things and what are the indicators and what do we already have and what might we need? So, you know, we agree with that idea that people have kind of untapped creative potential. And again, that goes back to my teaching, seeing that with the students and my dad. But then what are the indicators of that untapped creative potential? How can we assess it more systematically? And how can that be converted into creative behavior and creative actions or achievement? So that’s what we mean by “agency”. That’s where we start situating and building this kind of argument. Does ability matter? Of course it matters. Does context matter? Of course it matters. But it also matters how you believe. So even if you have the ability and you’re in an encouraging context, if you feel I don’t think I can do this, or I don’t want to do this. It’s too risky. Or I don’t want to do this because I don’t care that much. I could, but why invest the time? Or I can do this, I want to do this, I’m willing to take the risk, but I don’t know how to do it.
So that’s how these beliefs start building this little constellation of interdependent mechanisms that can move us from having the potential, having the opportunity, engaging with uncertainty, because there’s always uncertainty there, and then converting that into something that might become judged as a creative behavior or achievement as by yourself or others. So that is the backdrop where we really try to build a framework to position, not only these concepts, but these questions. Importantly, how do you study these systematically and what kinds of assertions can you make and how can you test those out? And I think it’s an open question. Some of it, a lot of it has been empirically tested, but I think there’s still questions that remain. And so, this is the probably second iteration of this model, which started with our creative behaviors agentic action model. And so, will this change or be revised? Yes. But I think it’s already a very solid starting point, both to understand it conceptually, practically, and empirically, and then to actually test it out in those cases as well - practically in a classroom, experimentally in an observational, lab, or experiential studies.
Anna Abraham
Perhaps I can ask a clarification question -- both of you have said that you didn’t like what people were doing, that something was done incorrectly. So can you, without naming names, maybe provide an example of what was not properly operationalized that pushed you to come up with an alternative. Start with your own mistakes maybe.
Maciej Karwowski
I will definitely criticize only two people, and both are here. This low hanging empirical fruit is using and interpreting those measures of broadly understood creative self-beliefs because in fact there are several different creativity-related self-beliefs, like creative self-efficacy is one, and creative personal identity, which we try to relabel as “centrality” is the other. But also self-rated creativity, which some people are using is pretty close to creative self-efficacy, although it’s probably not the same due to more prospective dynamic nature of creative self-efficacy. But the problem that was quite easily visible in our early works and in many other works is that those conceptually very dynamic constructs and characteristics are measured as traits. The point then is that very likely we are measuring not much more than openness to experience or some quite basic correlates of creativity.
So. the first point was, and this is something that Ron mentioned and I believe this is the main contribution or our idea is thinking in terms of processual, more mechanistic way about those constructs. Not just as correlates, but asking the question, what is their function and what role they play in this broader path. And of course, such models and theories are not completely absent in other sub-fields of psychology are present in educational psychology when you talk about expectancy value theory, or when you study the role of academic self-concept or different self-concepts quite narrowly sometimes defined in different domains and the role they play. And of course, those constructs or self-beliefs, self-concepts, etc. might matter for their own sake. They might be autotelic. That’s important that people have certain level of belief in themselves. But they also matter because they play a broader role, and our goal is to better understand this role. So, in this framework, we theorize some potential mechanisms they play, both mediating, moderating, et cetera. But of course, it’s challenging to really study because that requires very solid designs. We’ve got this broad bunch of various creative self-beliefs, but the goal is not to measure them and correlate them with divergent thinking or creative activities. That’s just the very, very beginning, very first step. The real question is like how to test a little bit more complex mechanisms and roles.
Another big question, of course, is how to properly study those constructs developmentally. There are many challenges, but I fully agree that it’s not about thinking about self-beliefs as independent trait-like entities. Unfortunately, they are usually studied that way because there are simple instruments we have developed that are easy to be used. That’s fine, but people should remember that theoretically those constructs are much more dynamic, much more prospective, much more intertwined with tasks and challenges they meet.
Desiree Sharpe
Well, thank you for that. That was actually very helpful. Both of you had referred to these experiences in schools that really inspired a continuation of exploring creativity as something that can both be nourished or inhibited the context of school. Beyond just learning, I wanted to ask you both about how schools can really impact creative self-belief and essentially creative confidence as sort of this baseline experience for children because this is where they’re probably going to get a lot of impact on their creative self-beliefs daily.
