Creativity unlocked

April 2017, AFR Weekend (The weekend newspaper of The Australian Financial Review)

Eero Saarinen, creator of some of the most inspiring structures in American architecture – the Gateway Arch in St Louis, the TWA Flight Centre at New York's JFK International Airport – was, at 10, a fat little dyslexic boy in Finland who was teased when his parents finally sent him to school.

The family soon moved to the United States and something happened to Saarinen as a teenager there. His confidence grew as his talent for drawing made him stand out. His yearning for attention from his famous architect father, Eliel, was now matched by an equal desire for distance. By the time Saarinen got to Yale, he was so sure of himself that he would sit in the first row of his non-architecture classes, and go to sleep.

Louis Kahn was another who would go on to create iconic and beautiful buildings – the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York at the tip of Roosevelt Island – but at school he was something of a dunce.

His parents, Jewish immigrants from the Baltic in northern Europe, were poor and the family lived in the slums of Philadelphia. He suffered severe burns to his face as a three-year-old and his childhood was marred by scarlet fever, diphtheria and rheumatic fever. He adored his mother, a woman who stressed idealism and doing what was best, and she encouraged him in his art, as did a later art teacher who helped his interest in architecture.

But at college he blossomed, winning honours and medals for his design skills.

In contrast to these two men, Philip Johnson, most famous now for his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, grew up as, in his own words, a "rich kid" and spoiled. Although he became fascinated by architecture when he was 22, he didn't enrol at Harvard's Graduate School of Design until he was 33. At first, he loathed it.

"The first day in architecture school was the worst in my life. I did not see how I could stand it," he wrote. But he built a house for himself while he was still a student and, within six years of graduating, in 1949, he had started his own practice. That same year, he completed his Glass House, a see-through home that was so astounding he had to eventually put up a sign to deter the sightseers who had come in such crowds a policeman had had to be posted.

By the late 1950s, these three men were considered by their peers to be at the peak of their creative power. On the surface, they all seemed so different. Not just in their backgrounds but in their manner and personality.

Johnson had had a manic-depressive episode in his college years. He saw himself as "autocratic" and "boastful, bossy, complaining, cowardly …" Success was all about luck, he claimed.

 Kahn's delight in his architecture came from the sense of order it gave him and he characterised himself as "outgoing, reasonable" and "individualistic". Success was a matter of willpower, he believed.

And independent, defiant Saarinen confessed that as an adolescent "[My] dominant conflict was to be liked – not by lesser members of the class though." Even as an internationally recognised architect confident in his own prowess, he remained surprisingly dependent on others' approval.

So very, very different, these three men.

The 'briefcase syndrome'

Which is what fascinated a small group of academics at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1950s who enlisted them – and 37 other highly successful architects – for an extraordinary set of tests in a rigorous scientific study which aimed to discover: what makes someone creative?

By the late 1950s, America had switched its focus to creativity, and the thinking processes involved. Image courtesy The Monacelli Press

 The same question fascinates Pierluigi Serraino, an Italian-American architect practising in San Francisco whose book, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, has refocused attention on that now almost forgotten UC Berkeley study.

The 1950s study's research, findings and conclusions about creativity will still strike a chord today, just as they did when they were first released from 1959 onwards to an attentive American public, drawn by the many big names involved.

But the UC Berkeley findings would also confound many of today's experts on innovation and innovative thinking, and discomfort many corporations and HR departments as they encourage their workforces to be, for instance, innovative – but also team members.

The research team's leader, Donald MacKinnon, commented later, "The process of creativity is not easily come by, nor are all of its phases easy to endure."

 The architects turned out to share a list of not-so-surprising characteristics – assertive, confident, inventive – but some surprising ones too – they were solitary, determined, reliant on intuition, impulsive and sceptical. They were also unafraid of their emotions.

More surprising, MacKinnon declared that, "Discipline and self-control are necessary if one is ever to be truly creative." He coined the term, "the briefcase syndrome of creativity", to describe a cluster of traits in his subjects that might be as apparent in an industrious accountant or solicitor.

(In his 2016 book, Originals, Wharton professor and social science writer Adam Grant quotes Aldous Huxley's comment that T.S. Eliot, who had stayed in his bank job even after the publication of The Waste Land, was "the most banky-clerky of all bank clerks".)

But MacKinnon went on to note of his high-achieving, imaginative and disciplined subjects that "spontaneity and freedom are no less essential".

