One of the questions I am often asked when talking about creativity is, “Can you guarantee we will generate creative insights and ideas?” A more blunt version of this question is, “How long will it take us to come up with a creative solution to our challenge?” And at the far end of bluntness, there’s my all-time favorite: “Can we just cut to the part where we solve the problem?”
In our result-driven environment, we think primarily in terms of the bottom line. If the bottom line is guaranteed, we’ll go for it. And while we are at it, let’s try to shorten the process as much as possible.
Imagine starting a talk or workshop with a statement like “Creativity is messy.” That’s not exactly what one would call walking on safe ground. When your audience wants immediate results or, at a minimum, guaranteed results, such a statement is not really encouraging. In fact, it raises a more profound question: How can we model something messy, and why should we? Why do we talk about a Creativity Operating System if it is unpredictable? Fair questions. To answer them, let’s go watch a game.
Nobody in the world can guarantee the outcome of a basketball game. It doesn’t matter if it’s a friendly neighborhood game or a game between two professional teams. No one — not the players, or the coaches, or the owners of the teams — can look you in the eyes and say, “We have such great moves; this game is ours!” No one can promise winning the game, let alone predict the exact result, unless they’ve rigged it, and even then, there’s room for surprises.
A basketball game is chaos. Controlled chaos, if you will. So many things can happen that you cannot really plan the game. You can surely prepare for it, but you cannot define a sequence of moves that leads to the desired outcome. There are too many variables, and each can set the game on a different course. The other team, the audience, the judge, an unexpected injury, a player thinking about something that happened just before the game at home… anything can affect the game and its outcome.
And yet, no professional basketball team gives up and says, “We cannot control the course of the game, so let’s just quit.” Nor do they say, “Let’s just show up and hope for the best.” No one can guarantee the game’s outcome, but we all know we can create the conditions that will help us. Like all other sports, basketball could be broken down (somewhat artificially but very effectively) into a set of skills, routines, and maneuvers to help any team that masters them be better prepared for the game.
Take speed, for example. The faster I run, the greater my chances are of reaching an optimal shooting position before I’m blocked. Does that mean I will score? Nobody can guarantee that. But the faster I run, the better my starting conditions are. The same applies to my shooting accuracy. The more accurate I am, the better my chances of scoring in the game. Obviously, anything can happen. I could get blocked, or be distracted, or just not run fast enough. Yet the more I work on this core capability, the more likely I am to achieve the desired outcome.
Speed, shooting accuracy, physical fitness, rebounding, offense, and defense maneuvers are part of the underlying model used by any good basketball player and basketball team. If you wish to be a better player, you should take each of these capabilities and master them. The better you get, the greater your chances of winning the game. Better, but never guaranteed. Basketball is chaotic, but we can create a relatively simple model of its underlying infrastructure to continually improve our results.
Creativity is at least as chaotic and unpredictable as a basketball game, at least when it comes to the bottom line. No one can guarantee a creative result given a predefined set of steps. There are many attempts to capture the essence of the creative process, but they are all futile. Creativity is not a process — there is no predefined set of actions that leads to a predictable result. When you think about it, this axiom follows directly from what we expect of creativity. If the result is predictable and repeatable, we are not likely to consider it creative.
As with basketball, our inability to describe creativity as a process does not imply we are helpless when it comes to improving the settings and increasing the likelihood of generating creative insights. The Creativity Operating System is not defined as a process. It’s a model of the underlying infrastructure that can make us more creative. Our creativity is built on seven core capabilities or functions: experiencing, observing, wondering, fusing, imagining, playing, and evolving. The more we master them and embody them, the more likely we are to come up with creative ideas when we need them (and even when we don’t).
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We will experience failures. We will reach dead-ends. We will face challenges we can’t overcome. At least not on demand. Creativity will still be chaotic, like a basketball game, but our game will improve continually.
The messy nature of creativity also has an upside. While we might not solve every challenge on demand, creativity can help us identify unexpected opportunities — opportunities we wouldn’t have been able to engineer intentionally. When we master our creative skills, we are better positioned to identify these opportunities. The reason we perceive creative people as more successful is not that they never fail, but that their failures are balanced by opportunities others miss.
Chaotic systems cannot be tamed. They can be controlled in the sense that we can create optimal conditions to generate a desired result. Mastering the Creativity Operating System doesn’t provide a definite solution to any creative challenge. It does create a fertile ground for creative ideas to grow.