Openness to experience is, of the five Big Five dimensions, the strongest predictor of creative output. McCrae (1987) first showed this convincingly, and the finding has been replicated dozens of times since. High scorers produce more ideas, draw unusual connections and are more comfortable in ambiguity.
But the trait alone produces nothing. Someone who scores high on openness but fills their time with routine work will not generate creative output. Someone who scores low can extract a great deal of productive creativity with the right structure. The trait sets your natural preference; practice determines what you actually make.
This article works through six concrete exercises — three for high scorers who want to channel their creative drift into finished outcomes, and three for low scorers who want to produce more creativity without giving up their structure. For the theory behind the trait itself, read Openness creativity and innovation.
For high scorers on openness
High scorers rarely have too few ideas. They often have too many — and too little discipline to finish one. The three exercises below target channelling, not stimulation.
Exercise 1: the three-week rule
High scorers fall in love with a new idea easily and let older half-finished projects gather dust. The pattern repeats until a whole shelf of started projects exists, none of them complete.
The three-week rule works like this: when a new idea arrives that would displace a current project, write it down on a separate list and wait three weeks. Only then do you assess whether it really is better than what you are making now. In most cases the idea proves less brilliant than the first rush suggested, and you can keep working calmly on the existing project. In a minority of cases it really is better — and then you close the current project deliberately, with completion and lessons learned, instead of quietly abandoning it.
This is an external brake on the high-openness impulse to choose novelty over completion. It does not cost creativity; it channels it.
Exercise 2: forced completion
Reserve one block per week — two to four hours — in which you only work on something you have already started. No new exploration, no new direction, no new sketch. Only finishing what is there.
The trick is that high scorers often find the end of a project boring. Setting up is fun, working out is satisfying, but the last twenty percent — debugging, polishing, finishing — feels repetitive. A fixed weekly block exclusively for finishing work builds a habit that your trait does not produce on its own.
Exercise 3: the external deadline
High scorers consistently underestimate how long things take. Their openness to experience means they get fascinated by side paths, and a project they estimated at two weeks is still running after three months.
An external deadline — a publication date, a presentation, an appointment with someone waiting for the output — creates an anchor point your natural tendency cannot drift past. Not every deadline needs to be heavy; sometimes "I will show it next Friday" is enough. The social obligation compensates for what internal discipline lacks.
For low scorers on openness
Low scorers rarely lack structure. They often lack exposure to the unfamiliar. The three exercises below target input, not output.
Exercise 4: one unfamiliar domain per month
Read one long article, one book chapter, or listen to one podcast per month from a field far from yours. Not to become an expert, but to hear the thinking patterns of another discipline.
A bookkeeper who reads one chapter per month from an evolutionary biology text hears ways of thinking about systems that do not exist in his own field. A developer who listens to one long architecture podcast per month encounters new metaphors for code structure. The combination of the familiar and the foreign is where creativity emerges (Simonton, 1997).
The trick for low scorers is to structure this — a monthly appointment with yourself, a list of candidate topics, a fixed time. The openness does not come from a spontaneous interest; it comes from planned exposure.
Exercise 5: three-ideas time
Reserve twenty minutes per week in which you write down three ideas for a question you are wrestling with. Not judged, not worked out — just written. The first two ideas are usually obvious. The third forces you past the obvious.
Diehl and Stroebe (1987) showed that brainstorming rules — "write without judgement", "quantity over quality", "build on others" — work especially well for people who do not naturally think creatively. For someone who scores low on openness, this is therefore a disproportionately large improvement.
Exercise 6: borrow the eye of a high scorer
Low scorers often produce better creativity in dialogue than in monologue. A friend, colleague or mentor with high openness can offer in an hour of conversation ten ideas you would not have generated in a week. Your contribution is the structural filter: which of those ten ideas is executable within your constraints, and how do you make it concrete?
This division of labour is exactly where mixed teams win. A high-scoring colleague without a structure partner produces ideas that do not land; a low-scoring colleague without an idea partner produces execution without direction. Together they work.
When none of these work
None of these exercises works for everyone. Three factors are often decisive.
Sleep and recovery. Creativity is among the most cognitively expensive activities, and chronic sleep loss diminishes it drastically (Walker, 2017). No technique compensates for four nights of six hours. For anyone serious about creativity, sleep hygiene is the first intervention.
Time protection. Creative work requires uninterrupted blocks of at least ninety minutes. Someone who fills their day with meetings and six-minute gaps cannot produce serious creative output with any technique. First free the time, then apply the technique.
Social pressure. Many work environments reward predictability and punish experimentation — especially large organisations with strong compliance requirements. Someone whose environment consistently says "do what we always did" cannot apply their openness productively without either changing the environment or moving some of their work outside it.
How openness combines with your other traits
Openness alone does not tell the whole story of your creativity. High openness with high conscientiousness (resembling the Heimdall or Odin archetype) produces systematic, finished creativity. High openness with low conscientiousness (Loki) produces an abundance of ideas that rarely land. High openness with high extraversion (Freyja) produces socially creative output — collaboration, performance, collective imagination.
That is the value of a full personality profile: a score on one dimension gives you a direction, a combination of five dimensions gives you a pattern. See Norse mythology personality types explained for the full matrix.
Want to know where you score on openness and how it relates to your other Big Five dimensions? Take the free Big Five test — five minutes, and you receive your scores plus a personal translation to elements and archetype.
For related depth: Openness creativity and innovation, Big Five facets explained, Improving self-awareness.
References
- Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: Toward the solution of a riddle. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497–509.
- McCrae, R. R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1258–1265.
- Simonton, D. K. (1997). Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Psychological Review, 104(1), 66–89.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.
- Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