His team's findings were remarkable in their consistency and insights. But seemingly inexplicably, given that, plus the high calibre of the subjects – the study's conclusions have been, after that initial flurry of interest, mostly left to moulder in the university's archives for almost 60 years.

Why? That question also obsesses Serraino.

America stung by Soviet smarts

In the US in the 1950s, the perplexing matter of creativity had national importance. The country had become as fixated on creativity as nations are today on innovation.

What was it? Who had it? Could it be spotted in someone before their talents appeared? How could it be nurtured? What made someone creative?

"Creativity may well be the most popular subject of our time," wrote one mid-century advertising guru.

In October, 1957, the Russians – deep into the Cold War with the US – had successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik (Russian for traveller), into outer space. They celebrated mightily with vodka. Muscovites rushed to Red Square to cheer.

America – prosperous, triumphant after its decisive role in winning World War II, and with a population that, courtesy of the GI Bill, was better educated than ever before, living in homes packed with shiny new appliances like vacuum cleaners and automatic washing machines – greeted the news with horror.

Dour, poor, communist Russia wasn't supposed to be winning the space race.

A newspaper cutting from the time puts its finger on the sore spot: "Yet the ultimate outcome of America's struggles with Russia may depend upon which nation trains the most young people who possess creative talent."

The UC Berkley team of psychologists was part-funded by what would now be called big business – first, the Rockefeller Foundation, then the Carnegie Corporation – and led by a man, MacKinnon, who had a background in wartime secret service assessment work.

They operated under the name IPAR, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, and their aim was to provide empirical evidence for a series of hunches about the personality and environment necessary for a creative to thrive.

What they keenly wanted to know was how to spot someone who had the potential to be highly creative so it could be nurtured, not discouraged.

Stay true to your vision

From January, 1956, the IPAR staff began to put together the set of studies – never duplicated – with the co-operation of some of the world's then best-known creatives. And not just architects.

Willing participants in the late 1950s ranged from writers Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Arthur Koestler to women mathematicians, to the 40 architects who Serraino has concentrated on in his book, such as Johnson, Kahn and Saarinen, and including I.M. Pei, Richard Neutra, George Nelson, A. Quincy Jones, and Victor Lundy.

The architects – all men were selected, it must be remarked – had submitted themselves to being "specimens in psychological labs"; to batteries of assessments of their maturity, stability, cognitive flexibility and sense of destiny; to gruelling interviews about their childhood, schooldays, friends, working routines, sleeping patterns, setbacks and sex lives (creatives mostly turned out to have strong sex drives); and to being eavesdropped on through their three-day stay.

In one pre-dinner test of the architects, of ethics this time, the ice-cubes in cocktail glasses can be heard clinking on a recording as Saarinen, Johnson, Lundy and a couple of others discuss the hypothetical situation of an architect, named Brown.

Brown's client has approved all the preliminary drawings for a challenging, important and highly prized commission, except for one key aspect which the client wants to change and which will affect the integrity of Brown's vision.

Eero Saarinen immediately leaps in, insisting the real problem is Brown. In his gruff voice with its Finnish accent he states, "I think Brown should have anticipated. Brown should have had some alternates" but maintains that so long as Brown's livelihood doesn't depend on the commission – "when your livelihood depends, you have to make certain compromises" – he should turn it down.

"He has to be willing to drop the job at this time or he has no … no future."

William Wurster was a prominent architect and also a fellow academic at UCLA, Berkeley. His clout helped Donald MacKinnon in his approaches to architects to take part in the IPAR studies. Courtesy The Monacelli Press

Philip Johnson is contemptuous. He reacts to Saarinen, "It doesn't happen that way in architecture! … It sounds very much like you've been reading Ayn Rand!"

Gregory Ain recounts the time a client greeted his half-finished working drawings of a "semi-luxury residence" with, "Can't you make it look a little more Hawaiian?"

After numerous wrangles and hypotheses and personal stories recounting their own experiences, the men agree that Brown must say no. The articulate Johnson says with passion: "… once you're represented by a building you don't believe in – what is the future of living?"

Chance encounter leads to obsession

Johnson's question, bursting from his innermost being, accords exactly with what MacKinnon eventually concluded about creative people from his studies. Number one: they are driven, and not by money.

In a 1964 paper on the architects study, MacKinnon wrote: "In [German psychoanalyst] Erik Erikson's phrase, the creative person has solved the problem of his own identity."

