Narrating creativity: Developing an emic, first person approach to creativity research— Mandy Chilcott and Daved Barry

Despite the complexity of workplace creativity, laboratory or survey-based quantitative research conducted in the positivist tradition supports a trend towards prescriptive ‘recipied’ lists for stimulating creativity. In contrast, by recognising creativity as a complex multi-level system, we were inspired by ideas from narrative therapy to develop a new narrative inquiry methodology that uses personal storytelling to collaboratively investigate, promote intelligent reflection on, and enhance the creativity process.

Our aim was to explore how taking a pragmatic constructivist approach might unfold a new way of eliciting richly descriptive realworld information that exploits local situated knowledge (what we call ‘emic creativity’) about the individual and group creative processes within a workplace. Using a developmental application of the methodology as a single-level case study on gaming designers in Denmark, we found that the new emic creativity methodology can contribute valuable information about creativity within a particular system.