Maciej Karwowski
That’s THE question. And a pretty serious one, I would say. Bandura proposed critical mechanisms that are responsible for development, primarily of self-efficacy, but that might quite broadly apply to other self-beliefs as well. And I believe they work here pretty well. The first, and probably the strongest one, is “mastery experiences”. So previous successes, small successes, personal successes, successes that are interpreted by a personal success, not necessarily objective ones. And that’s critical that students have such an opportunity in school. By the way, the whole education, at least theoretically, is organized that way. It’s organized in a way that you start from simpler things, and you go to more complex things, and they give you this feeling of success. And of course, the problem you might say is that those school successes, that small successes, those are primarily academic or much more often related to more rigid algorithmic way of solving typical problems than creative. So, one thing of course is to be more open into various directions. But generally speaking, the first condition is that your self-efficacy or agency, especially healthy one because we don’t want to just build agency for the sake of agency and we want to build it in connection with real understanding of people’s strengths, is to have those small opportunities and small occasions to experience successes which brings you to exercising this agency. And probably this is the most important point.
The second point is called “vicarious learning”. This is instantiated in modeling. Looking, seeing, cooperating with people are significant others. They could be parents, could be teachers, but could be peers as well. So having this opportunity to see how other people are doing things, to try to exercise that capacity. And again, if it’s only told, or if it’s only written, that’s probably not enough. The focus is to give this opportunity to exercise and to watch others. The third one is called “social persuasion”. It could be verbal persuasion where you are being told that you can handle it or you are permitted to try. Or it could be social persuasion that is more indirect, like obtained through observation, obtained to comparison, or something that happens in every classroom all the time. This may not necessarily proceed in a good way because sometimes it can also hinder our self-perception, but that’s also the point. So again, that’s the question, how to create those surroundings, this climate to support learning from each other, but also like hearing this message that “you can!”.
And the fourth one, which is probably the most abstract and difficult to imagine how to put it directly into schoolwork because it’s more physiological. So, this fourth source is associated with the feelings or bodily reactions we get when we interpret those different signals, for instance, as indicating stress or indicating arousal or something that is not so easily translated into those real-world school-like realities. But I would say we should focus on creating possibilities for mastery experiences, create opportunities to learn from each other enabling vicarious modeling, and also social persuasion or comparisons which is also an important source of information. So, I think all those mechanisms work in this context as well.
Ron Beghetto
Just to punctuate a couple of things - in chapter seven, towards the end of the book, we include practical questions and strategies that have an education focus, but they could be applied in any context. The four components that Maciej described are critically important. There are three further key things that I really want to kind of draw out of those that point to the focus of our work and the model. School is just a context. And the idea is that you could be creative or not creative in any context, honestly. As long as you’re alive, you could be creative if you want to be even in the most constrained context. What is key is how beliefs get rendered into decisions. So, I think the key idea here is that this is about taking action. Som it’s about action experiences and decisions. You always have an opportunity to take action, and then you have to make some decisions about should I do this right now? You know, in addition to “can I?”, I think that’s where creative risk taking comes in. Should I do this? Are the benefits going to outweigh the costs? How am going to do this? And then those other factors, like internal and external constraints. If you’re not feeling well that day, or you didn’t sleep well. You may then decide against the kind of creative expression opportunity presents itself. Or if you feel like the social persuasion is not persuasive enough. People are telling you to do it, but for whatever reason, you’re not persuaded by it. Or you don’t feel like you’re supported in that environment. So, I think those are key components to think about. And then from the designer of experiences, I think we have to think about education as a “set of experiences”. I mean, and I think Bandura talks about that explicitly and we certainly do - mastery experiences, opportunities to experience, not just hear about things, but to do things. This is really about enacted behavior. It’s not just about living in the mind. It is a very cognitive behavioral, experiential approach.
So, I think we have to think about how can education be more of an experience of mastery in different subject areas? And when we’re generating genuine experiences, there’s always going be uncertainty. We have to let go of the idea of, for example, this lesson’s planned, so I already know the outcome in advance. I think that’s what ends up being the case.
