What kills creativity more than anything else is non-creative people being responsible for the development of a creative individual. Creativity more than anything else is in the mind. We need to ask ourselves: are we creative enough to recognize and reward creativity. A cute story…

Once a child was taking the Minnesota Test for Creative Thinking developed by Dr. E. Paul Torrance. The child was working on the Circles and Squares Task. She had 42 circles to fill in with sketches of things and was making slow progress. When the teacher announced that there was only one minute left the child quickly drew a man at the bottom of her page of circles and added lines from his hand to each of the circles to show a balloon man.

How would you evaluate this imaginative solution compared to the solutions of other kids who sketched 42 different things? What she may have lacked in fluency (numbers of ideas) she made up in originality (unusual and unexpected solutions). Creativity can manifest in more than one way.