How To Be More Creative

Creativity is going to make the difference between working and not working, quality work or dull work, insecurity or life chances. We are moving into the real creative economy, where companies need solutions to problems, always. You have to get with this plan.

On Oprah.com Martha Beck wrote recently about her attempts to be more creative:

I resorted to a strategy I call the Kitchen Sink. I read bits of eight books: four accounts of brain research, one novel about India, one study of bat behavior, one biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and one memoir of motherhood. Next I drove to my favorite Rollerblading location, listening en route to a stand-up comic, a mystery novel, and an Eckhart Tolle lecture. I yanked on my Rollerblades and skated around, squinting slack-jawed into the middle distance. After a while, a tiny lightbulb went on. “Well,” I thought, “I could write about this.” Duh. The Kitchen Sink, you see, is one way to activate your brain’s creative right hemisphere.

I have a different take on being creative, though I know what Martha means. It’s often the case that if you leave the problem of being creative alone, some kind of inspiration, or breakthrough, happens.

But see if you share this experience:

I’m trying to think about an article, about my own particular take on an event or a political development and lo and behold, after giving it that downtime the text books tell me to, I come up with a really great idea, a really new perspective. I even think, Eureka.

The problem is, often it bears no relationship to what other people think or believe. It’s not just an outlier, this new idea is often plain stupid. Downtime has made me dumber. If I wrote up everything that comes from this creative process I doubt I’d be in work.

After, what, two decades of this, my view of being creative is that it has a very close relationship to the circumstances around you. Being creative is about being conditioned by and reacting to or against your circumstances. It relies on you taking an intelligent, informed view of what other people believe and say.

I began writing about this kind of creativity in The Elastic Enterprise, where my co-author and I put forward the view that great leaders have the ability to do what we called Cognitive Reframing. That means they are able to reframe the circumstances or conditions around a problem. Think Jerry Seinfeld wondering how hair curlers work. Do they fly off that warming contraption and wrap themselves up in your hair?

Cognitive reframing, the term, comes from cognitive therapy. But put that to one side. This is not about therapy. It’s about creativity.

Here’s an example:

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren are Nobel Prize-winning physicians. They won for their work in identifying the cause of peptic ulcers.

The story is well known. For decades doctors thought stress causes ulcers. Marshall and Warren showed that the cause was really a bacterium. Their new theory was derided (some would just say criticized) for at least a decade before winning acceptance.

You could hardly get more creative than being a Nobel Prize winner. It’s better than being a rock star or a comedian. Marshall and Warren changed millions of lives.

But the untold part of the story is this. The reason they won acceptance for their theory was because they began to frame the discovery in terms that were acceptable to the community of gastroenterologists whose work was undermined by their discovery. They went to work on reframing both the science and the explanation.

The first step in that acceptance process was to identify the bacterium as a new type of bacterium – an unknown, something that gastroenterologists could hardly be expected to have known about.

The point I want to make is that the discovery itself was scientific method. Winning acceptance for it required all kinds of creative strategies.

Before finding acceptance the discovery, the very detail of novelty, had to be partially reframed, in order to allow their peers to do the necessary cognitive reframing that would make the discovery real.

And one strategy they used, in addition to framing the discovery more sympatheticaly, was that Marshall swallowed a solution made up of the bacteria he said gave people ulcers and he showed how sick it could make a human being.

In my view, then, creativity relies on manipulating, attacking or changing the cognitive frameworks we are working within. Creative people are typically disrespectful of these frameworks, and their creativity is really their way of breaking out or of reframing how we see the world.

Think John Lennon and his long struggle for different types of acceptance – for his love of Yoko Ono, for his desire for peace, for citizenship. Think young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wants to change the world.

Is there a clue in there for how to be more creative? I think so. If we can become more conscious about the frameworks we function within, we can do ore to reshape them or argue for their demise.

Here’s another example: For most of the past two centuries we have lived within a framework that says our western way of life is really about progress. The reality if these two centuries have also seen some of the worst atrocities, as well as high fluctuating changes in life chances for people.

The creative block for us is to see a way forward that doesn’t involve taking sides in this argument – whether capitalism has been good for our section of humanity or not.

The creative response for some thinkers is to say let’s create a new framework for understanding wealth creation. But if you are a comedian you may just want to laugh at the sheer lunacy of our adversarial system where both sides simply won’t let go of the rag.

Forbes.com