About a week ago, I think it was Dan Pink that tweeted a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled “Why Creative People Are More Likely to Be Dishonest.” I bookmarked it, but before I moved on I retweeted the link with a comment that this was an aspect of creativity we shouldn’t tout too frequently.

Creativity is getting a lot of attention these days. When I saw Tom Borrup speak yesterday, he mentioned that one of the few sectors not spending a lot of time researching creativity was arts and culture. Business, he said, sees creativity as an important asset in the effort to gain a competitive edge and is investing in studying it.

The researchers in the HBR article found that people who believed creativity was something only a few possessed were more likely to be dishonest than those who felt creativity was a talent everyone shared. The researchers said for the less honest people it appeared the idea they had a rare skill lead to a sense of entitlement that different standards applied to them.

In order to combat this, the researchers suggest companies should create a sense that creativity is something everyone shares and can tap into; focus on the team being a collective of creative individuals that succeed together; don’t give people special treatment and

Carefully define what creativity is and is not. Our results demonstrate that the definition of creativity is not fixed and can be changed. While creativity involves a certain degree of risk-taking, managers should make clear that taking risks does not mean ignoring the rules and moral guidelines.

I was pleased to see the idea that everyone can be creative being promulgated. If the arts and cultural sector is going to have a long term goal of disseminating this concept, it is helpful if the message is being spread by entities and in situations that are not perceived as being aligned with arts and culture organizations.

I emphasized the point of defining what creativity is and is not because it often feels like I read about businesses who equate creativity with the risk taking and out of the box thinking that is going to catapult them to the next stage or whatever. Most of the time creativity doesn’t really step out of the box at all but reinterprets the contents of the box to emphasize different elements.

Nearly every social media app can be described as providing the ability to share images, videos and short messages with friends. What separates Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pintrest, Snapchat etc from each other is what features each focuses on.

It is probably important to point out, as the people in the article’s comment section do, that not all creative people are dishonest and not all dishonest people exhibit creativity outside of being adept at masking their dishonesty. It is also easy for people to feel entitled for reasons unrelated to recognition of their creativity.

In a number of past posts, I have noted that there is no magic formula that will engender creativity in people and organizations over the course of a short seminar. Creativity is gained by practice over time, a sentiment echoed by HBR article commenter Linda Adams.

Raise your hand if you have had an experience that resembled the first sentence:

A lot of people think creativity is simply brainstorming a bunch of ideas and that’s it—that’s where writers get “I’ve got this great idea. You write it and I’ll split it 50-50.”

But creativity is far more than coming up with ideas. It’s executing them—which is a skill that can take years or decades to learn–and taking the dynamic leaps into the unknown to see if something works. It’s taking a risk because something that we try might not work at all, but trying itself is part of the creative process and a learning experience. But most people are not going to take that much effort, and those who try are sometimes surprised about how much hard work it is.