The This and That of Creativity

What is Creativity?

A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend an evening at a writing related event with Iain Banks . As you would imagine, he was delightful. During our conversation, I admitted to him that, when I was having my first attempt at writing a book - which became The Beatle Man , I used part of the plot of The Wasp Factory as inspiration. He simply smiled said “everyone does that”. When you are discussing creativity, it seems unnecessarily defeatist to parrot out that there is nothing new in the world. After all, it is patently untrue. New things happen all the time. But, for most of us, we most often receive and react to things are that genuinely new rather than actually create them. Very few of us are at the edge of anything new. I, for one, spend very little of my time trying to solve the problem of superconductivity at room temperature or building my own LLM, yet most of us are required to be problem solvers.

So, when we discuss what we mean by creativity, we are not really discussing the new but we are discussing new ways to solve problems. This may seem like a pointless and pedantic distinction but I think it is a very important one. If we measure creativity by insisting on genuine acts of creation or innovation then we will disappointed but we will be measuring the wrong thing. Also, we will approach improving our creativity in the wrong way. The truth is, most people understand that creativity relates to problem solving but the danger is the language around it suggests otherwise. I don’t want to go around bursting everyone’s bubbles, but very, very few of us are genuinely creative. I would consider myself a creative person in the most basic sense but I know that I never really do anything genuinely new. I’m writing this in an application someone else wrote, on a laptop that someone else built, based on a chipset that some clever people designed. This is the thing we must understand, our creativity is as users of other things to solve problems in new ways.

The Obligatory Space Reference

In those few days of glorious panic that was the Apollo 13 mission, one of the many problems they had to solve was reducing the amount of CO2? in the cabin, breathing being an important component of survival. They had to make the spare CO2 scrubbers from the Command Module usable in the Lunar Module or, to use the more succinct description from the film “We gotta find a way to make?this?fit into the hole for?this?using nothing but?that.” Now, if we accept that we are all users of other people’s creations to solve our problems, this has to be our new mantra. Because it drives us to the most important thing to fuel our innovation, get a better understanding of both this and that, this being the problem and that being the tools and techniques we have at our disposal.

This - The Problem Space

Whenever you are assessing a problem space it is important that you understand the nature of that problem as fundamentally as possible. The issue with any problem is that problems produce symptoms and they are often more directly observable. So you go after the solution to the symptom and end up with a partial solution or, in the extreme cases, you actually make it worse unintended consequences often spring from erroneously going after symptoms or building solutions to partially understood problems.

Being fond of an analogy, I offer you the story of Isaac Newton discovering the spectrum of colours in white light . The mercifully short version is that Newton split the light with a prism and saw the various colours emerge. He then put the coloured light through another prism and observed that he got the same colour out i.e. he had arrived at the fundamental colours of the light.

This “prisming” process is essential in assessing a problem space. Every observed problem must be broken down into any and all underlying problems so you address fundamental root causes. Too much of what is done to improve things is symptom based, superficial, skimming the surface of a problem to give the appearance that it is being addressed. This is why so many problems boil down to culture because the “prisming” of a problem space often reveals something relating to people at its core. The art of decomposition of a problem is a really important and undervalued skill. We tend to value people who are good at attacking symptoms because it feels more direct, more vital. It isn’t. Find the people who can see beyond the symptoms, the ones with the prisms that can break down the light to its fundamental colours.

That - The Available Solutions

Ideation Wheels

Before we get too far into that, I would like to (re)introduce the idea of ideation wheels. I wrote this on my blog to literally no acclaim about 8 years ago. As a way of visualising the use of this and that in problem solving it still stands up. The third factor I used in this model was assets. I now prefer the conflation of what I then called solutions and assets into the that of a simpler Apollo 13 model. The method is still the same, you look at all the things you have on the table and you spin the wheels to see if they might help solve the problem. You can nest the wheels to allow you to combine tools and techniques together.

I mention this because it helps to visualise a very obvious fact. The more solutions you have on your wheel, the more chance you have of finding something that might help solve the problem.? The more of that you have, the bigger the chance of solving this.? I’m sure the NASA engineers would have liked a much bigger pile of things to choose from. And so it is with every problem solving activity.

