Lately I’ve been thinking about innovation and the development of creative ideas. I’m generally interested in creativity and innovation, but I admit this recent foray is partly because we are currently living through a time of quite unprecedented uncertainty. Creative thinking helps us respond to uncertainty, because we can’t solve problems using the same thinking that created them, right? And also uncertainty can foster creativity, because it is a disruption to the status quo, and it must be easier to make something different when beginning from a different starting point?
I remembered a while ago reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation‘. The book discusses innovation and different approaches to innovative thinking, and has some thoughts about how we can try and encourage ourselves to think innovatively and have creative ideas.
One of the ways we can be innovative is to borrow ideas from elsewhere. This reminded me of Austin Kleon’s book ‘Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative‘. (I happened across his blog a few months back.) He sums the book up thus: “The big idea… is that you are a mash-up of what you let into your life, and anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.” Or as Salvador Dalí put it: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” So, borrowing is fine (with appropriate attribution of course!) and sometimes innovation can be as simple as taking an idea or a solution from one field and finding an application for it in another field. As Johnson explains in Where Good Ideas Come From, evolutionary biologists call this exaptation; the classic example being the premise that birds’ feathers originally evolved to provide warmth and were later adapted to help flight.
So borrowing ideas is good, but in order to effectively borrow ideas we need to have somewhere to borrow them from, we need to find influences to surround ourselves with, and this leads us to cultivating interesting networks. Another quote, this time from Dudley Field Malone who said: “I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.” So we need to get out of our echo-chambers, have wide and diverse networks to draw on, and ideally these networks need to be constantly refreshed, changeable and evolving, in order to keep us supplied with fresh stimulus. The wider the variety of stimulus, the better chance of developing an innovative idea; so we should read widely, have challenging conversations, ask questions, and continue to keep exploring and learning new things, to gather as much information as we can. All of this can help us to foster creativity and spark ideas.
But for me the most interesting idea is that innovation often comes from making connections. So by mixing things together you get something new, and indeed possibly even something that might be more than the sum of its parts. Steve Jobs said that “creativity is just connecting things” and perhaps that’s what Apple have done, connecting a music player with a mobile phone, connecting form with function, connecting design with technology. Or as Steve Johnson puts it: “Collisions lead to creativity, collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.” So as I’ve said before, interesting things happen where there are connections or junctions; in the borders, where things overlap; or where things change or transition from one thing to another. Where are we now if not in a time of change and transition?
I remembered a Guardian article and another blog I read a while ago, both about the importance of creativity in uncertain times. Some great thoughts here:
- Doing something creative can distract us from what is going on in the wider world; as Josh Hogan puts it: “When I’m focused on that one activity I’m not worrying about things that might happen in the future; it brings me back into the present moment because I have to pay attention to what I’m doing.”
- Creative activities can let our unconscious mind figure things out while we’re occupied with what is in front of us. As Dr Daisy Fancourt says: “While activities such as creative writing can help you vent your emotions, other things like knitting or crafting can give us some space and a safe haven away from our stresses, which might provide a chance to think things through and find solutions.”
- Creativity is needed to drive change. Of course change is inevitable, “this too shall pass”, but if we want to proactively drive change then we need to think differently and creatively.
- Being creative gives us the ability to adapt and grow. So change can be external, or (often more interesting) internal. If we don’t change, we can’t adapt, we can’t grow and we can’t respond to external change; but more importantly, frankly we’re not really living!
- Creativity gives you a greater capacity to choose. Because thinking creatively gives us options, and having more options is always a good thing.
So being creative and thinking creatively is good for us, as well as being a good way of responding to uncertainty. Essentially as I said at the outset, we can’t solve the problems we have using the same thinking that created them. The good news is that times of uncertainty can foster creativity, “necessity is the mother of invention” and all that, and there can be huge steps forward made in relatively short periods of time.
I got to reading about crisis-driven innovation and this almost inevitably leads to John F. Kennedy and his famous quote that: “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.” (Unfortunately according to Wikipedia this isn’t quite true, the second character means something more like ‘change point’, but we can still appreciate Kennedy’s point.) There are lots of examples of how crises help to drive innovation, for example the rapid development of radar technology during World War II, or the repurposing of automotive factories to build aeroplanes, or more recently Formula One teams making ventilators, and rapid development of vaccines.
I know that we are living in difficult times at the moment, and there’s no way that war or a pandemic could ever be described as a good thing, but I have to believe that there are some positives that might come out of this. There is a feeling that things will never quite return to how they were, and maybe that is a good thing? There will be impacts on many aspects of our lives as we find our ‘new normal’; things like travelling less, meeting virtually, working more flexibly. But the great thing about innovation is that you’re never quite sure when and where your ideas are going to come from, or where they are going to lead you. So perhaps the most interesting things that might change are things we haven’t even thought of yet. Innovation is often about trying to solve a problem, and we are currently trying to deal with one of the biggest problems to arise in our lifetimes, but it can also be about just making the world a better place, (even if only in a very small way).
So I’m going to finish this with some advice from ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ on how to have creative ideas: “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”