That resounded hugely with Serraino. Over the years, Serraino, who was born in Messina, Sicily and moved to the US when he was 28 to study architecture and now practises out of San Francisco's Bay Area, had heard about the so-called personality study.

Serraino knew that papers and documents existed in an archive somewhere but he didn't know where until a chance encounter in 2009 at Oakland Airport. "I ran into Raymond Neutra, the son of Richard Neutra, and he told me 'I found the files of my father! And you should look at them.'

Pierluigi Serraino: “Eras of great creativity are a function of the environment.”

"Raymond had found the content utterly fascinating and he encouraged me to get in touch with a key researcher who had been involved. This man was Wallace Hall who had been a PhD student and the deputy researcher on the study, under Donald MacKinnon, and I was so lucky because a few months later, he died. But before he did, he told me about what was in the archives."

Serraino became the first person to see all the files in their entirety - setting him on the obsessive hunting, researching and writing mission as the scope of The Creative Architect grew wider: "I could not let go."

Corporate conformity kills creativity

He believes – as did MacKinnon – that we are all born creative; unfortunately – and tragically for our sense of self – it mostly gets knocked out of us once, at around four, we join the bigger world, at school. "Then you start relinquishing yourself," he says.

The decline in creativity in most of us as we become socialised and begin to "fit in" has always been the case, said MacKinnon, who died in 1987, but Serraino believes there are now stronger forces at work, dulling our creativity, muting the truly creative voices.

"Despite all this bragging about a corporate's creativity," he says, "if you don't fit the culture, you're kicked out of the culture. And businesses everywhere started copying that. There was a time when architects began copying the culture of their corporate clients. It's very much assembly line."

On this, there is new data. In an age when we are so keen to encourage innovation, when people talk constantly of start-ups and innovation hubs, when the United States government has just announced an Office of American Innovation, business data shows that American Millennials, for a start, are not proving to be the imaginative entrepreneurs we thought they would be.

In the Atlantic magazine late in 2016, Derek Thompson, author of Hit Makers, wrote a piece theorising that the growth of behemoth companies like Walmart, Apple, Amazon, Facebook had "jammed the wheels of innovation".

Thompson, using figures on new business formation, said that entrepreneurship in the US has declined in each age since the 1970s and "adults under 35 (aka Millennials) are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation on record".

Thompson hypothesises that as big companies get bigger, their sheer clout squeezes out small businesses. Competition declines. Yet the big companies, with their efficiencies, can offer consumers low prices, which is exactly what governments – and the consumers – appear to want.

But the share of all businesses that are new firms has fallen by 50 per cent in the US since 1978.

Some American politicians, like US Senator Elizabeth Warren, are now warning, wrote Thompson, that "left unchecked, concentration will destroy innovation".

And that is what worries Serraino.

"There are always creative people in every era," Serraino says. "But eras of great creativity are a function of the environment. And the environment can inhibit creativity. It can enforce conformity."

Postwar 1950s America saw creative breakthroughs in everything from science (Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine) to design (Jens Risom, Charles Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia) to food (Julia Child) to literature, journalism, advertising, art, television, rock music and architecture, breakthroughs which still reach down and influence us today. Of the atmosphere, Serraino says, "There had been so much destruction. Everybody was so happy this nightmare was over. When you've been in emergency, you can do in six months what would take five years otherwise. You become Einstein in three seconds."

Lab rats' reluctance turns to gratitude

By 1958, Philip Johnson had made his name as the architect of the Glass House and he had just finished, with Mies van der Rohe, the Seagram building on Park Avenue. He was in his early 50s, and something of a social butterfly, all the better to win clients and keep his profile high.

He was also busy. On September 8, 1958, he replied to MacKinnon's invitation to take part, "I really don't think I can take an entire weekend off from my work, as flattering as it would be to the ego to do so."

The architects invited to take part in the IPAR study were known for their modern work, but the actual study took place in this mock-Tudor building. Courtesy The Monacelli Press

Frank Lloyd Wright didn't reply to his invitation and Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer declined. The latter noted as an aside: "I have to say here that I usually do what I may call my creative work on the back of my pocket calendar during airplane trips and on the commuter train."

But then Saarinen was persuaded to accept, which meant Victor Lundy telegrammed to say yes, unable to resist the chance to mingle with the man who had designed the revolutionary General Motors Technical Centre in Michigan. Johnson also relented.

Finally, 40 leading architects agreed to take part in the study – even as, like Johnson, they continued to be sceptical that the study would reveal anything and doubtful that such a thing as creativity could or should be analysed.