Filling Your That Bucket

The more tools and techniques you know about, the more chance you have of coming up with an innovative way of addressing a problem. This means you need to actively fill your bucket. It has to become part of every day, every week. And it is very important not to simply fill your bucket with accepted doctrinal thought. You will find lots of content that says “if you’re trying to do this, use that” - often shadow-sponsored by the makers of that. Avoid such dogma as much as you can. Not least because it can often lead you down the wrong path of understanding the problem. You have to look through your own prism, not a concoction of someone else that seems to resemble your problem.?

The best way to avoid other people’s dogma is to look in entirely different places. I very rarely consume any business content. Instead, I wander widely through any and all things, history, art, philosophy, wherever I end up. I subscribe to a great thing called The Browser that sends me an email a day with links to five interesting articles which I will read voraciously. The simple fact is you can never know what’s useful. If you only consume things that result from the search for “how do I solve my problem” you will only ever get answers that other people have come up with. It can never be new. Innovation comes from wild adjacency. The key skills are reading, understanding, remembering and then, crucially, making connections. You will never regret filling a big bucket full of that.

That Before This

People get excited by cool stuff. And why not? What’s wrong with cool stuff? Well, the issue that arises a lot is when people get so excited by a particular that that they think it can be used to solve any number of problems. You can see this now with GenAI, no doubt it is a powerful hammer, but that doesn’t make everything a nail. Getting this before that will always be essential, even with the coolest of solutions. The big issue with the cool stuff is that it tends to get rammed into people’s faces as the hype rises and, senior people in particular, start to feel the compulsion not to miss out. You don’t really know you’re having a bad sleep until you are bombarded with Dormeo Octasmart adverts - and then you can’t possibly live without one.

Headspace

No, not the meditation app. This is about the understanding of the mental conditioning you need to have the best chance to have a good thought.

In the forward to a later edition of Douglas Adams’ complete Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Neil Gaiman tells the story of the writing of the fourth instalment, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish . The first three books came from Adams’ earlier genius radio work, he had never had to come up with a book out of nothing before but, because of a long tale of financial woe, he had to. He holed up in a hotel and wasn’t allowed to leave until he had a book. By my rules, the worst possible conditions for creating anything. He was literally writing a page at a time and handing it to an editor in an adjacent room. What he ended up with is half a great book. The sad thing is, you can almost see the point where he ran out of ideas and went on a sprint to write “The End” and, presumably, collect a much needed cheque. At least the first half is great and, if you are among the dozen people who have read Terra Exitus , you may have seen traces of the delight of Arthur and Fenchurch amidst the misery.

Far too many times in my working career I have been involved in workshops of one kind or another where we have tried to crowdsource “ideas” by handing out Post-Its and people scurry off to write something and stick it on the wall. It never works. No one has had time to think, to create. What they produce in the moment is often bland and obvious because everyone feels compelled to write something. That is not how ideas work. You can’t hand someone a piece of paper and shout “create something new NOW!”. Original thought is hard. It needs time. It needs space and it needs a wide variety of stimuli. You need to have a space in your head for the ideas to flow into. If your mind is filled with thought, they won’t appear as they have nowhere to go. Exactly how you get to that mental state will be individual so it is unlikely that ideas will ever come from having everyone together unless you have given them time and space in advance to have the ideas in their own best way.

My third novel, Science Fiction (out now!) came out pretty much fully formed from a single shower. I started with the idea of writing some science fiction and came out the shower with the plot, dried quickly, ran to the iPad and scribbled it down. You have to write it down quickly. These thoughts are like dreams, the balloons that drift away if you let go of the string. If I’d tried to create that at the screen it wouldn’t have happened. Much of the subsequent detail in the book was devised in showers. Horrible mental images aside, showers are a creative hotspot for me. Someone who understands these things would be able to detail the difference in mental state in a shower versus sitting at a desk but, whatever that is, it is very important for my creative process. Can I call it that without sounding a bit… y’know? Probably not. I recently watched the film Tick Tick Boom . When Jonathan Larson has a song he can’t write, he goes for a swim and it suddenly appears. Would never happen when I swim, the pain fills the space where the thoughts should be.

