Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 6. The creative personality

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

—Shakespeare

Thus the creative genius may be at once naïve and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.

—Frank Barron, 1963

Now that we know something about how their brains work it would be useful to know how to spot creative people at a dinner party, say, or among a thousand candidates applying for a job at an advertising agency. For this we must turn to personality studies, the favoured experimental technique of psychologists who can't stand white mice.

This approach attempts to explain or predict human behaviour by studying the differences between individuals' personalities. It is most famous for giving us tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index (MMPI), the Myers–Briggs, the California Personality Index and many more.

The MMPI, developed in the early 1950s by the University of Minnesota, which continues to rake in a small fortune from its licensing fees, was designed to test for nine different kinds of psychopathology, including schizophrenia, psychosis, paranoia and hypochondria. The idea behind it was to enable psychiatrists to identify and label the condition of people who didn't adjust particularly well to normal life. But it was soon taken up by companies and institutions ...