What Creativity Really Is—And Why We Need it To Survive & Thrive In Fast-Changing Times

Creativity, at all levels, is a fundamental driver of evolution, growth, learning and, therefore, thriving. Creativity — personal and organizational — has the unique power to improve our lives (and the world with it). We’re not just talking about creativity in terms of art, crafts and the creative industries.

We are talking about those everyday acts of creativity that drive a life less ordinary: the new way to respond to our lover so we avoid a fight, a fresh approach to being a leader that inspires the workforce to embrace a new future, a way to play with our kids so that they feel safer, a way to adapt a global economy to massive climate change and systemic collapse.

You, me, and everyone around us have creativity written into their DNA. It is a large part of what makes us human. Creativity is a unique characteristic of living things.

No matter how powerful a computer is, it cannot be creative. It can look as if it’s being creative, yet every outcome is predictable and driven by a set of algorithms (equations that generate solutions based on a predetermined set of mathematical relationships). No breakthroughs can emerge from linear machines.

However, even the youngest child and the simplest cellular organism can create breakthroughs — unpredictable, often non-linear solutions — that simply didn’t exist before. Whilst computational theories can account for basic cognition, they cannot account for human creativity. This is what my lifetime’s work in Bio-Transformation is focused on.

Living organisms are the creative products of our own creativity. We are ‘autopoetic ’. Powered by biological brilliance, life is continuously creating more life from a bunch of seemingly inert chemical building blocks. As we evolve, both biologically and culturally, we open up more and more fields of possibility that were not there before.

The result has been everything from opposable thumbs to Shakespeare’s plays, the powerful frontal lobes, and the screen you are reading this on. Along the way, nations, political systems, technologies, and enterprises have all been created by our imaginations.

The ruling explanation for what creativity is is two (or more) previously unconnected ideas that are recombined together into something new. Yes, this does tend to happen in the final stages of a creative act. We take pieces of Lego and combine them in a new way. But this is not the key to having a breakthrough with an idea or habit. Something way more fundamental has to happen first.

In a landmark study in 2012 , rappers (MCs) were put into MRI scanners while performing. First, they sang lyrics they had written in advance. Then they were asked to improvise in the moment, in flow. The difference between their brains in these two states was enormous. With the scripted lyrics, areas of the pre-frontal cortex associated with control, decisions, and judgment lit up.

But when the MCs were freestyling, the areas of control, willpower, and attention were all less active. In the moments they gave up being conventionally ‘smart,’ they were most creative! Similar results have been found with jazz musicians when they improvise, too. The deeper the inhibition of their prefrontal cortex, the more intense their imagination!

I spent years thinking that my job as a breakthrough innovation consultant and creative leadership guide —paid to help organizations innovate and teams become more innovative —was to help people have ideas.

Yet, after hundreds of projects with some of the best companies in the world (and having taught and coached tens of thousands of people how to break through their problems using creativity), I began to realize something quite revolutionary.

Creativity is not simply about having new ideas. In fact, the most important prerequisite for enjoying a breakthrough is actually letting go of the old. It's what we are prepared to give up that counts, not what we cling on to.

This is quite a challenge, given that we rely on our existing assumptions, habits, and emotional patterns to survive life and succeed in the systems we are part of. There is rarely, perhaps never, a blank canvas to create with. No artist, entrepreneur, leader or parent starts with one.

Instead, we all start with notions about what a great company does, how good leaders act, and what a great love life should be like. The metaphorical pieces of Lego we want to build with are already tied up in other structures. We must break them apart to invent something new with them. However, this is easier to say than do.

We engage with every problem in life with an idea of what the ‘right’ way to solve it is and habits conditioned over a lifetime about how to act around them. These old ideas and habits have been burnished into our nervous system over a lifetime of constant conditioning and consolidation of our neurons.

When faced with an issue or conflict, we fall back on the familiar to deal with it. The canvases of our lives, societies, and businesses are chock full of imagery, and there is little space to create or room to innovate. We simply cannot have a breakthrough until we are ready to let go of these assumptions and habits. It is a literal impossibility.

This is why so many large companies fail to spot massive opportunities for innovation, even though they have more consultants, agencies, MBAs on staff, investment capital and resources that the tiny companies that challenge them.

It is also why a few, like Kodak, Nokia, or Blackberry, have gone down, even when everyone else can see the writing on the wall.

The same attachment to old habits and assumptions locks us into repeated patterns that stop us from having consistently awesome relationships. If we always respond to our friends and colleagues in the same way, there is no opportunity for breakthroughs. No matter how much effort we expend, creativity cannot occur until we release the old, so leaving room for the new to emerge.

