Creative people start with more dots to connect
Henrik Angelstig
Business Analyst at Corsmed | Author of the blog Startup Builder |?MSc at SSE
Entrepreneurs understand the need to be creative better than most. Our very survival depends on doing more with less in ways others overlook.
But how do you “get creative”?
A Google search reveals some common advice:
These points aren’t wrong. In fact, they work very well!
But why do these suggestions make you more creative?
And how can you use that insight to more creatively solve the challenges in your startup?
That’s the topic of this essay.
What is “creativity”?
First, let’s define what creativity is.
Creativity is just connecting the dots. Every invention, artwork, or creation is just a collection of raw materials – “dots” – connected in a certain way.
But one must also connect the dots in ways different from what’s gone before. No one would label an artist who connects the same dots in the same way “creative”.
Still, you can be different without being creative. The Rolls-Royce was made by improving quality in every aspect of the car. The result was dramatically different and better. But not necessarily creative.
There are actually two kinds of different: intensity and novelty. You can be enormously successful by connecting the same dots with more intensity. But only novel connections are creative.
But novelty alone is not enough. We have all seen artworks that are unquestionably unique, but that are simply weird.
As an example, look at the two images below.
Which artwork would you say is more creative?
Most will probably pick the banana dolphins to the right. It transforms a plain fruit into something new, even pretty, in a way that’s surprisingly delightful.
The painting on the left, in contrast, is more of a hodgepodge of disparate stuff. It’s somewhat interesting. But it evokes more questions than positive emotions.
The second piece of creativity is value. The connection must fill a need that makes the dots more than the sum of their parts.
Resourcefulness is one way to create value. A hacker who achieves the same task with just 20 lines of code – that previously took 200 lines – is creative.
But addition sometimes creates value too. Why did Harry Potter become a more creative story as J.K. Rowling added more characters and details?
Because adding more characters to the same universe created a network effect.
If the story just included Harry and Voldemort, there are very few interactions that can happen. But as the number of characters increase linearly, the number of possible interactions increase exponentially.
The mental cost of keeping track of one more character is thus far less than the entertainment value that character adds – assuming the author makes those interactions interesting.
The J.K. Rowling example highlights three key points about creativity:
When a connection is both novel and valuable, we call it creativity.
In short, my definition of creativity is this:
“Creativity is connecting the dots in new ways that birth leverage.”
Most new ideas don’t work
Creativity = Novelty x Value is simple in theory. But it’s devilishly hard in practice.
That’s because the intersection between novelty and value is microscopically small.
Hitting upon a creative idea is like an archer trying to hit the intersection of two gigantic targets – but whose overlap is the width of a pinky finger. Hitting any of the two targets Novelty or Value is easy. But hitting the overlap is near impossible.
The best way to improve your odds of a creative “hit” is therefore to take more shots – i.e generate more ideas.
If the odds of a creative hit is 1%, a person who takes 100 shots has a 63% chance of one of them hitting the creative sweet spot.
An idea is born when you “connect the dots”.
But most people stumble because they start with too few diverse dots to connect.
The player who starts with the most number of diverse dots wins
Imagine a product-building contest using LEGO bricks.
There are two players: A and B. Each player gets a box of LEGO bricks to work with. And every “product” – a unique combination of LEGO bricks – has a 1% chance of being commercially viable.
Whoever comes up with the most number of successful products wins.
But here’s the catch.
This game is so clearly stacked that B will win every single time.
Now imagine the spectators celebrating B as a “creative genius!”. An “inventor without equal!” The very notion would seem absurd.
B wasn’t more creative because of talent.
For all we know, Player A might actually be twice as good at connecting dots in novel ways.
Player B was more creative because she started with more dots to connect.
This imaginative LEGO contest is also how the game of creativity is played in real life. But with one key difference:
In real life, the LEGOs are invisible elements hidden in one’s brain.
That is why one person may seem more creative than another. It’s often not that they have a superior ability to synthesize elements in novel ways.
They simply stack the game in their favor by first retrieving many more dots from their memory.
The player who retrieves the most dots from their memory wins.