The men were split into four groups of 10, each group arriving on different weekends in 1958 and 1959.

It had taken IPAR's team more than a year to set up the tests. For a start, they had to make sure that no rivals who detested each other ended up in the same group. As well, certain architects wanted to be in the same group as others they admired: Johnson also wanted to come the same weekend as Saarinen. Two control groups were established. 

Then the psychologists rigorously tested interview situations. Photos from the time show them experimenting with seating positions.

IPAR staff rigorously tested out seating positions for the interview part of the study before the subjects arrived. Courtesy The Monacelli Press

Apart from sleeping, everything – from eating to interviews and testing – took place at the IPAR headquarters on the Berkeley campus, a two-storey, mock-Tudor former frat-house that must itself have given the mid-century modernist architects pause as they arrived.

The architects were assigned numbers for discretion and were never to see their files so that researchers could be free with their impressions. (And they were: of Johnson for instance, one researcher wrote that he "seems like a controlled psychotic". Neutra's interviewer wrote, "He must have people love him … He almost literally thinks of himself as superman.")

In one test, these prosperous, important men had to fill an 8 inch by 10 inch frame with 80 one-inch-square tiles, with a choice of 22 colours. (Saarinen used all white; Johnson used nearly all white with three stripes of black and two squares of r

The mosaics test threw up interesting differences. Above is Philip Johnson’s mosaic. Eero Saarinen went for all white. Courtesy The Monacelli Press

In another, they had to decide where, if a man developed a third arm, it should be located.

However tough – or demeaning – the three days of the study, and however critical the architects may have been during the process, to a man they seemed grateful to have taken part.

Ralph Rapson wrote, "Although I returned from my recent visit to Berkeley somewhat weary physically, I felt the assessment most stimulating mentally."

Twenty-five years after the study, in 1983-84, IPAR – now called the Institute of Personality and Social Research – went back to the architects. By then, just 27 were still alive and 23 responded. The architects' creativity had not diminished. All were still at the top of their field and, in spite of wealth and fame, they were still fully absorbed in their work.

That result recalls something a then-90-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright told television interviewer Mike Wallace in 1957 when he was asked about death, age and immortality: "Youth is a quality and if you have it, you never lose it."

 Relevance grabs attention

In late February, Pierluigi Serraino gave a lecture on his new book in California's Palm Springs, during the city's Modernism Week. Palm Springs is two hours' drive into the desert from Los Angeles. Its balmy weather during the winter months made it a magnet in the 1950s and 60s for millionaires and movie stars like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bing Crosby who then gravitated to a new style of architecture – modernist. Neutra, Quincy Jones, E. Stewart Williams and Albert Frey all built houses there.

The revival of interest in the work of society photographer Slim Aarons is, in part, due to one breathtakingly perfect photo he took in early 1970 at the home Richard Neutra had built for Edgar J. Kaufmann in 1946, Poolside Gossip.

It shows two beautiful women chatting lazily by a bright blue pool under a desert sky. A third walks alongside the pool. But the real star of the photo, the structure that anchors the image and gives it its class, is Neutra's architecture, with its clean sharp lines, its simple beauty and openness.

Richard Neutra’s 1946 Palm Springs house gets the real billing in Slim Aarons’ iconic photograph. Slim Aarons: Women (Abrams, $US85)

Serraino's Palm Springs talk, as billed, seemed to promise a look at an historic but arcane study, an oddity. Instead, within minutes of his first PowerPoint slide, the audience was taking notes.

Up flashed this quote from English paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott: "It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living …"

It was clear this lecture would be about more than relaying personal gossip about big-name architects.

Focus and frustration

Back in the 1950s, the study's findings convinced MacKinnon that there was indeed such a thing as a creative mind which exhibited the certain same characteristic, he wrote. 

And there was a central trait at the core he maintained: "It is personal courage, courage of the mind and spirit, psychological and spiritual courage that is the radix of a creative person …"

As for the creative process – which MacKinnon readily admitted he understood less than the creative personality - Serraino lists the five recognised five steps: preparation, concentrated efforts, incubation, insight, and verification or production.

That is, first, there is the training or the acquisition of skills over a long period.

Then, there is the ability to focus hard and long on a challenge or problem as it presents itself.

Frustration follows and the true creator may often withdraw for a period, or procrastinate. Meanwhile the unconscious gets to work.

Insight – or the eureka moment – is reached.

