The Work of Creativity
Self-help authors claim that they understand creative thinking, and suggest that they have the ability to teach a simply process that will enable even uncreative people to be wildly imaginative. It's dubious that such a process exists - if there were, their theories would not be so varied and inconsistent.
Even so, there do seem to be a few common elements in the activities and approaches used by creative people across various domains.
Phases of the Creative Process
MC suggests that there are five basic phases of creative activity:
- Assimilation - An individual becomes immersed in a set of problematic issues that arouses their curiosity.
- Incubation - Ideas churn around, often "below the threshold of consciousness" until connections are made between things that were previously unrecognized as connected. When we try to solve a problem consciously, we proceed in a very linear and logical fashion that forces us to remain within known concepts, which effectively prevents creativity from occurring.
- Insight - This is the "eureka" moment when we recognize the connection and are able to articulate it. What was unconscious bubbles to the surface of our consciousness
- Evaluation - We decide whether the insight we have achieved is worth pursuing. This can be the most difficult part of the process, as many people fall in love with any idea that comes to mind and defends it against criticism, whereas the truly creative people are able to distance themselves and avoid wasting energy on bad ideas
- Elaboration - Once the insight has been recognized as worthwhile, additional work is necessary to detail it. This is Edison's "99% perspiration" as one works over a basic idea to determine whether it can be realized and applied.
However, this "process" of creativity is not linear, as during the evaluation or elaboration processes, new insights can occur. Nor does one step proceed invariably to the next, as one may assimilate a great deal of information and never have a creative thought. Neither can progress through the steps be forced - they take as long as they do. A person may incubate for years before coming to the point of insight, or it may take just a few hours of thought. There may be "flashes" of inspiration that don't add up to anything for quite some time.
He also feels that a five-stage process may be oversimplified and misleading. It does seem very logical and rational, but it doesn't accurately describe the way that creative people work, and there are many additional steps in some processes. It is, however, a good high-level and general model of the process.
Creativity is also seen to be an instantaneous and situational phenomenon, such as the occasions when a person stumbles into a wholly unpredictable situation and finds and finds a brilliant solution. Most often, people fall back on patterns when they encounter unexpected problems - but when they have no knowledge or training, they can seem quite creative in figuring things out on the fly.
(EN: This situational creativity does not seem to fit the author's pattern because it does not effect a change to the field. It is not unheard of for an impromptu solution to change common practices, but this is quite rare.)
The Emergence of Problems
The author suggests that there are three main sources that cause problems to arise: personal experience, requirements of the domain, and environmental pressures. In reality, they tend to be overlapping and synergistic, but he will discuss them as if they are separate phenomena.
Personal Experience
There are many stories about the manner in which people exercise creativity in response to problems in their personal experience. In particular, those who faced serious and insurmountable problems early in their youth often make a career of soling them.
A few examples are given of scientists whose childhood experiences put them on a lifelong quest. It's also noted that poets and artists are often "tortured souls" and that many people find creative inspiration in periods of emotional and physical distress.
Not all inspirational events are tragic, as there are other creative people who simply took an interest in something in their youth, often because they were patronized by a parent or another adult who encouraged their curiosity and provided them with the resources to develop their knowledge of a given domain.
Requirements of the Domain
Another common source of problems are the requirements of the domain - whether an individual notices the gaps in existing knowledge and seeks to explore them, or is simply rebelling against practices or principles that strike them as being wrong or limiting.
An example is given of a physicist who was bent on demonstrating that the existing principles were wrong, and wanted to disprove certain premises that seemed to be taken for granted by everyone around him. Numerous scientific breakthroughs occur from simply testing established theory to find al alternate approach.
Another rich source of creativity is the borrowing of ideas from different domains, often but not necessarily in neighboring disciplines. This occurs when people change careers, bringing with them the mental model of their former domain, which gives them a different perspective to those who are formally trained in accepting the canon of their new domain.
It's remarked that "the prevailing philosophy in academic life is reductionism." Domains become too self-referential and cut off from reality, and very often become rather foolishly insular and detached.
While a newcomer to a domain brings with him a great deal of ignorance and many foolish and impractical ideas, he may in time become familiar enough with the domain to make valid contributions that represent a fusion of ideas, as he schematizes the domain information according to his previous occupation.