Sometimes school feels artificial, and creativity doesn’t feel like it would be welcome there because the teacher already knows what’s expected and how it’s expected. So, you at least have to loosen up how it’s expected. You have to be open to the idea that these students might meet this objective, but I’m not exactly sure how, and I’m going to be okay being surprised with how they do it. You have to at least loosen that constraint a little bit. And I think if you do that, and I think that’s what I learned through The Odyssey of the Mind. It took me 20 years to figure what was happening. It wasn’t like it was a constraint-free thing. It was a structured facilitation. But what was unconstrained or less constrained was how they were going to solve this problem. I had no idea. They had no idea. But that’s where creativity comes in. So, I think those are the key things to think about with respect to our work. That it is definitely anchored in Bandura and other kind of pragmatic work. It is really about action, experiences, and being open to allowing new and different ways for people to resolve or experience whatever they’re trying to do that can’t really be predicted in advance. And I think that’s where it gets a little sticky in schools because we know that teachers are trained to like plan the lesson. the objective, what they’re going to do, but also how they’re going to do it, what it’s going to look like. And if we loosen that a little bit, then I don’t see any problem with schools being places where creativity can grow, be nurtured, expressed by both teachers and students.
Anna Abraham
I think what you said about what Bandura points out about learning being an embodied experience is really work reflecting on more. We’ve just run our Annual Torrance Lecture and Conference last week, where the thematic focus was Creativity & Motivation. And one of the things we discussed was how the doing, the act of getting into it physically, is really essential to the process of the learning, which is opposed to the more cognitive approach that happens in schools, where you are expected to sit in your seat, be spoken to, and use your body as little as possible. I quite like that your model gets at these emotional and motivational components, which I think few others really do, or when they do, they talk about it as something separate. Now that you’ve talked a little bit about your last chapter, which goes over practical strategies and so on, can you take us through the other chapters of your new book – Creative Agency Unbound. The use of the word agency is really interesting, because it brings to mind this propulsive force that gets us to do things, that goes beyond just a belief, as you just said, to the doing of something. And it’s the starting point of the doing of something. Your first chapter talks about creative agency and why it matters. The second is about creative confidence (can you do it?) and the next chapter is about creative centrality (should you do it?), followed by one on creative risk-taking (should I do something creatively or not?) – this raises the question of would you do something creatively if there’s the option not to do so? Risk-taking is something that is never easy to do. Most people are risk averse. And I think probably younger children are even more in a risk averse context than they’ve ever been because they’re feel much more under each other’s scrutiny with smartphones and social media. I was wondering about most about your concept of creative self-regulation and how it is similar to or different from related concepts like emotional self-regulation or other ways in which we regulate ourselves. Often when I look at people who are trying to be creative, the choice of not doing it creatively rarely arises. It’s almost like the situation calls for a creative response. So, I’d love to know a little bit about what pushed you to go from beliefs to agency. And this is a topic you’ve been working on a long time now but in this work, what are you proposing that is quite new? What are the new considerations that you want all of us to keep in mind? Is “agency” essentially a substitute for “motivation” or something else? Is it an action tendency to the actual doing? I’d love your thoughts on that and where you’d like to see this work go.
Ron Beghetto
How about I give a little preamble about how we’re conceptualizing agency and then if you just want to run us through the model, that’d be great. One way to think about the belief component is that it’s really the beliefs that underlying decisions. It’s not like just beliefs are floating around, right? This is about agentic action. And so, Creative Agency Unbound opens up our understanding of how all these things work and also helps expanding the program of research. What we really want it to do is launch a program of research that is much more systematic, much more integrated, that has this deep theoretical model and understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish and then points us in a direction of how we can start designing much more integrated systematic studies that that entail all these components. And the way that we were conceptualizing agency with regard to that is it always has these blended components. So, first of all, it’s intentional, right? So, you’re making a decision about something when you’re being agentic. We even get into the philosophical weeds at the beginning of the book and talk about how there are arguments against the idea that people have agency, that the world is predetermined. And we talk about the ways to navigate that.
Our claim is that while we might live in some deterministic laws of physics, humans still can exercise agency. That’s the kind of stake we’re putting in the ground. And if that’s the case, then one has to be intentional about it. We’re not just playing out some predetermined script. So, it is intentional, self-directed, and it blends this idea of moving from just envisioning some new and meaningful actions to actually enacting them. So, you have to have both of those things. You have to be able to see the possibilities, but you are committed to enacting them. So again, everything is animated through behavior. And I think that’s where I think people get hung up on beliefs as if this is something that’s just very cognitive, very metaphysical, or whatever the case may be. But that’s not the way we’re thinking about this. We’re saying that the way you think about yourself, or the context, or the situation, is really going to influence your decisions to take action, which is also influenced by your prior history, your prior experiences, all those different things. But really, it’s about enacting your capacity to, within the given constraints of the context you find yourself in, to do something different that can actually have an impact on your life and the lives of others. So that is kind of the way we’re conceptualizing agency. And we have a little definition in there to kick things off. And then we’re going from this idea of like, if you have the potential to do that, we believe all people do, right? And it’s constrained by a variety of different things, of course, but still, how can you go from potential to actually doing something impactful in the world that can impact you and others? What is happening in between there? That’s kind of where our model really drops in.
