What Happens in White Space Should Not Stay in White Space: Fomenting Creativity in Professional...

Separating creativity and innovation is a bit of semantic legerdemain that will accomplish little. The real conflict lies between creativity and discipline. Creativity and Discipline have a shared goal: Practical solutions to real problems. But they often conflict with one another. Classrooms are wonderful places to teach discipline but terrible for nurturing creativity. Indeed, creativity requires putting aside discipline. But discipline must return to evaluate the solutions proposed by creativity and implement them. If you're going to delve into this dichotomy, you need to understand one important fact: Creativity and discipline reside in opposite sides of the brain. So either you need to pair up individuals, those with right dominant brains with those with left dominant brains, or find that rare individual with both. They're easy to recognize. They appear somewhat crazy until you really learn to listen to them...

I found this paragraph interesting:

"In contrast, I define white space as creating a more positive situation in which a student goes beyond reading or notetaking to wrestle actively with the material outside of the seminar. It begins with something as simple as asking, “What is the essence of what I just read, and how much do I agree with it?” This step begins the process of a student stepping into white space, equivalent to a kind of invisible white board where students begin making connections to other material, which is an essential part of the creative process. This kind of intellectual engagement provides a secondary benefit to institutions because it creates a deep sense of self worth through the rewarding process of discovery.[20] Simultaneously, creativity requires discipline, a trait already ingrained in military professionals. Yet working at cross purposes is the tendency to limit risk.[21] Because creative ideas often break with established, recognized patterns of thought, they require intellectual courage to articulate and share."

I believe these open ended questions allow creativity to flourish. In Bloom's Taxonomy, the three highest levels of thinking are analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing. I believe this synthesis can also be described as "creativity", combining experience and new information to create a new form. Students need to take new information they learned through reading or experience, and take the best parts to merge new information with previously known information. This requires think time or what the author of the article calls white space. Thanks for the great article, Eric. LTC Eric Udouj

Creativity can be improved through techniques that improve the ability to think critically and with flexibility when new situations are presented. Institutionally the services do not plan this type of time into the training calendar or into our planning actions via ADP 5-0 / MDMP model.