What a 1968 NASA Test Still Gets Wrong About Creativity, and Why AI Makes It Matter More

Almost every talk on creativity opens the same way, with a test NASA commissioned in 1968 to identify its most creative engineers and scientists. The test did its job well enough that the agency put people on the moon the following year. Later, the researchers behind it, George Land and Beth Jarman, turned the same instrument into a longitudinal study of children and found something startling. Among five-year-olds, 98 percent scored at what they called genius level for creativity. By adulthood, only 2 percent did.

It is a wonderful story, and it gets told constantly. It is also widely misunderstood, in three ways that count for more now than they ever have.

First, it was not a creativity test

The NASA instrument measured divergent thinking: the ability to generate a large number of ideas and possibilities from a single prompt. That is a useful capacity, but it is not the same thing as creativity. Generating many options is one input to creative work, not the whole of it. Treating a divergent-thinking score as a creativity score is like treating someone’s vocabulary as their ability to write a novel. Related, clearly. The same thing, no.

Second, it asks the wrong question

Almost every retelling lands on the same closing line: who in this room still thinks they are creative? It is the wrong question. The better one is: who here is inviting creativity in? Who feels free enough, unjudged enough, uninhibited enough, to let it happen?

Because the issue for most adults is not a shortage of imagination. It is inhibition. We learn, over years, to edit ourselves, to censor the half-formed idea before it reaches our mouths, to play it safe. And it is rational, because the stakes climb as we age. A five-year-old drawing a purple horse risks nothing. An adult floating an unusual idea in a meeting risks their credibility, and behind that sit mortgages, school fees, performance reviews and shareholders. The problem is not that adults became less creative. It is that adults became less free.

Third, it draws the wrong lesson

The usual conclusion is that we should all train our divergent thinking, run more brainstorms, generate more ideas. But divergent thinking was only ever one part. What decides whether anything comes of it is how that raw material gets shaped, and that is largely a leadership responsibility, not an individual one.

Creativity does not happen inside a single head. It lives in a system: an individual produces something novel, a field of people, the managers, leaders and gatekeepers, decides whether it is accepted, and only then does the wider domain actually change. An idea that never makes it past the field is not, in any practical sense, creative. It is just a thought that died in a meeting. Which means the conditions a leader sets, what gets heard, what gets encouraged, what gets filtered out, matter as much as anyone’s raw ideation.

Why AI sharpens all of this

Here is what makes a 1968 test suddenly urgent in 2026. AI has made divergent thinking essentially free. Infinite options, instantly, on any prompt you like. The one capacity the NASA test measured, the generation of many possibilities, is now the cheapest thing in the building.

So the scarce and valuable skill is no longer generating ideas. It is shaping and selecting them, and building the conditions in which a good idea can actually move from a private thought into accepted practice. If the lesson of 1968 was protect your divergent thinking, the lesson of 2026 is the opposite end of the same system: you now have infinite divergence on tap, and what you lack is the field that lets the right ideas through.

The real question was never whether you are creative. It is whether you are inviting creativity in. In an age of infinite options, that is the only version of the question that still pays.

Frequently asked questions

What was the NASA creativity test?

A test developed in 1968 by George Land and Beth Jarman, originally to help NASA identify highly innovative engineers and scientists. It measured divergent thinking, the ability to generate many ideas from a single prompt.

Does the test prove we lose creativity as we age?

Not exactly. The study found divergent-thinking scores fall sharply from childhood to adulthood, but that is better understood as growing inhibition and rising stakes than as a loss of underlying creative ability. Adults become less free to express ideas, not less able to have them.

Can creativity be taught?

The generation of ideas can be developed, but the bigger lever is the environment. Creativity emerges in a system, so leaders who build the conditions for ideas to be voiced, heard and accepted often unlock more creativity than any individual technique does.

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The Creative Leader programme is about exactly this: building the conditions in which a team’s creativity is actually invited in. Start a conversation.