Maciej Karwowski
Well, first of all, Anna, I believe what you mentioned that for you, this is primarily a sort of motivational model. That’s also how I see it. So even if we cover those cognitive categories primarily, the main question under this broad umbrella of agency is that we ask why, how, and using what strategies people are translating this potential into real world activity. And that’s mainly about this activity, not about tests, not about research on remote associations, etc. So, for me, that’s a starting point. And, of course, the term “agency “is differently theorized in different disciplines. But agency here is associated with this feeling of control over situation over the task and the possibility to handle it. But to really handle it, not just believe, but also this attempt to do so.
Those categories which were theorized by us previously, like five or six years ago, and they’re different names, by the way, and we discussed quite a bit. I’m still not quite sure whether this rebranding was or will be successful or not, because for instance, this category of creative self-efficacy is so popular. Also, creative personal identity or this belief that it matters, has also found its place in the literature. So, I’m not sure whether we will be successful with these new terms we are proposing, but we strongly believe that these new terms are better. We try to be very specific in this book. So, when we talk about confidence, we think about both dynamic, contextualized, task-specific creative self-efficacy and creative self-concept, which is a little bit more static, a little bit more trait-like, also important, but it’s a slightly different animal. It’s more static and based on your experience, more strongly correlated with certain personality traits than the self-efficacy. Both matter, both influence each other. One is built upon the other but for us, both are like subfactors of creative confidence in a sense. So creative confidence is understood as an overarching umbrella term.
When we are talking about creative centrality, which we see as a pretty strong necessity-like factor, because indeed we see in our research it has a moderation effect. So normally, everyone who studies creativity finds correlations between cognitive tests, measures like divergent thinking, analogies, metaphors, remote associations and other measures like activities or achievements are usually weak to moderate, but mostly weak. That could be associated with various reasons, but let’s leave that aside for now. But what seems pretty interesting is that when we include this more identity-related factor, this centrality, which is to what extent it matters for people to be creative, it almost always nicely moderates and changes this strength. So, for people who care, this correlation is pretty strong.
For people who don’t care at all about their creativity, why should they put effort into it? Even if they are cognitively really skilled, they see very little reason. Quite often they even misinterpret or don’t treat those tests as indicating anything about creativity. For them that’s meaningless. So, this centrality is much more related to identities. It’s a sort of factor that could moderate it or work as necessity, like as a necessary condition.
About creative risk-taking – given that creativity is always uncertain and people need to take this path or explore it and ultimately decide to engage into the process. By the way, I believe that Bob Sternberg’s one-page long paper from the early 2000s on how creativity as a decision is a building block for this way of thinking about it, namely that it’s hardly possible that someone will make this decision without the proclivity to accept some sort of risk taking.
And the final one, the broadest and, I agree, probably the most controversial for various reasons, or at least it could raise certain questions, is the creative self-regulation factor. This is because, first of all, this is something that is quite broad and emotional self-regulation of course is theorized as part of this broader construct. But what we describe in this book is that creativity in particular could be thought of as a sort of a creative problem-solving process that has different phases. The term phases is a simplification of course. There are not always clear phases, it is not always step by step, but they are useful in shaping our thinking. People create plans, people monitor their actions, people assess what they’ve done properly or not. People deal with obstacles they meet. People use different strategies to deal with those obstacles. When the job is done, they assess what they have achieved and they think about whether it could be done differently or improved, etc. So, thinking about self-regulation as a sort of processual approach when you’ve got those different elements is just one way of thinking about it. It’s interesting to think without self-regulation, there is a perceived agency that people believe they can, but this does not necessarily mean they really can. That’s just this belief. It would be overestimated and quite often it is. Creative self-regulation is a factor that translates it into more like actual agency and there is growing research showing that, for instance, when people are taught different strategies like how to self-regulate, their confidence also increases because this is a mastery experiences-like factor, even if it wasn’t thought in such a way.