The human brain – Library and Workspace
We can roughly divide the human brain into two types of memory:
The long-term memory is like a vast library – with millions of diverse “mental LEGO bricks” available for creative assembly. However, it’s a cold storage. The brain won’t start connecting these dots without prompting. ????
The working memory is like a tiny workspace – where we can consciously hold, modify, and combine ideas in new ways. This is the hot zone where much of the “connecting of dots” takes place. ????1
The problem is just how incredibly tiny our mental workspace is. Research estimates that our working memory can hold only about 4 “chunks” at the same time – a chunk being a grouping of 3-5 items. 2
What’s more, we can typically only retrieve one item at a time from our long-term memory.
Imagine you had access to a swimming pool full of LEGO bricks, but you could only retrieve them with a pair of chopsticks. ??
Then, you could only connect as many LEGOs at the same time as can fit inside a teacup. ??
That’s the creative challenge we face with our brains.
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Retrieve dots faster – anchor and association
So if the main obstacle is starting with too few dots, how can we speed up the process of retrieving more dots from our long-term memory?
The key is to use what I call anchor and association.
The human brain is wired to think in terms of associations. If I say the word “kitchen”, you’ll likely start thinking of words like “knife”, “fork”, “fridge”, “cooking”, “frying pan”, etc.
In this example, “kitchen” serves as the anchor. All the other items are associations to that anchor.
Anchor and association is like throwing out a small net in the LEGO pool – and fishing out all adjacent LEGOs in small batches at a time.
But to fish enough dots from the pool, you need to use multiple anchors.
ACE+S: Attributes, Components, Environment & Similarities
Let’s say you want to discover creative ideas for a banana. ??
To first generate enough dots, I recommend viewing the banana from three different types of anchors:
You then create three separate lists – one for each anchor – and write down as many words you can think of using each anchor.
Finally, each word you came up with is used as a new anchor, and where you write down all Similarities to that word.
As example, here are my three lists of words:
Now that we have lots of diverse dots, then – and only then – are we start connecting them.
Most connections won’t work!
Personally, I wasn’t able to find any ideas that were novel and valuable from the following connections:
But some of my connections turned out to be much more interesting!
Some examples:
Had you just asked me to “come up with creative ideas for a banana” – I’d have been stumped.
But by first generating more dots, I had more dots to connect.
And some of those connections inevitably turn out to be rather interesting!
Force yourself to work with bad ideas – they are adjacent to great ones
In her TED Talk The little risks you can take to increase your luck, professor Tina Seeling shares how she helps students be more creative by forcing them to work with terrible ideas.
After sorting her students into groups, she asks each group to come up with the worst idea for, say, a restaurant.
Some ideas her students generated were:
Next, the groups are asked to switch ideas with each other, and to make the “bad” ideas into something good.
Within a few minutes, some student always bursts out: “This is a great idea!”
When forced to work with terrible ideas, the students always find ways to transform them into something good:
By starting from seemingly “bad combinations” of dots – you end up connecting dots that no one else thought of.
”Bad” ideas are always adjacent to great ones.
Why the creativity hacks work
Let’s return to the common creativity advice:
What is the common theme these tips share?
That’s why these creativity hacks work.
Any creativity hack that follows one of these two principles will work.
Summary
Creativity = Value + Novelty.
But because the intersection between Novelty and Value is so small, most attempts at creative ideas don’t work.
That’s why you just need to generate as many ideas as possible. And new ideas come from connecting dots in new ways.
But to make a lot of new connections – you must first start with lots of dots to connect.
Your long-term memory already contains millions of dots. But they are all in cold storage. Only by bringing them out into the “hot zone” of your working memory can you start connecting them in new ways.
To be more creative in your own startup, pick one or two aspects of your business you’d like to innovate on. Then, use the ACE+S framework to generate as many related words as possible.
By starting with more diverse dots than your competitors, you stack the creative game in your favor.
In my next post, I’ll explain how to improve your odds of finding connections between your dots that are not just novel – but also valuable.
Graduate Analyst at Deutsche Bank/Cambridge Graduate
1 年Hi, I’m Seline from Imperial, now working in MiraclePlus(formerly Y-combinator China). We are looking for early-stage project for investment (from idea stage to series B) and accelerator program, pls reach out if you have any start up ideas that need any funding support or PMF guidance.?