Nearly a decade ago in 2010, Newsweek magazine drew attention to “The Creativity Crisis” in a July cover story. Two details in that report have always stuck with me: the first is that the creativity scores of children and adults have been consistently declining since 1990.

The other is from IBM. A survey of 1,500 companies revealed that creativity was a top skill missing in today’s workforce but was considered essential for business growth.

NASA sponsored researchers have also revealed compelling data demonstrating that at age 3 98% of us are creative geniuses. But, by the time we’re in our 20s, that number falls to just 2%.

As I learned more about the creativity crisis I noticed two confounding circumstances. The first is that there’s a huge misunderstanding about it. Many feel creativity has no roll outside of the arts — that creativity is all about making pretty things. The other, as experts like Ken Robinson and KH Kim have explained, is that rote learning methods and over-programming children both diminish creativity.

Nearly everything manmade that inspires us — whether that’s a new smartphone, a rocket launch or a poem — is the result of someone who harnessed their creative side, who engaged with the world in a way that wasn’t seen before. As artificial intelligence transforms industries, we also cannot predict what the jobs of the future will look like. But 21st century skills like creativity will help prepare both us and our children for the future. Free play, as Robinson notes, is key to engaging creativity.

Read the full article on creativity by priya bery at medium.com