Just to be clear – we’re not saying that everything can be controlled or that everything can be planned. Even with creative self-regulation there is much space for spontaneity, there is much space for chaos. But we do see the arguments for factoring in how planning, monitoring, self-assessing, and managing emotions play a prominent role during the creative process and creative activities. So, confidence, centrality, risk-taking and self-regulation play different role in this translation from potential to activity. Some of those mechanisms were tested. Some tests are quite robust, as in not only correlational, but also longitudinal. Some are even experimental. Some are micro-longitudinal. But we also should be probably very transparent in saying that in what we are proposing, there are also some new ideas or new hypotheses related to those mechanisms which are yet to be tested. So, we invite everyone who is interested to test it and prove that we are wrong, for instance, which is always the best thing to push the science forward.
Desiree Sharpe
Thank you so much! That did spark me to want to ask you a question that I had not thought of prior, which is how you guys might envision the model working in a group context. I mean, if everyone’s showing up with their own agency, how does that interplay work? I’m guessing you guys have probably had this discussion before but would love to hear an example of how this model might translate into that scenario.
Ron Beghetto
Yeah, I’ll take an initial shot at this. And again, I think, you know, just to kind of amplify the idea that really part of this book is we’re trying to make things as clear and logically coherent as possible, including giving examples of different things that’s already been done, but also pointing towards what still needs to be done. So, this book is an invitation for researchers to explore, test, and refute these ideas, but also practitioners to think about this and test these out in a very pragmatic way. And so, I think your question is getting at one that often comes up when I share this model, for example, in classes or talks or something is like how does this scale to a more social model? And I think that’s a pretty thorny empirical question - how do you assess that? But I think it’s a very interesting and important question. And I think one way to think about it is through the Bandura’s framework and how those four elements are going to at play. You’re going to have this vicarious learning experience going based on who is also doing what you are, if you’re doing a shared task with a team, for example. There’s also going to be social persuasion, and then, whatever role you’re playing in that experience, you’re going to be developing your confidence and so on. So, I think that’s a way to think about it from more of an individual perspective, and then you start scaling it up. I’ve always been interested in looking at how people bring different things to the table and how that kind of gets absorbed into the team’s final idea. So, teasing that out – what is shared and what is unique in that process? And what is the profile of people that are engaging in that process?
I think things do get merged together, but it would be interesting to do tracer studies of the emergence of certain ideas. How do those getting taken up by the group? Do they get modified? How do they get modified? What are the factors that play there? Although ours is more of an admittedly individualistic model, I think it does have implications for group work, both through the lens of how individuals are contributing to and being influenced by what’s happening as they’re part of a team. And I think, you could also scale it up. I mean, I know there’s been work on like collective efficacy and thinking about how does this aggregate and how do teams operate and how can we look at that at that molar level of analysis. There’s not much work in that area. It becomes increasingly complex. You can lose things as you aggregate to the team level. You can lose some really important potentially explanatory aspects of that process. But I think it’s a live question. It’s not one I’m kind of waving off. It’s just a very complex one that I haven’t engaged in. But I think it’s doable. I’d be interested in hearing what Maciej has to say about this.
Maciej Karwowski
I would definitely say that this is an open question, and I believe we even talk about as further directions to explore in the book. So, it’s indeed complex. I think that one thing to consider, and that’s much easier to theorize and to think about, is co-agency, co-creation, what happens and how people perceive themselves and the possibilities while cooperating in dyads, in teams, or even cooperating with generative AI. However, it’s a distinct question and a different question than the question about those entities functioning at higher level, which is more like an emergence question: whether collective creative agency or shared perceived similarly - within a team, within a classroom, within an organization - whether it holds the same properties as proposed by this individual model. Strictly speaking, we don’t know. But there is relevant research from late 1970s and 1980s about “groupthink” and the fact that when people believe that the group is coherent and when the group is formed of experts. quite often this feeling that they are highly competent, not necessarily creative, is detrimental simply because like putting the group together is more important than dealing with the problems.
So, first of all, I’d like to see how it works in terms of creative agency. Second, I believe that the take-home message from this book, analyzed at the level of individual, but is that this is not necessarily thinking that “more is better”. Of course, it’s important that people believe in themselves because that’s the motivational factor that pushes them to try out, to exercise this agency. But no one is saying that that very, very high conviction is always beneficial. Probably a slight overestimation is motivationally quite beneficial. It’s better than underestimation. But I guess what everyone is much more interested in is a sort of healthy high, but at the very same time calibrated self-perception. And it becomes calibrated when people really can try things out. So, when it’s built not only on social persuasion and that someone told them that they are creative, but on those exercised activity, on this real world, having the hands dirty – because that’s the way to really check and examine to what extent my self-perception matters.
