When I worked in Silicon Valley, I realized after a short while that a big part of my job as a manager amounted to finding ways to help people be creative. After all, if you have a collection of very smart employees, it's wasteful to just tell them what to do - they probably know more than you do about the challenge at hand. So I started collecting my own thoughts on the subject, and also looked into a lot of the academic literature (in recent decades a sizable field of creativity studies has grown up). I guess I shouldn't have been, but I was struck by the similarity of my personal experience and the research. It appears that many if not most creative people work in roughly the same way.
But only recently did I come across a slim, decidedly non-academic volume that, it turns out, pretty much said it all back in the 1940's: "A Technique for Producing Ideas", by James Webb Young.
Young was an advertising executive who taught a class at the University of Chicago School of Business. "A Technique for Producing Ideas" is based on his notes for those classes, and derived from his own experience because at the time he could find no references on the subject.
Essentially, says Young (as do I, and in one form or another, as does much of the research), creativity is essentially the combination of old ideas in new relationships, and the creative process amounts to these five steps:
- Gathering raw material, or research.
- Playing with the raw materials, freely exploring their properties and relationships.
- Incubation: walking away from the project and allowing the unconscious mind to work on it while the conscious mind does something else.
- The sudden appearance of an idea, apparently from nowhere - it's not coming from nowhere, your unconscious mind has been busy in the background.
- Testing the idea against reality, and modifying as necessary and possible.
The thing is, none of these steps is likely to be a surprise to anyone, and yet many people claim to be incapable of creativity. As Young points out, they're probably not incapable, they just fail to appreciate how important it is to follow these steps in order, or they may lack the will or interest to give them the extended attention they need. Young says he's not worried about sharing his secret because
First of all, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it.Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.
In my experience, the most frequent mistake people make is to skip steps 1, 2 and 3 and go straight to trying to come up with ideas. This yields nothing but torturous sessions of brain-beating, usually leading to a conviction that one is just hopelessly stupid.
The problem is not a case of stupidity, but of using the wrong "processor" for the job. Different chips are often optimized for different kinds of processing, say of general purpose arithmetic vs. graphics. It doesn't work very well to ask the arithmetic chip to process graphics - it might be able to do it, but it will be relatively slow and clumsy. Aiming to be creative by simply trying to have an idea is very similar. You're asking your conscious mind to do something it wasn't designed to do.
Young quotes economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (of Pareto Principle fame) to the effect that people are either speculators or rentiers. Speculators are "constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations" - they are the creative people in the arts, business, or any field. Rentiers, literally "stockholders", are "the routine, steady-going, unimaginative conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates."
Now some people know they are rentiers (though maybe by another name), and are quite happy with that. I say that's great: more people should probably focus on being all that they are, rather than what they think they should be.
But for those who really want or need to be "speculators", if only some of the time, James Webb Young tells them all they need to know. For the rest, as another creative advertising person once said, "Just do it."
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Read More Entries by Spencer Critchley.
How many times have we been driving down a busy highway or tossing in bed when inspiration pays a visit?
This is a process that just happens. It happens to all of us, every day. Harnessing this dynamic of brain function is difficult, but acknowledging it and preparing for it are two of the keys to capitalizing on it.
The third and most important key is capturing those ideas as they pop into our conciousness. We've all been there when inspiration strikes. How many times do we take a mental note to write it down later when the time is more convenient? After all, when these ideas reveal themselves we often think them so self evident that we couldn't possibly forget them...until later when we can't recall what they were.
Keep pen and paper or mini recorder handy to capture these streams of inspiration. It'll ensure the payoff of the process.