THE STRUCTURE OF CREATIVITY

Creativity – a common and mysterious experience

Creativity, the capacity to invent appropriate responses that did not exist before, is still a phenomenon that is barely understood. For instance Noam Chomsky, in his latest book on the philosophy of language and mind[1], asserts that if we understand fairly well the structure of language, we don’t have a clue on its creative use in everyday situations: how we continuously use language to produce new sentences that are appropriate and adapted to the context.

In this sense, if creativity is still a mysterious phenomenon, it’s nevertheless a very common situation. We demand that the persons we interact with be creative: if anybody interacts with us in a blatantly predictable and mechanical way, we’ll get angry quickly or quit the interaction. We want people to respond to this present situation, not respond like robots. And really be present and attentive, not give us pre-made answers.

A little bit deeper, we’ve all experienced some form of creative process: we’ve stumbled upon problems we couldn’t solve immediately (a presentation, a key decision, how to respond to somebody, etc.), just to have the answer pop up out of nowhere when we were the least expecting it (sometimes when we had abandoned any hope to have an answer).

So how does it work?

The structure of the creativity process

Interestingly, artists and scientists[2] give the same account of the creative process. They all point to the same sequence:

1.   A first phase of disciplined, conscious, hard work, until the person blocks in some way on a problem he/she can’t solve immediately

2.   The person finally gets to do anything else, totally unrelated to the task at hand in 1.

3.   At some unexpected point, bingo! the badly needed idea pops up out of the blue, as if the problem had been processed and solved at an unconscious level

4.   Final step: the new idea has to be checked and implemented. Back to disciplined and conscious activity

Learnings

Can we draw some learnings from this sequential structure?

Creativity, invention, intelligence imply active unconscious processes

It’s actually not “as if” the problem had been processed and solved at an unconscious level: the problem is really processed and solved at an unconscious level.

We usually overestimate a lot the role of our conscious processes: most of what we do and understand occurs below the threshold of conscious activity. Did you ever happen to read the same book, and one day “get” everything, and the other day still reading sentence after sentence, but missing the gist of it? If our unconscious processes stop supporting us, we fall immediately.

You don’t force creativity or intelligence.

It just happens. Let it happen

You can create the conditions for it to happen

What conditions?

-      First, find a problem. If you only do what you already know how to do, you’ll never experience any creativity. But if you don’t face any challenge in your life, I suggest you try and be a bit bolder. You’ll be rewarded for it.

-      Then choose an interesting problem: if you don’t like what you do, chances are slim that you’ll experience anything valuable coming out of the task and out of your unconscious mind.

-      Finally work your ass off: if you don’t know your stuff, you’ll never come up with new and groundbreaking ideas.

-      But the interesting point here is that knowing your stuff is not enough: you need to also allow some space and time for your unconscious to process the information at its rhythm and without tension.

And of course tune yourself in to what’s going to come, especially at odd moments and places (under the shower, while driving, …). Start paying attention to your spontaneous ideas. They might carry the solution to a lot of your problems. Don’t believe them unconditionally: test and adjust. But pay attention.

[1] What Kinds are Creatures Are We?, 2016

[2] See for instance the very interesting book by Jacques Hadamar, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, 1954, for a presentation and discussion of this process in the mathematical field. This presentation is also heavily influenced by John Grinder, one of the co-creators of NLP, especially an email exchange we had on the subject, and more generally his and Carmen Bostic’s teachings.