ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to examine relationships between NDS concepts and creative thinking at the individual and group levels of analysis. Dynamics that occur at the organizational and societal levels of analysis will be involved to some extent. A new theory emerges that involves NDS concepts of chaos, bifurcation, catastrophe, and self-organization. In doing so, it incorporates existing theory and addresses issues that have not been fully explored by conventional theory. Several questions become parenthetically important: (a) What are the relation-
ships between individual, group, organizational, and societal processes? (b) How do the relationships between system levels contribute to the understanding of creative processes at any of the levels of analysis? (c) Do any new rules emerge to explain how ideas are generated or how idea elements assembled into other new ideas? (d) What insights does it give to the group productivity problem, whereby the intellectual productivity of groups is only about half the time better than the production of the most competent individual? (e) Does NDS suggest whether creative ability is widely or narrowly distributed in the population? (f) Can an idea ever be original, or is “originality” a flattering but vacant construct? The exposition begins with some basic and recent themes in creativity research.
Themes involve general definitions, principles of divergent thinking, personality, cognitive style, environment, motivation, and the investment theory of creativity,
alongwith a growing awareness of exponential effects in creative production.Next, ideas will rush in through the nearest window in a chaotic flurry, then self-organize into something resembling the solution to a problem. The speed of the flurry and self-organizing process vary a bit depending on whether one problem solver or a problem solving group is involved.