Environmental Pressures
The third source of inspiration and problems is the field itself. A creative person is exposed to the influence of others working in the same field - his teachers, his fellow students, his coworkers, and others to whom he is constantly exposed. Aside of pressures to conform to the domain (as previously discussed) there are also best practices and common issues that arise and are discussed.
That is, when an artist paints he is influenced not only by the knowledge of the domain of painting, but by the work of other painters to whom he is exposed. A writer is likewise inspired by his fellow writers, and a chemist by his fellow chemists. Particularly in competitive fields such as business, there is a constant awareness of what others are doing and a desire to surpass them in order to succeed.
Writing is a particularly rich example, as many of the most famous writers in history were not trained to be writers - they did not come by their knowledge of the craft by being instructed in the domain, but discovered it entirely by their exposure to other writers of their own time without having a categorization schema of the domain.
In the sciences, there is the common practice of having a "think tank" of researchers in the same areas, interacting and exchanging ideas to spark one another's creativity. Whether there is cooperation, competition, or some combination of the two, people in the same field are inspired by one another's work.
In other domains such as politics and philosophy, a "think tank" is created informally, often by those who wish to work outside of the constraints of an existing field.
The "environment" may also consist of specific influences rather than a formal (or informal) gathering of people. Political and economic crises, such as the Great Depression or World War II or the collapse of the Soviet Union, present an array of problems of various sizes that people become desperate to solve. There are a number of periods in recent history that show an explosion of creativity in an array of domains as a result of the influence upon large numbers of people.
Presented and Discovered Problems
The creative proses begins with the vague sense that "something is not right" - and the tensions that arises engages the cognitive processes to diagnose and solve the puzzle. People who feel that all is well are seldom inspired to seek change - so this sense of wrongness is critical to the initiation of creativity.
These puzzles arise from problems, which may come in one of two ways:
- Presented Problems - Are given to a person to solve, with a clear indication of the problem and the desired outcome. Employees are constantly given presented problems by their superiors - it is the very nature of work.
- Discovered problems - Come to the attention of a person on their own. No-one tells them, and no-one else may even be aware that the problem exists.
There are many people with the knowledge and skills to be creative, but who are never presented with nor discover a problem to which to apply their capabilities. Some anecdotes are given from creators who attest that the hardest part of successful innovation is finding a problem to solve.
(EN: I would propose that the hardest part is defining the problem in most instances - you know something is wrong, but can't figure out what it is, and are not sure of the results you wish to achieve.)
A few other interviews speak about the scope of problems. If a solution is only valuable to a small number of people, a large corporation may decide not to pursue it. This gives rise to many small companies who recognize the scope of a problem is much larger than recognized by those who dismiss it.
(EN: Software companies are a great example. There are small and successful firms that provide enhancements or extensions to applications that the application provider didn't recognize or felt were unworthy of attention.)
The amount of time it takes to find a solution often depends on the depth of understanding of the problem. Some will hack for years at a solution to a problem they do not fully understand - and may never stumble upon a good solution to the real problem because they have not sufficiently defined it.
Very often, the solution to a seemingly small problem can have a major impact, and revolutionize a field's understanding of its domain. Consider that Darwin's theory arose from recognizing the similarity among species and the changes that take place from one generation to the next. It was not a dramatic change in thinking at first, but when it was pondered, it was discovered to be quite profound.
The Mysterious Time
A creative person "senses something" but does not jump to conclusions - they tend to go dark and mull it over, recognizing that they do not know enough about the problem and need to gather more information. Creators are very leery of snap judgments and do not lunge for the most obvious answer.
It is not well understood exactly what goes on in the human mind during this period of incubation, and therefore it is seen as mysterious and magical - and is greatly overemphasized in theories of creativity. Moreover, the epiphany that results from incubation seems to come from nowhere.
Interviews: creators speak of "simmering" on something. Some will even say that they avoid thinking about it and spend time "goofing off." What is not recognized is that the time in which a person is not trying to think of something is likely the most productive - because "trying to think" means applying existing models of problem solving, and a creative solution requires departing from existing models.
Conscious thought is too rigidly structured to result in truly creative ideas. We have to use different processes to come to different conclusion. They may be poorly understood and they may be poorly documented, but it is clearly evident that these indescribable processes are very real.
Incubation may take a matter of seconds (though this is usually the sign that an existing solution is being applied), or it may take days or years. Trying to force innovation effectively prevents innovation from occurring - because, again, under pressure we fall back on known methods and are not being creative.
