Amabile’s Three Rings of Creativity

Theresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has devoted much of her research to studying creativity, productivity, and innovation.  One of her most famous articles is “How to Kill Creativity.”  In this article, Amabile outlines a model of creativity with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles, very reminiscent of Robert Sternberg’s triarchic model of intelligence.  Tony Wagner uses Amabile’s model in discussing the topic of innovation in his excellent book Creating Innovators.

The three domains making up Amabile’s model are Creative Thinking Skills, Expertise, and Motivation.  The area of overlap in the center is Creativity (or Innovation, as Wagner refers to it in his book).  Creative thinking skills, for Amabile, refer to flexibility of thought, imagination in approach to a problem, divergence from the status quo, and perseverance in times when new ideas are scarce. 

Expertise is deeply compile knowledge about a domain, such as writing computer code or performing brain surgery.  It is the result of extended deliberate practice (10,000 hours in the studies cited in Gladwell’s Outliers) and includes highly developed automated schema comprised mostly of procedural knowledge (how to do something) studded with chunks of declarative knowledge (knowledge you know that you know).  Experts are highly fluid in their performance of a domain task or in solving a problem in that domain.  They can flexibly assemble skills they’ve practiced in order to create new solutions to problems.  However, outside of their domain, perform about like everyone else, as demonstrated in a famous study comparing chemistry professors to undergraduates in solving problems in introductory economics.

Amabile’s third ring, the most powerful she says, is Motivation, which is the determination to actually do something, to accomplish a goal.  She divides motivation into two parts, extrinsic and intrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation is what comes from outside a person to induce them to perform – the classical carrot-or-stick approach to managing people.  Much study has gone into extrinsic motivation, some of which is referenced in Daniel Pink’s well-written book, Drive. The consensus is that extrinsic motivation can work for getting standard results on standard tasks as long as the incentives and penalties are in place and relevant to the person.  What extrinsic motivation does not do well is produce long-lasting change or lead to creative new approaches. 

Intrinsic motivation is that drive that comes from within the person, her or his own desire to do something, like run a four-minute mile or invent an electric light.  We tend to call intrinsic motivation passion or purpose.  Not surprisingly, intrinsic motivation leads to the most creativity and productivity in people.  As Mark Twain said, play is what you want to do and work is what you are obliged to do, whether painting a fence or designing a bridge.  The most creative work results from intrinsically motivated behavior.