Finally, in the verification phase, the creator must be able to produce his or her idea or solution, through his or her own persistence but also because circumstances and their environment permit it.

In one of the interviews conducted for the study, architect George Nelson says: "I have an ability to see new solutions. I am a problem solver."

And while the architects were all such different men – even in the qualities they perceived in themselves – they were strikingly similar in several ways, down to their childhood experiences.

These men were able to sense problems that others couldn't see, "a type of intuition in making connections that few have", as Serraino notes. They did not go for early answers either, preferring to push themselves on to a solution that was original and "both true and elegant".

MacKinnon also deduced that "creativity is the reassembling of existing knowledge … bringing together concepts and ideas routinely thought to be far apart."

(Steve Jobs sounded very similar when he told Wired magazine in 1996: "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it; they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesise new things.")

Taste for solitude

The architects were individualistic, and non-conformists in their work, even if they were conformist in other aspects of their lives. They didn't mind upsetting people. They were "profoundly independent in judgment, thought and action", and confident enough in their work to survive the "bashing" (Serraino's word) that comes from deviating from the norm.

When, in a post-study test, the architects were asked to rate all 40 attendees for creativity, seven of them, including Johnson, Lundy and Saarinen – who received the most number one nominations – all unashamedly put themselves first.

Work was their life. It refreshed them and often took precedence over family and relationships.

Creatives are also able to reach deep into their own lives and experiences for inspiration. "The more creative a person is, the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions," McKinnon stressed. They were impulsive when it felt right.

They were also open to the outer world, curious and non-judgmental.

These men also all had a high level of tolerance for chaos and for highly complex situations and ambiguities.

But they didn't like teamwork (unless they were leading the group). They preferred to work in solitude and – appearances to the contrary – were uniformly introverted. (In the IPAR writers' study, the subjects were divided more evenly – 53:47 – on introversion/extraversion.)

With relish, Serraino relates one finding. In spite of the architects' seeming sociability and the necessity of attracting and getting on with clients, that turned out to be a front: "The creative architects revealed even less desire to be included in group activities than that expressed by the naval and civilian personnel who volunteered to man the Ellsworth station outpost in Antarctica."

Treading carefully, MacKinnnon also identified in creatives a kind of psychiatric turbulence or personal conflict, which drove them in their work and which their work helped resolve. Their drive was exceptional, propelled by a sense of destiny.

The architects were asked to rank their fellow attendees on creativity.. Philip Johnson was one of seven who unashamedly put himself first. Courtesy The Monacelli Press

And much of what propelled them through life had been started off in childhood, with parents who through choice or oversight or just neglect, had allowed their children autonomy in their lives.

And this bundle of shared traits somehow allowed these men, once confronted with a challenge or problem, to switch into a mode that led them to their creative solution.

But this is how Serraino had begun his 2017 lecture: "Recent years," he said, "have shown a growing preoccupation with the circumstances surrounding the creative act and a search for the ingredients that promote creativity. This preoccupation in itself suggests that we are in a special kind of trouble – and indeed we are."

Teamwork is a turn-off

The interest in creativity in 1950s America reflected a major shift. During the war and just after, the focus had been on efficiency and what IPAR termed "the highly effective individual". What had arguably helped win the war was a series of assessments run by the Office of Strategic Services, where MacKinnon had worked as had Carnegie's John W. Gardner. These pinpointed individuals who would make successful spies, agents and resistance leaders behind enemy lines.

This kind of effectiveness was then seen as highly desirable postwar in organisations and institutions, and was supposed to lead to higher profits.

But with the Russians seeming to outsmart the Americans in the space race, creativity came into the picture.

Intriguingly, the circumstances that are pushing our own preoccupation with innovation were almost precisely mirrored 60 years ago. People then were also worried about technology and increasing automation. They lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation and war, and fears were surfacing about the population boom. There were even the same worries about the dumbing down of education: "What went wrong with US schools?" was the title of one story published in early 1958 in US News & World Report. 

The man who had arranged major funding for the IPAR study from the Carnegie Society, John W. Gardner, wrote, "If a society hopes to achieve renewal, it will have to be a hospitable environment for creative men and women."

It is this that now concerns Serraino. He is scathing of the conformity that he argues has now taken over companies. His doctoral thesis at UC Berkeley was on teamwork and he insists the kind of teamwork (as opposed to collaboration) pushed in workplaces today is the very antithesis of creativity.