Articulating an idea - describing it to someone else - is yet another later step. The reason that the question "what are you thinking" is so annoying is that it interrupts the thinking that is going on, dispelling a solution that was forming in the mind before it can be understood. To describe something to someone else is to understand it, and be able to put it into words. Articulation happens after incubation is finished.
Creativity requires a "mental meandering" that cannot be described. Two people cannot discuss ideas until they have ideas, and must be given time to incubate. Trust that they will get there, and don't force it. Structured creative sessions suppress and destroy more than they create.
The Functions of Idle Time
While little is known about exactly what happens during the period of incubation, a number of theories exist.
In general, it is suggested that the idle time engages thought process that are nonverbal. We tend to think of thoughts as being an internal dialogue, speaking to ourselves silently - but words can only be used to work upon ideas that we can articulate. A creative process is so novel that the thoughts it engages are pre-verbal, and so the mind's "voice" seems silent while these processes are engaged.
A cognitive theory of consciousness, quite similar, is that the creative processes exist in the subconscious mind. We are not aware that we are thinking about a problem, even though the mind is hard at work. Though it stands to reason that we may not have a sense of nonverbal thought processes - so this explanation may be essentially the same as the first.
Freud ties creative thinking to violent or sexual episodes in early childhood. He suggests that a creative person is quietly obsessed with some aspect of a problem that has been associated to repressed memories, and the "quite" of the mind is its attempt to access information in away that does not trigger traumatic memory.
Another model suggests that the mind is capable of "parallel processing" such that a separate set of thinking processes is engaged while we are attentive to other things. Hence a creator who focuses his main attention on some frivolous activity has moved the thinking about the known problem to this second process, which reports the results back to conscious memory when a development has occurred.
Field, Domain, and the Unconscious
The unconscious mind is different than the subconscious: it is the part of the brain that deals with routine tasks, such as riding a bicycle. An experienced rider is not aware of the movement of his muscles as he pumps the pedals and balances his weight - he has done it so often that he can do it without thinking.
In terms of creativity, the same unconscious processes may be applied to investigation and problem-solving: they are relegated to a part of the mind that is largely autonomous. In much the same way as facts seem to pop into our mind, solutions to problems may bubble up from an unconscious process of thought.
This theory implies that the solutions are known to us, or at least the practices by which we discover solutions have already been discovered, but are buried deep within long-term memory until some stimulus triggers them to surface. In essence, the "creative" solution is not your creation, but something that you have learned and filed away long ago.
The unconscious explanations also consider the retrieval of seemingly unrelated schema: something that you know about a jet engine is triggered when you are thinking about a vacuum cleaner, and the principle from a seemingly unrelated discipline suddenly seems relevant to the problem at hand.
This, again, suggests that the solution to a problem is already known, but the mind did not realize that the knowledge was applicable until the mind's automated schema-retrieval function was triggered to apply it in a seemingly unrelated situation.
The "Eureka" Moment
Many of the creators interviewed had very vivid memories of the moment of inspiration in which they discovered the solution to a problem. It is analogous to learning a skill - there is a long period of struggle leading up to the moment when, seemingly out of nowhere, you just seem to get the knack.
Similarly, this "eureka" moment is not a thing unto itself, but marks the culmination of the incubation period. A person does not come up with an idea spontaneously, no more than they pick up a musical instrument and begin playing competently. There is effort, experimentation, and practice that lead up to this seemingly magical moment when they suddenly discover the solution.
There is also the process of discovery by bumbling into a solution. Consider the legend of Edison, who took great pains to discover the proper elements to use for the filament of an incandescent bulb - spending long hours trying every possible combination he could think of until he stumbled across something that worked.
The author suggests that there are four important conditions:
- The creator must pay attention to the work to notice problems and insights
- The creator must know the goal he wants to achieve in order to recognize he has succeeded
- The creator must be aware of domain knowledge that will guide him toward a solution, or away from a false start
- The creator must "listen to colleagues in the field" to learn about their attempts to solve similar problems
(EN: It seems tome the last two are not germane to having a discovery, but in being able to successfully communicate its value to others in the field, which is a later stage in the process.)
There's a loose bit at the end that asserts that creative work is never done - even when a solution has been found, the creator may continue experimenting to find a better solution, or move on to a related problem that they noticed while working on their solution to something different.