2 - What is Creativity?
The disjunction of creativity and strategy largely arises from lack of understanding about creativity. It is not merely that "business people" are woefully clueless, but even those who are in creative occupations are not particularly adept at describing it either.
The authors approach to defining creativity considers three specific facets:
- Content - The basic elements contained in a working definition of creativity
- Outcome - A pragmatic assessment of the outcome achieved by creativity
- Process - The processes, interactions, and activities in which creativity occurs
Creativity's Content
In the context of business, creativity must create something. An idea may be novel or imaginative, but if there is no potential to generate value for the firm, then it is not of interest to the firm.
Moreover, creativity as an activity is undertaken with intent to create value. To simply create assemblages of random things is a frivolous waste of time with a scintilla of a chance that something that is created might be useful. Happy accidents do occur, but business generally does not fund activity in hopes there might be an accident.
There's also a distinction between an idea that is new to an individual, new to an organization or group, or new to the world - a person may have original inspiration, but the same idea he has just discovered may have dawned upon someone else before.
Also, value is not entirely objective, but depends on context: what is valuable to one firm may not be valuable to another. More significantly, convincing someone of the potential value of an idea can be difficult.
Creativity's Outcomes: Transforming Contexts and Redefining Problems
A more pragmatic approach to defining creativity focuses on its outcomes - which are essentially changes, which replace existing "patterns" with new ones. Specifically, it replaces existing patterns, does not merely make the them work better - that's merely efficiency.
Also, creativity replaces patterns with new ones - it does not disregard rules and order altogether, but proposes a different set of rules and a new order. A creative thinker is also a systematic and strategic thinker, who breaks with existing conventions in order to implement new ones.
The Creativity Process: Tolerating Contradictions Enables Bisociative Thinking
The authors introduce the concept of "bisociative thinking," a phrase coined by Arthur Koestler in 1964. This theory proposed, in essence, that creative thinking arose when the human mind grapples with a paradox, between the perception of what is and the conception of what might be, and that creativity is the process of reconciling the two.
(EN: I'm skipping much of the rest of this because Keostler was a nutter whose theories bordered on mysticism and the paranormal. Given the authors' reliance on this, I may be dropping some lengthy sections of content.)