"Teamwork is a buzzword that gives a false sense of participation … It is inconsistent with creativity," he tells AFR Weekend, "The findings of my fieldwork research were exactly the same. People do not want to hear it, but that is the case."

What's more, if pushed into teams or groups, Serraino writes, "[creative people] were prone to lose interest in the task at hand and then underperform".

Founding and early IPAR staff. Donald MacKinnon, the leader of the team of UC Berkeley psychologists, is in the centre of the centre row. Courtesy The Moncelli Press

MacKinnon believed that creatives set extremely high goals for themselves and these can conflict with those set for a group. He argued that "good group dynamics and smooth interpersonal relations" and the "nurturing of the creative talent" were incompatible values and goals.

"Creativity is at the margins of the norm," says Serraino. "When [creatives] are forced into the norm, they become less invested. Their work is downgraded."

Buzzwords aren't enough

The IPAR study had some limitations. There was no criticism at the time but their selection criteria included media attention, which meant an architect of the calibre of Antoni Gaudi, if alive, would not have been considered; only five articles on him were published in his lifetime. The selectors also ignored Florence Knoll, John Lautner and Albert Frey. 

No women were selected for the study and the methodology used is now considered obsolete as we have developed a deeper understanding of how people perform in artificial situations.

But the study remains captivating. For a start, it's intriguing to imagine such creative personalities let loose in today's organisational or corporate environments, with their reliance on focus groups, data and algorithms, the use of consultancies for advice, the emphasis on consensus, along with the hot-desking and the open offices …

As Serraino says, "Society is an agreement to shave the edges of oneself. Anarchy unsettles society. Nevertheless, some people's edges are bigger than others."

Psychologist Abraham Maslow, best known for his "hierarchy of needs", is quoted in The Creative Architect, pointing out that creativity revolves around the absence of fear. Try typing the words "fear" and "workplace" into google and see how many pages of entries appear, from Ten Unmistakeable Signs of a Fear-based Workplace to Getting Fear out of the Workplace. 

And yet bosses and politicians – and American presidents – persist with the idea that somehow creativity can be conjured in the current corporate space if enough of the right words are used. In early March, the ABC's chief executive Michelle Guthrie announced a multimillion-dollar fund to which ABC staff – who had also just learned that up to 200 ABC jobs might go – could pitch "the very best" ideas.

Will the fund work? Is there such a thing as an innovative mindset, a highly creative person who – miraculously – won't instinctively balk at such a competition? Or, elsewhere, being asked to fill in the now ubiquitous "ideas form"?

'The courage to be oneself'

Serraino is doubtful. The several years he has spent working on the book, researching then writing, has been an adventure, taking him into an area about which he cares deeply. But he is left puzzled by the fact that the findings of MacKinnon and his team have been so neglected. (They got a rare airing in 1991, when British comedian John Cleese gave a talk about creativity at Grosvenor Square, London, which is still shared on YouTube. Cleese opened with a salient point that companies, school principals – and politicians – might want to consider: "Creativity is not a talent; it is a way of operating.")

Pierluigi Serraino's book The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study explores the conclusions of the 1950s UC Berkeley study into creativity. Author Serraino finds them in contrast to some of the contemporary ideas about innovation. Published by The Monacelli Press, available in Australia from Penguin, $65.

Serraino emails to say, "The IPAR papers and the literature of the period are filled with insights. It actually fills me with my own insight about what sticks and what doesn't over time. Did people not read this material? Or they did and forgot? And what is not relevant about this study today?"

Of course, it didn't help that Donald MacKinnon never got around to writing his book about the revolutionary study. The man who knew everything about creativity, and particularly about the drive and resolve that it took, somehow failed in resolve himself.

Better to finish with more of his quote about courage: "The most salient mark of a creative person, the central trait is … the courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to think thoughts unlike anyone-else's … the courage to follow one's intuition rather than logic … the courage to stand aside from the collectivity and in conflict with it if necessary, the courage to become and to be oneself."

Are we up for it?

The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study by Pierluigi Serraino, published by The Monacelli Press, distributed in Australia by Penguin, $65. To buy, https://penguin.com.au/books/the-creative-architect-9781580934251

 This article was published by The Australian Financial Review on April 28, 2017. Michelle Guthrie left her job as managing director of the ABC in September, 2018 in controversial circumstances. Pierluigi Serraino continues to write booksin this area and to practise as an architect.His latest book is on the work of American architectural photographer Ezra Stoller.