Creativity
Putting existing things together in a combination that was not there before.
The behaviour, in one line: I regularly connect distant ideas into something original and I’m willing to try things that might fail.
A box of drawing pins stops being a box the moment you meet it as a container for pins. Most creative blocks are that shape: something in front of you that has been assigned a job, and cannot be seen doing another one until you make it.
Creativity is not a gift some people were issued. It is holding two things that do not usually meet and seeing what happens, which depends mostly on how varied your inputs are and whether you can stop judging long enough to make some bad combinations. Machines are now very good at recombining what already exists, so the premium moves to the combinations they have not seen — which means to inputs that are yours.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Wide, deliberately unrelated inputs | Deep inputs from your own field |
| Generating, then judging | Judging as you generate |
| Asking what the constraint assumes | Working within the constraint |
| Time away to let it settle | More time at the desk |
What it looks like. The requirement says the form needs nine fields. You ask why any of it is a form, and seven of the nine turn out to be in a system you already have. What ships is not a shorter form.
- When the obvious answers are cheap. Anything a model produces instantly is by definition the combination already lying around. What is left to add is the one it has not seen.
- The problem that has resisted for a year. If a straightforward approach was going to work, it would have. What is left needs the frame changed rather than more effort.
- Differentiation of any kind. Doing the same thing slightly better is available to everyone. Doing a different thing is not.
- Collect widely and on purpose. You cannot combine what you never took in, and material from outside your field is where the unusual pairs come from.
- Separate making ideas from picking them. Judgement applied too early kills exactly the combinations worth having, because early on a good idea and a bad one look the same.
- Reframe the constraint: what would this be if it were easy, or inverted, or ten times bigger? Constraints are often assumptions in disguise.
- Stop and go away. Connections get made while you are not looking, and only if you leave the gap for them.
- Break it into parts
Four parts: collecting varied inputs, separating generation from judgement, reframing the constraint, and letting ideas incubate.
- The part that carries it
Separating “make many” from “pick the best”. Judgement applied too early kills the combinations that were worth having.
- The order to learn it in
- Build the input habit first — you cannot combine what you have not collected.
- Then enforce the split: generate without judging, and judge in a separate sitting.
- Then add the reframes — easy, inverted, ten times bigger — and deliberate time away.
- Put something at stake
Commit to bringing ten ideas rather than one to the next planning session, and let the room pick.
- Compress it
Collect widely. Generate without judging. Reframe the constraint. Then step away and let it settle.
- The smallest useful dose
Ten ideas before any one idea, and one hour a week of inputs from outside your field.
- Anchor it to something you know
A kaleidoscope. The same fragments of glass, a different turn, and a pattern nobody had seen.
“Creativity is just connecting things.”
— Steve Jobs
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Creativity run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Creativity in the course →
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