Creativity

Creativity a loaded concept and everybody you ask will give you a different definition. The definition I find the most useful, is the one which divides creativity in to flexibility and fluency. Flexibility is the more familiar one, the one where you are able to come up with wildly different ideas. That is often traditionally considered creative thinking. Fluency means that you are able to produce any ideas at a constant rate, say one per second or two. Combine these two and voilá, you are creative professional.

You can practice creativity just by combining the above mentioned meta-hopping, dimension switching and systems thinking. There is no magic in it. It’s just a simple recipe, lots of repetition. A house, big house, a house in the 1500s, a red house, a concert house, a gallery, a little girl going to buy fresh bread in the 1500s from a big red bakery that has an art gallery and live music in the lobby etc. You get the drill.

The biggest barrier to creativity that I see people having is their reaction to dumb ideas. Some say there are no dumb ideas. I say there are lots of them, all over the place. But it’s ok! Just keep on generating them ideas. Maybe the first ten or twenty or fifty are useless, but the good and fantastic ones will come, eventually. Trust me.