Creativity and Action

This blog was started in September of 2007, so it’s still new and yet to attain critical mass. But even if you come across this post at a later date, I’d appreciate your thoughts on some of these questions. The last thing I want for this blog is to be didactic and dogmatic. Thanks.

1. What do you think intuition is?

2. How does intuition occur?

3. Would you say your actions are (normally) driven by emotions or the end process of rationalization?

4. What is the process of your deciding to respond, or not respond to this post?

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
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The fool has a central place in creativity.

For centuries the king had his fool. It was the antidote to being surrounded by yes men. The fool can stand conventional thinking on its head.

Most corporate employees focus on short-term, time-critical, functional, and results-driven events. We say things like ‘results-driven’ all the time as if it is a virtue. But within a creative context, results are not guaranteed. They are a side benefit. This is like the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon. If you go looking for it, you won’t find it. But value emerges out of the creative process.

Creativity needs a completely different mindset. More than that, it needs a different way of being-in-the-world than operational management. Business schools aren’t practicing academic birth control because they churn out graduates who think alike. This is not surprising. Typically management consultants are valued by the school they attended and the quality of their education. These people may be very intelligent, but are they successful in adapting to a world that thrives on the new?

New ideas look foolish.

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I just moved this site from www.blog.christopherrichards.com to www.creativityandaction.com. I seem to have lost some of the comments during the transfer. I haven’t deleted them intentionally.

Christopher

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It’s one talent to generate ideas. It’s another to commercialize them. I suggest a partnership between creatives and functional efficients (as I call them). Functional efficients know what they are doing, and do it well. They are administrators, and engineers.

A relationship between these two groups seems to me more pragmatic than taking predominantly left-brained people and trying to make them develop their right-brain thinking. I am aware that these left- and right-brain definitions are not quite right, but they serve for my illustration. Functional efficients should at least understand that the creative process needs time in which to germinate ideas. They should have some contact with the creative process.

Only by respecting a creative space will ideas come into being and have the chance of growth. If the creative space is denied, then the danger is to fall back into well-marked pathways.

In other words, actions will be limited to doing what we have always done and simply try to do it faster, better, and more efficiently. But this is not a path that is open to the new.

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Anthony Storr’s book, Solitude, points to the richness of our private and personal inner worlds as territory for incubating creative ideas.

Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Kafka and Wittgenstein, all had the capacity to be alone without being miserable.

Well, maybe they were miserable some of the time, who isn’t?

They understood solitude as a refuge from the distractions of everyday life. Thinking for them was a solitary activity.

Dependence on what others are saying leads to conventional thinking. Creative thought and action has to resist groupthink.

Groupthink is conforming, agreement, and submission to authority. Creative thought is disruptive, and challenging. It breaks new ground. It necessarily doesn’t make sense. At least it doesn’t make sense at first.

But creative group process is possible. It has to be acceptable to make the most absurd assertion and see where that leads. It’s an adventure, an exploration.

I had the good fortune to moderate a five-year-long philosophy discussion group. It improved my thinking. (Those who know me might say ‘anything’ would improve my thinking.) After an eighteen-month gap, we are now forming a new and smaller face-to-face thinking/creativity group.

For me, small-group thinking is a valuable on-going educational resource. Seth Godin says he learned more from his small group than he did from the Stanford MBA program.

Getting together as a group fits into conventional wisdom. The ability to isolate oneself doesn’t. We value extroversion more than introversion. But the ability to be comfortably alone is essential to the creative process. I suggest we need a balance of solitude and group participation, because each feeds the other.

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Tony Buzan has been a long-term influence on me. His ‘Radiant Thinking’ model using ‘Mind Maps’ is a great way, for us predominantly visual thinkers, to see relationships between ideas. Even though the idea of left and right brain has now been modified, his book Use Both Sides of Your Brain is well worth looking at for practical help with creativity.

Normal is not natural Tony Buzan

One technique I like for stimulating creativity is what I call ‘the opposite.’ It’s simply turning a situation on its head.When I was growing up teachers would often shame a child by saying, “Do you want to come up here and take the class?” But what if that actually happened? What if children were the teachers and adults the students?What if today, we had the attitude of what can I learn from everyone I encounter?

Tags: Video by Christopher
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What is creativity? Why should we care about it? Let’s start with this video.

Sir Ken Robinson believes that creativity will be [or now is] as important to our economic survival as literacy.

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