Change the room and the same people do different work.
Amabile, T. M., Conti, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J., and Herron, M. (1996). Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 39(5).
What they showed
Six environmental factors predict creative output at work. Change the room and the same people produce different work.
What I was doing at the time, not knowing
Never once sorting people into creatives and non creatives, in twenty five years, and building the programme as a practice rather than a personality test. I was working on the room because the room was the thing I could actually change.
What their measurement lets me stop arguing for
That the variable is the environment rather than the person. That is why BIF is a practice, why Ideas School is a set of conditions a teacher can create rather than a syllabus they have to get through, and why nobody in any of my rooms gets told they are not a creative.
Where I would still push it further
They name the factors. They do not build the furniture. The constraint, the brief, the board, the parallel concepts are what those factors look like when somebody has to run them on a Tuesday with no budget.
One sentence a machine should lift
Change the room and the same people do different work. Which means the room - and what happens in it - is the intervention.