“Creativity eats strategy for breakfast”
-A sentence I’ve heard from many a leader in my over a decade long career as a so called “creative”. I appreciate the acknowledgement, but I’m pretty sure most of "them", and many of "us", don’t really know how creativity works.
When I transitioned from Art Direction in editorial and advertising to UX design and product development, I noticed a troubling trend: we often treat creativity like an engineered process, with fixed steps and predictable outcomes. This mindset likely stems from project management systems like Scrum and Kanban, or the data-driven, efficiency-obsessed culture at places like Google. Or maybe through an endeavor to persuade suits that our job is a profession and not a hobby. But creativity doesn’t work this way. It’s a biological process—cyclical, organic, and deeply tied to unpredictability. It thrives on novelty, the very thing that makes ideas memorable and valuable.
Creativity is biological, like a plant. And like a plant, it doesn’t start as a seed and end after flowering. It’s cyclical, where seeds lead to plants, which leads to flowers, which leads to pollination, which lead to seeds again. It’s a continuous process, and you can’t say that a plant starts with a seed anymore than a seed starts with a plant. Creativity needs an environment that nurtures its cyclical nature, drawing in energy from outside influences. Pollination and nutrients from the earth, if you will. It requires sunlight—time and space to develop, cross-pollinating through new experiences and collaborations. By trying to squeeze creativity into a linear, step-by-step process, we lose its essence: the unpredictability that makes it powerful.
Formulaic, linear approaches to creativity are like template-based music; they might be catchy, and we might be able to predict when the song is “finished” more easily, but they lack the surprise of Billie Eilish’s whispered vocals or Aviciis blend of electronica and country music (which, of course, has been copied after, but obviously to lesser success). When others merely try to replicate these expressions, they may sound similar but inevitably fall flat. In a best case scenario, they end up like fun artifacts, but they are quickly forgotten.
This cyclical nature is what gave every successful artist like Marcel Duchamp, and every successful designer like Dieter Rams and Jony Ive their edge. They didn’t just create; they pushed everyone else to rethink what art and function could be. But following their steps isn’t true creativity. In an attempt to do what they have done before, we do the opposite; we paint-by-numbers when we should be using our incredible brain instead of, to be blunt, turn it off. Yes, we can learn from them, and probably should, but simply changing the colors of a “winning” design isn’t innovation—it’s laziness.
In a world overflowing with content, users have become experts at spotting the poor copies. Dozens of great apps and thousands of videos and photos are consumed every day. Everyone is an experienced curator of good design. And they are not easily fooled.
Like my art history professor May Britt once told me: “It’s not that Duchamp or André Breton created art that was inherently interesting because of the singular artworks. It’s that they forced every other artist to reconsider what art is.” I think the same applies for Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive. They forced the entire electronics industry to reconsider what an MP3-player and a phone really is. Needless to say, if we used a linear process with the end goal to create another “Fountain”, or another iPod for that matter, we’d most likely end up with not only a lesser copy, but an outdated idea.
Here in Norway, a country built largely by engineers, the predictability mindset is pervasive. I’m grateful that predictable engineering processes built our bridges, boats and oil platforms, but I’m also extremely grateful that someone came up with the novel idea of taxing oil companies 80 % to access our natural resources, and, on top of that, Farouk Al-Kasim and Hermod Sk?nland initiated and built the Norwegian petroleum fund investing that tax cash in foreign companies. The latter was a major contributing factor to Norway become one of the richest countries in the world. The two ideas, strict engineering and room to think novel thoughts, led to the success of the Norwegian energy adventure.
The best ideas don’t arise in isolation. They emerge from intersections of diverse minds and unplanned moments of collaboration. Norway’s engineering prowess has built a remarkable society, but imagine what could happen if we embraced a bit more of the uncontrollable, the cycles of unpredictability that drive true innovation. Not only in art and a few advertising agencies, but in design, journalism, business development, user interfaces or whatever else unavoidably relies on people experiencing the product being made. Some people do it, but few companies have a culture supporting it. We need the people paying the bills to understand this, not just the keynote speakers at conferences.
Ultimately, real value lies in those unplanned cycles, where creativity responds to the world around it and continually evolves. That’s where the magic happens. Everywhere. Not in steps 6-8 in a Trello-board. Not by following a company handbook of “creativity.” And it’s when the "magic" of creativity happens, and is allowed to happen everywhere, at any part of any process, uncontrollably, that we not only innovate but also grab, and deserve, peoples attention.