2012-05-17

Is an IT professional less creative than an Artist?

If I only had one word to define me as a professional creative is the word I would use. The best quality an IT professional can possess is an analytical mind. I am analytical, but it does not match my creativity.

Recently I have had reasons to consider the twain traits, analyticity and creativity. Here I define creativity  as the ability to create computerized models of the real world or cyber models of reality,  and  analyticity as the ability to understand such cyber models and find faults in them. I was contemplating over the best eight [1]  guys I met in the business. I was analyzing their strengths and weaknesses and found they all are analytical (no surprise), but to my surprise I considered them relatively weak in creativeness. One of these guys once asked me for advice he had a problem with the general ledger in an accounting application. He gave me such a detailed explanation of the problem I thought he was giving me a solution, but when I outlined the solution he called me a genius, (this guy is a genius with an IQ above 150). You can focus on a problem so much you do not see the solution, this happens to me too, but more often to my more analytical friends.

I am starting to believe these two traits are XOR, you can be very creative or very analytical but not both. Of these eight guys  the one I consider least analytical is the most creative of them (and vice versa).

Eight is too few to draw far fetching conclusions from, but I wonder. I suppose  I have assumed being creative and analytical goes hand in hand. To be successful in IT you must be analytical, being a successful creative  IT professional you may be a compromise, balancing analyticity and creativity. If I’m right a creative IT professional should be less creative than successful professionals in trades where analytical skills are less important, since the creative IT guy have an analytic mind to drag along.


[1]  My selection criteria ‘I should have worked with them sufficiently to know they are top quality IT professionals’. I count to eight such guys. I will not name or describe them since some of them would resent being on my list in public.

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