So, talking about groups, on the one hand, I would be afraid that very high collective self-belief, creative self-efficacy, or confidence could be detrimental because of those well-identified classic social psychological mechanisms. On the other hand, I’d like to see such research. I can say that the Journal of Creative Behavior will soon publish a study from Japan, if I remember correctly. It’s an organizational study and it examines collective self-efficacy and individual self-efficacy as cooperating and explaining creative behavior. So, this sort of analysis deals pretty nicely with this issue. It’s not just averaging which misses a lot, variance also matters. So, the extent of similarity between group members, that’s an important factor. So that’s not just an average, that’s what is really shared. So that’s an interesting point for further research.
Anna Abraham
That’s fascinating and thank you for sharing that. We’re almost out of time, so we just come to our last question. I go back to something that both of you of mentioned in terms of your origin stories for creativity which I think of as the impact of the serendipitous. Ron, you talked about being in this unusual situation where these kids asked you to do something and everything sort of came alive unexpectedly. Maciej finds a book that sparks off everything. And then you have the other side as well, which is what we find a lot is - even if you want to teach for creativity. a lot of people don’t really know what it is. A lot of the time, creativity is seen as such low hanging fruit - that as long as someone’s drawing something, it’s creative. It’s not really seen as this goal directed, intentional mastery of a thing. And very often the context in which we’re demanding it, a lot of it just does not get utilized or honed in any significant way, because the people taking these decisions are not aware of it. Maciej –you wrote a paper that kind of went against the Ken Robinson idea of schools killing creativity in 2022. I think you built a case for what they do well. But I suppose one has to be lucky to have the right context. So, the individuals with all of their potentialities and agency – it is not just the task, but also what happens to be in place in their context. And some things can be dropped in serendipitously, and other things are really down to whether the people who are around you can recognize it and create conditions for you. So, I just wondered whether we could end on the note of what do you think is lacking in each of our contexts? Can you tell us what in your own experiences has been these stumbling factors or things you think about the context that could have been, that could be improved, the things that we need to work on, perhaps not as researchers, but to be aware of that sometimes models can’t really work because we’re not really cognizant of the context in which a lot of these things happen.
Maciej Karwowski
Let me maybe start, although I believe this question requires another hour for discussion. But I’ll try to be brief. Of course, we need to debunk myths related to creativity - it is not only related to the artistic. Beyond that though, the term “context “is pretty broad. But when I think about it, serendipitous-like discoveries come to prepare minds. I think what we know about knowledge and rich contexts and how to inspire creativity based on what we know about how knowledge is organized in our minds is crucial. All those classic findings of Mednik and colleagues are still pretty vital. When we think about creativity and when we think about mechanisms, and one of the mechanisms is about remote associations to a concept. The very natural consequence of this knowledge is that the making of remote associations requires time. If something is provided quickly, often you can say that it will be obvious because it reflects how the mind is organized. In our conceptual networks something that is close is something that is prototypical.
So, if you are a teacher and you’re asking yourself, how can I support creativity, the first thing is to not expect that you will receive creative answer when you give those kids no time to think, no time to go through those different associations. This is a simple principle, but at the very same time, I believe pretty powerful. So that requires time. And if it requires time, it also requires silence. I mean, quite often those questions are asked, and if people are silent, no one feels really comfortable. So really quickly, pretty basic answers are provided. So, I would say that’s something that is like a no-brainer based on the knowledge we’ve got about the brain. The third thing, which is again sort of obvious, but perhaps we should repeat it all the time. And it’s not only about agency, that’s about creativity in general, is that you have to have a space for errors and risk-taking. There is no creativity that is successful at the very first time. So, if there is no climate that allows people to experiment or to err, it is naïve to expect that creative solutions will be provided.
