1. The Creativity Paradox
Tell most people that they are not creative, and they will disagree. The idea that creativity is a broadly distributed human capacity — that everyone has a creative spark waiting to be ignited — has been propagated so thoroughly by popular culture, educational theory, and workplace development programmes that it has become essentially unquestioned. Psychologists, to their discredit, have not always pushed back.
The data does not support it. Peterson’s research team developed the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) — one of the most widely used measures of creative behaviour — to assess not the potential for creativity (ideation), but actual creative achievement: measurable output in recognised creative domains, verified by professionals in each field. The results are Pareto-distributed rather than normally distributed. Eighty-six percent of people score either 0 or 1 across any given creative domain. A very small proportion of individuals account for the bulk of creative output [Peterson, 2017].
Picasso produced 65,000 works of art — approximately three per day for 60 years. Bach composed so much music that a professional copyist would require decades of eight-hour days merely to transcribe it. Fifty percent of the entire classical music repertoire derives from just five composers, and 95% of what is actually performed draws from only 5% of their total output [Peterson, 2017]. Creativity, genuine creative achievement, is one of the most unequally distributed capacities in human nature. Understanding which personality traits underpin it is not an academic exercise. It is a practical necessity for any organisation that wants to identify, deploy, and retain the small proportion of individuals who can generate genuinely novel and valuable ideas.
2. What Is Openness to Experience?
Openness to Experience is the Big Five personality trait associated with intelligence, creativity, abstract thinking, and artistic interest [McCrae and Costa, 1987; LePine, 2003]. It is the only Big Five trait with a meaningful correlation with IQ — general intelligence — and, in large part, reflects the expression of cognitive ability in personality. Open people are original, imaginative, creative, complex, curious, and broadly interested. They are motivated by ideas and aesthetic experience for their own sake; they orient their worlds around intellectual and artistic pursuits. Low-openness individuals are conventional, concrete, practical, traditional, and set in their ways [Costa and McCrae, 1992].
Peterson’s (2017) framing of the attentional hierarchy is helpful here: open people’s attention gravitates upward in the conceptual hierarchy — toward broader, lower-resolution ideas, patterns, and possibilities. Less open individuals’ attention gravitates downward — toward the concrete, the implementable, the immediately actionable. Neither is inherently superior. Sometimes it is most useful to concentrate on the big picture, sometimes on the details. Organisations that understand this distinction and build their teams accordingly benefit from both.