Creative at every age: first as explorers, then as archaeologists

Creativity is young. This belief is widespread in our society, fueled by the prominence that early talents such as Mozart, Picasso, or Steve Jobs hold in popular culture. Creativity is often described as something magical that arrives early in life, shines intensely, and then, like many other cognitive resources, declines with age.

Yet this belief, however widespread, is a myth. Creativity is not a fire destined to burn out. It is a capacity that evolves, shedding its skin but not its nature or its power. Examples of mature masters are as numerous as those of young geniuses: for every Mozart there is a Verdi; for every Picasso a Cézanne; for every Steve Jobs a John Goodenough, awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of the lithium-ion battery, conceived when he was nearly sixty.

Like most myths, however, this one contains a grain of truth. What changes with age is not creativity itself, but the way it operates. At the beginning of a career, the creative process tends to be rapid, swift, and intuitive, thanks to flexible cognitive structures that are relatively unconstrained by the rules of a field. “Young” creativity behaves like explorers: it travels the world in search of something new.

As a career progresses, the creative process becomes more reflective. Cognitive structures grow more rigid, but also more complex. They make it possible to synthesize ideas that were already known but never previously connected, and to assess consequences more carefully. More “mature” creativity behaves like archaeologists: it is made of deep excavations, of discoveries of connections that were previously invisible.

What changes over time, therefore, is not the ability to be creative, but what is needed to stimulate that ability: the fuel that ignites the fire, the ingredient that gives the recipe its extra touch. If different forms of creativity exist, organizations wanting to generate new ideas should focus on what their employees need to be creative at the various stages of their careers.

The key ingredient, for everyone, is knowledge, which is at once creativity’s greatest ally and its greatest obstacle. It fuels the creative process and, at the same time, constrains it, narrowing the range of what appears plausible, acceptable, or worthy of being tried.

At the beginning of a career, the creative process benefits most from developing deep knowledge in a specific area. Adding depth of knowledge to a mind that is still relatively unconditioned by the “this is how it’s always been done” mindset—the greatest obstacle to change—creates an exceptional combination. Depth provides the raw material, while flexible cognitive structures recombine it in unexpected ways.

As a career advances, however, depth makes cognitive structures more rigid. At this stage, exposure to new perspectives, disciplines, and ways of framing problems—what researchers define as breadth of knowledge—becomes essential. It is the breadth of knowledge that allows creativity to endure over time. New stimuli from other fields force cognitive structures to reorganize, eliminating connections and adding new ones. What once seemed set in stone is called into question again.

Creativity, then, is not a rare jewel reserved for a chosen few. It is a living system that must be cultivated and nourished, taking into account its different stages of development. Organizations and managers who wish to foster creativity should encourage new hires to become experts in their field, and push more experienced professionals to step outside it, acquiring new skills, perspectives, and ways of working. The goal is not to unlearn what one knows, but to remain open to novelty: to resist the reassuring closure of certainty and preserve, even in later stages of a career, the somewhat unsettling yet deeply stimulating pleasure of not knowing what will come next.

Originally published in Fortune Italia