Finally, when I think about context of things could we change perhaps quite easily is something you mentioned at the very beginning, which is movement. Everything we think about school is very static, but we know a lot about the embodied character of creativity – there’s the attention restoration theory and empirical research showing that when people are moving, when people are in the wild, when people are in nature, they get better ideas, and, importantly, we know why. This is not just some kind of magical insight/incubation. We understand better why it happens. And you can add to this the fact that sleep is important because of how it enables the restructuring of long-term memory. And memory matters for creativity. And that’s why knowledge also matters for creativity. If your knowledge is very limited, high-class solutions are unlikely to occur. These may seem like simple suggestions, but I believe that giving more time, giving more space for errors, giving space for silence, and providing some opportunities for movement - all provide good starting points for creating a space for creativity in the classroom.
Ron Beghetto
I agree with all those things. In fact, the last time Maciej and I saw each other in Ireland, we had our conversation jogging around outside on a track. I really do believe, whether one is walking and talking, or just walking and thinking, movement is often an overlooked factor. And there is some research that’s coming out that supports movement and ideation, which is really interesting. The thing I would also add is I believe is in relation to time. I conceptualize it this way - we have only so much time and energy every day. So, the question is what are you doing with that time and energy? A lot of times in school in different spaces or in everyday life, we’re filling it with a lot of sawdust. And so, if you do not protect that time and energy, you have a problem. Because in order to do anything creative, you have to be able to have time and energy. I, for one, block out two hours every morning, very, very early before other people contact me. And that’s when I do some movement, I think through movement and then, I’m out in the desert running or whatever. And then, I do some writing and thinking every day, no matter what. I think persistence and just allowing that time to just really explore is key. And so that’s the other piece – exploration. So, I think what we could do is provide time to explore ideas and interests, especially for young people. Extracurricular activities always are a good thing to do that. But even in other domains, just giving people more time to explore and think about things. Persistent time with but being open to that uncertainty, too, right? Just being open to it. And I think that’s how you prepare the mind to be ready to receive it and perhaps have these serendipitous experiences.
One of the most stark examples I have of this is when I was directing Innovation House at the University of Connecticut. The students were living above our classroom in the dormitory, and they were all majors, which was great. So, that provided a lot of different perspectives. And then we would meet down below there in the class. We had lke 15 weeks for the first semester and then another 15 weeks, which makes an entire year but at 15 week semester. I was thinking about problem finding, how it is really important, that we need time to explore. So, I thought let’s give them at least a month or month-and-a-half to identify a problem and then try to do something to solve it. Prototype it, solve it, whatever it could be. Start a new company, create a new club, whatever. It could be, personal, could be global, whatever.
That was not enough time. By the second year, a lot of students even said that. So, what we did the second year is we gave them 15 weeks to engage in problem finding. Now that, what does that mean? Do they just sit in there, know, scratching their chins. No, they’re doing things. They’re exploring ideas or mashing them up. They’re forming groups. They’re disbanding groups. It’s a very active, exploratory space. They’re finding things. They’re pursuing them. They’re dropping them. They’re picking them back up. With that 15- week active exploration period, one project turned into a company. Some other launched into some really exciting things. Some of them were complete disasters as well, but that’s okay to Maciej’s point. That was our motto. This may not work out, but you’re going learn from it. And we would still have a big celebration. I’d bring in food, and they would tell their stories of their projects, including if they were a disaster. Why was it a disaster? What did you learn from it? So, you could have that group saying that, and then the other group talking about how they got funding for this thing and they’re going to launch a little business. Those were equally compelling stories and informative stories. And then we also brought in last year’s group to this year’s new group. So again, the modeling and vicarious leaning - all that takes time. We just have to give people time and protect it in school, and outside of school, because the only way can get something done is if you just do a little bit every day and you’re not doing it when you’re exhausted and you’re being pulled in 50,000 directions. So, I think you have to really protect that time and then things can happen. Those are things that I think we don’t see. We see a lot of homework, a lot of busy work. How much time do people actually get to think, to explore and just do it over persistently structured over time and just allow things to kind of emerge. Yeah, it’s not magic. It’s just where are we putting our time and effort?
Anna Abraham
Thank you both so much! I think this a wonderful way to end this discussion. Thank you for your wonderful work over so the years and may there be many more to come. It’s very rare to find a theoretical work that is also full of practical advice that is applicable across contexts. It’s wonderful to see an account of creativity that wrestles with the agentic nature of our creative selves. So, congratulations and thank you to both of you, Ron and Maciej, for putting it out there for the world. Thank you for having this long conversation with us at the Torrance Center as well.
Ron Beghetto
Thanks for the opportunity. Great seeing you all.
Maciej Karwowski
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
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