In my experience, creation doesn’t happen at the screen. The work doesn’t happen at the screen. It’s maybe a little like the difference between architecture and construction. The art of creation then the process of building (not ignoring the creation involved in the building). I can build very quickly when I have good plan. I can’t build at all without one. And the plan will appear at the strangest of times. As Albert Camus put it “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.” And yet, how many of us allow such ridiculous beginnings to happen in a work context? How often to we even admit that that is how we work best? Have you have stood up from your desk and said “I’m going for a walk in search of a ridiculous beginning”? Probably not. Because the rules state that work needs to look like work. This leaves me torn when you combine this thought with the subject of hybrid working. The current accepted view is that office time is necessary for “collaboration”. I agree with this. There is massive amounts of value to be gained from time together but I think the collaboration is best to focus on understanding the problem space rather than developing the answers. The answers are more likely to come on the bus home. One of the biggest things we lose in not going to office is the different headspace you get during your commute. The planning of collaboration time needs to follow a loose structure. Everyone comes together to prism the problem, understand it, define it. Everyone then goes away to their own personal mind palace, shower, isolation tank and has ideas in their own way. Then everyone gets back together to share what they have come up with in a safe, nothing is stupid, environment. Iterate, do that all again, because once you’ve heard other people’s ideas, maybe yours will get better, reflection on any inputs is key, as Dugald Stewart said in Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind:

“Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection.” Or, in Anthony Burgess’ more succinct version "Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”

To organise your teams to do this, consider this simple scheme, particularly in relation to how you organise for hybrid working:

• Problem space, prisming (together)
• Understanding (together)
• Ideation (alone)
• Sharing (together)
• Reflection (alone)

Sadly not a cool acrostic but perhaps useful, nonetheless.

Organisational Brakes

It’s not just about how you organise your time that’s important, there are a number of ways that organisations can install invisible brakes on their progress. The first thing to consider is if you are hiring the right people or if you are listening to the noisy ones or the most senior ones instead of the quiet ones. The most creative person might also be the quietest - or you might never have hired them because they interviewed terribly. Creative minds are often compelled to create, so what someone does out of work is important. But don't confuse making things with creativity, it isn't always. Making things can often be copying an existing design. That demonstrates the ability to learn and mimic but not necessarily create.

A Brave New World

You need to be brave to suggest something genuinely new. It’s a risk. There is safety in the numbers of conformity. A creative environment is one that rewards the taking of such risks. It can’t just be about outcomes, you need to foster a brave culture. An idea doesn’t pre-suppose its implementation, you need to encourage people to provide new approaches and praise the effort, even if you don’t actually act on it. Because as you encourage it, it happens more often, the ideas keep coming, get better and will then start contributing to new outcomes. In an environment where no one is brave and follows the traditional style of “you don’t get fired for buying IBM” you, ironically, end up like IBM ( sorry IBM, love you ).

It is also important that, when you create a brave, ideating culture, you listen to your people. Organisations can sometimes have a habit of outsourcing their thinking to consultancies. This isn’t always a bad thing but the consultancies should be there to facilitate and drive not come up with the ideas and strategy. If you really want ideas, the new, then you can’t ask people who will happily sell the same ideas to everyone. Again, this is a safe option “I got <consultancy X> to write out strategy, so it must be good”. As opposed to “I got <consultancy X> to write our strategy and they changed the logo on the last one they did”. Differentiation does not this way come. Consultancies are wired to conform - they sell the dogma of the day - and senior managers, risk averse and picking safe options, go with what they say as it’s safe. Ain’t that the truth Blockbuster?

To drag this inevitably and awkwardly back to Apollo 13, there is scene when they realise they are going to have use the Lunar Module to get the crew back and the ask the manufacturer their opinion. Fearful, the guy says he can’t give any guarantees. Gene Krantz then replies “I don't care what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do. So, let's get to work.” He reacts to the obvious fear by immediately providing permission to fail and invites positive contributions.

Anyone still with me? You are? Amazing. Now the hard bit starts. You need to go away and think about this. Have a shower. Take a walk. But rest assured that there are answers out there. There are ways to do things differently, better but you need to pay attention about how you going about finding them. It may not be necessarily how you’ve always done it.