Very few people understand this secret. In fact, most people in positions of authority want people — whether employees, school kids, college students, or workers — to keep doing things exactly as they have been told. The results are predictable. Little innovation. Zero breakthroughs.

Little wonder that conventional governments and hierarchal organizations find it so hard to create. The same can be said for those of us who are taught how to follow the rules by our parents, teachers, and leaders. Culture and the group thinking that pervades it stop people from letting go of the old. And we have to question the dominant way of doing things, often ruffling feathers if we want to truly create.

Picasso broke through because he questioned everything about how to represent truth in art. Einstein questioned Newtonian laws. Steve Jobs questioned the role of a personal computer (and what it could look and feel like as a tool for creativity). Gandhi questioned the conventions of how to create a revolution.

Famously innovative figures like these, whom we so like to revere years after their breakthroughs, were laughed at, ignored, and criticized for years precisely because they broke the rules and didn’t listen to “no, we don’t do it like that round here” for an answer. Every time our friends or loved ones act predictably and expect us to do the same, they crush our creativity. Yet it is we who have let them!

You can either be right about your assumptions. Or you can be consistently creative. Never both.

The tragedy of many people’s lives is that the organizations they work in, and the schools and colleges they study in, have been designed from scratch to reduce originality and promote a fixed way of being. They are told to the singkle "right" answer not to aks better questions.

No wonder AI is based on the same impoverished view of human intelligence: about predicting what the solution "should" be based on what has been done in the past.

What makes things even more challenging is that the habits and assumptions that stop us from questioning the ways things have always been can rarely be relinquished by simple cognitive choice.

Many of our most fundamental habits and assumptions about how to deal with life/business / the market are anchored into our neurobiology by our emotions. As neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, without emotions, we cannot make decisions. Emotions lock in habits and assumptions that seem to be able to defend us against change, danger, and uncertainty.

As we go through life, we hardwire a specific neural response to familiar threats. The more intense the initial emotion was when we created a response, the deeper the programming was and the harder it would be to change it.

This is the primary obstacle to our creativity: the fear and stress that drives our habits and assumptions to keep on repeating. Fear shuts down our nervous system, foxing us into tunnel vision and tunnel memory.

Yet connection and courage open us up to new ideas and new experiences whilst allowing us the freedom to let go. Studies show that distance and space can also really help us breakthrough. By consciously taking a break to play ball, go on a vacation, or have a shower, we force our busy brain to stop focusing on a problem and so let go of our old ideas long enough to allow new ones to emerge.

A system of brain activity shows up when the brain is at rest. It fades out whenever we start doing a task. This Default Mode Network (DMN) turns out to be more active at rest in people who have more spontaneous ideas . Resting and letting go allows our body/mind to wander between ideas and connect up the dots, free from tension, habit, and pressure.

Early studies show that we can use the more focused, ‘smart’ parts of our brain to direct our DMN to wander, carefree, in directions that might come up with the ideas we are looking for. In other words, we can consciously promote the chances of creative serendipity without trying to control it.

If we don’t embrace creativity in all areas, our quality of life will soon suffer. The patterns we use to survive life often create more problems than they solve because the old ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are no longer fit for purpose.

What worked in the 1980s to rent movies to customers may not work so well in a digital age. What worked wonderfully on the savannah in Africa doesn’t work so well in an office cubicle in Savannah, Georgia. What worked brilliantly when we started our career as an intern at a multinational company may not work so well in a Silicon Valley start-up. What worked well as a five-year-old to keep our parents happy may not work so well as a lover or spouse. What worked well when dating at age 20 may be a poor strategy for a happy and fulfilling married age 50. I should know.

If we want creative breakthroughs, we have to engage in a process of letting go before we get to the fun part, when we get to recombine ideas and enjoy the rush of breakthroughs. That means surfacing and questioning our assumptions. Spotting and breaking our habits. And, above all, encountering and releasing our fears.

This is why true creativity, in whatever area in life, is a whole mind and body thing. We need all our faculties aligned if we want to be creative, as opposed to talking about being creative.

This is a way of life, not a title at work. It is a way of engaging with the problems we want to solve, feeling our way, thinking our way, and acing our way to solve them with a creative breakthrough. As we practice this art, craft, and science, we learn to break through anything that is blocking us at will. The blockages are inside. As soon as we let go of them, things begin to flow.

This is an iterated excerpt from my book, Switch On: Unleash Your Creativity & Thrive with the New Science & Spirit of Breakthrough.