When we asked 760 teachers, parents, professionals, and lifelong learners how creativity actually shows up in their lives, the gap between belief and reality became impossible to ignore.
We all believe creativity matters.
Across our research, one message came through loud and clear: creativity is no longer an optional skill reserved for artists or inventors. It is increasingly important for navigating school, work, and everyday life.
Our data exhibits a collective urgency to embed creativity in learning experiences from youth through adulthood.
96% of parents and teachers indicated that creativity is essential or very useful for learning and future readiness. And yet, the same people described systems that actively work against it.
Creativity, unpacked: how people see it
Creativity means different things to different people. Our survey included teachers, parents, lifelong learners, and business professionals, and it revealed diverse perspectives on creativity’s role in everyday life.
When people are given the opportunity to define creativity, unanimity seems unattainable.
We offered the following definitions with the opportunity to choose as few or as many as resonated:
- Artistic Expression – Creativity is about making art, music, or other forms of personal expression.
- Problem-Solving – Creativity is finding new or different ways to solve challenges.
- Innovation – Creativity is developing fresh ideas, products, or approaches that bring change or improvement.
- Everyday Thinking & Expression – Creativity is using imagination and flexibility in daily life, learning, or work.
Creativity means different things to different people, but patterns emerge. 63% of teachers see creativity as ‘everyday thinking and expression,’ shifting the traditional view of creativity as art toward daily problem-solving. Meanwhile, 45% of lifelong learners embraced all four definitions, reinforcing a more expansive view.
These findings reinforce the idea that creativity is a universal skill set that everyone can nurture.
Understanding how people define creativity is one thing. Understanding what they wish they could do more of is another.
Experimentation and collaboration are the creative skills people want most.
When participants were asked which creative skills they most wanted to strengthen, one answer consistently rose to the top. Across teachers, parents, lifelong learners, and business professionals, “trying new things and experimenting” ranked among the highest-priority skills to develop. With the extended definition of the skill, which includes showing a willingness to take risks and try different approaches, these findings suggest that people are seeking permission to experiment and explore.
Many participants connected experimentation with resilience – the willingness to stick with ideas when success is uncertain and solutions are not immediately obvious.
What unites it all together is the benefit of working with people who think differently.
These skills reflect a desire to shift how the creativity skill set is experienced.
The systems around us aren’t always designed for creativity.
Again and again, participants described workplace and learning environment expectations that crowd out exploration.
Teachers described fear of failure and low self-confidence as major obstacles to students’ creative engagement. When the expectation is to produce the right answer quickly, people naturally become less willing to take creative risks. This is exacerbated by the lack of peer support in teamwork and compounded by a packed curriculum. “We all are running from the morning till the end of the day, and we are pushing the kids too much.”
For professionals, workplace cultures that inhibit risk-taking or fail to offer opportunities to contribute meaningfully create additional barriers. “At my job, I am expected to get the job done, but new ideas are not encouraged. This risk-aversion makes the job uninspiring.”
Families juggle competing priorities, offering little room for open play and exploration. “I would say that the majority of families I know schedule (and way overschedule) something for every day of the week.”
These expectations can often lead to overwhelm. With pressure to perform at work, in school, or as a parent trying to do the best for their children, our ability to use our creative skill set diminishes. Even external factors beyond these environments contribute to the emotional overload.
But overwhelm doesn’t just come from too much pressure. It can also come from too little structure. One teacher shared, “Sometimes I’m assigning a project prompt to explore a specific topic; the open-endedness of that can also feel as if it’s too big to even approach. Unlimited can feel overwhelming.”
Rather than inspiring innovation, unlimited possibilities often lead to decision paralysis in both adults and young people. When people have difficulty making decisions, it can seem as if they lack creativity.
Creativity needs boundaries to thrive. There is a clear call to shift systems so they better support creative skills.
Creativity prospers with authentic connection.
That connection can be with peers, mentors, and the Self, as our participants revealed.
Participants described collaboration as reducing fear, increasing confidence, and exposing people to perspectives they would not discover on their own. They also noted that authentic relationships matter just as much as structured teamwork.
As one participant reflected:
“Sharing life experience with students with honesty and authenticity leads to trust and engagement.”
Creativity is rarely a lone endeavor. It flourishes when people feel psychologically safe enough to contribute ideas, make mistakes, and learn.
When participants considered creativity as artistic expression, they spoke of its role in their well-being. For lifelong learners especially, creative activities were described as a way to restore balance, process stress, and reconnect with joy. Sharing creative hobbies through clubs or libraries helped sustain creative engagement amid busy lives.
Others highlighted the importance of downtime, nature, and unstructured play – not as distractions from productivity, but as conditions that enable creativity.
The relationship appears reciprocal.
Creativity supports well-being, and well-being supports creativity.
The Creativity Conversation continues, and the central question remains how to support it.
When we step back, we see reciprocal relationships everywhere. A wider definition of creativity opens doors to well-being. And the more people use creativity to solve daily problems, the more that wider definition becomes accepted. Each reinforces the other.
If a workplace or learning space doesn’t value questioning and innovating on what already exists, creativity skills shrink. Creativity skills, like all skills, transform with practice. We all have muscles, but those muscles become more limber when stretched and contracted, given space to explore within one’s unique physical and mental limits. The participants in this study want that space. With the opportunities to experiment and take risks in supportive environments, job satisfaction increases, leading to expanded well-being.
And yet, those same environments only seem to add value when there is an equal balance with unstructured exploration or play, remembering that play means different things to people of differing ages and lived experiences. Connecting with people, being out in nature, and being joyful calm the nervous system, reducing overwhelm that is such a clear barrier to creativity.
More than 760 participants contributed to this exploration of creativity through surveys and conversations. Taken together, their experiences point toward a common conclusion:
Creativity is connected to everything—and it is shaped by the environments we encounter, the relationships that nurture us, and the opportunities to explore.
These voices call for recognizing that we are all creative, given the right conditions. The question is whether we’re willing to build those conditions. If you want to be part of this ongoing conversation, join us for the next Creativity Conversation discussions.
About the Author
Renee Rainville is the Global Strategic Partnerships Consultant at Destination Imagination.
Destination Imagination, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) volunteer-led nonprofit organization whose purpose is to inspire and equip students to become the next generation of innovators and leaders. The organization is a leader in project-based learning experiences, where students work together in teams to solve open-ended, STEAM-based (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) Challenges and then present their solutions at tournaments. Destination Imagination has impacted more than 1 million students worldwide.
