Jacob W. Getzels was an educational psychologist at the university-of-chicago-psychology who served as csikszentmihalyi's doctoral mentor and made a foundational contribution to creativity research that would shape the flow research lineage: the concept of problem-finding.
Problem-finding
Getzels's central theoretical contribution was the distinction between problem-solving and problem-finding. Standard creativity and intelligence research of the mid-twentieth century focused on problem-solving — given a well-defined problem, how effectively does a person generate solutions? Getzels argued that this framing missed the more fundamental creative act: identifying which problems are worth solving in the first place, or formulating problems that did not previously exist as stated.
He called this problem-finding, and he argued it was the hallmark of genuinely creative work. The scientist who identifies the right question to ask, the artist who chooses the subject and composition, the entrepreneur who sees an unmet need — these are problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Getzels grounded this in empirical research, most systematically in the longitudinal study of art students he conducted with csikszentmihalyi.
The Creative Vision
creative-vision-getzels-csikszentmihalyi (1976) tracked art students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as they constructed and executed still-life drawings. The study used behavioral observation and followed participants years after graduation to assess which students had achieved lasting success in the art world. The key finding: the students who spent more time in exploratory problem formulation — handling and recombining objects, delaying commitment to a composition, remaining open to reformulation during execution — produced work judged as more creative and were significantly more likely to have successful artistic careers years later.
This was a rare genuinely longitudinal study of creativity: the problem-finding behaviors observable in the studio predicted real-world creative achievement over a decade later. The result distinguished problem-finding not as an anecdote about exceptional geniuses but as a measurable, behaviorally observable predictor of creative success.
Influence on Csikszentmihalyi's research program
Getzels's problem-finding concept fed directly into csikszentmihalyi's later work in at least two ways. First, it established csikszentmihalyi's methodological commitment to longitudinal, behavioral study of creativity — the approach that distinguished his empirical program from more anecdotal or retrospective creativity research. Second, the problem-finding concept reappeared in creativity-flow-and-psychology-of-discovery (1996), where csikszentmihalyi extended it into the "systems model" of creativity, arguing that creative individuals are distinguished partly by their ability to identify which problems within a domain are worth working on.
The systems model — in which creativity requires a domain (symbol system), a field (gatekeepers who select innovations), and a person who can navigate both — owes its emphasis on the social and domain-embedded nature of problem formulation to Getzels's foundational insight that creativity begins with problem-finding, not problem-solving.
Position in the lineage
Getzels is the intellectual grandfather of the creativity strand of the flow lineage. He is not primarily a flow researcher — his work predates and sits adjacent to flow theory — but his shaping of csikszentmihalyi's doctoral research established the empirical approach and several theoretical commitments that flow research inherited. The KB's creativity research strand, anchored in creativity-flow-and-psychology-of-discovery, traces directly back through the problem-finding concept and the longitudinal method Getzels pioneered.