CREATIVITY: Destroy to create by Kevin Duncan

A WORD ON CREATIVITY

Creativity thrives in stimulating environments, so make sure you provide one. In the fuzzy front end, everything is a mess. Don’t worry about this – it’s essential for making unexpected connections. Start by generating way more ideas than will ultimately be needed, then be ruthless in editing them down.

Don’t innovate all the time – it’s exhausting and distracting. Beware novelty overload, and remember that quitting can be winning. And don’t expect inspiration to strike miraculously – it doesn’t.  Instead, get to work and good things will follow.

Then once you alight on something genuinely innovative, pursue it with total conviction. Novelist Madeline L’Engle once said, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

ORIGINALITY: DESTROY TO CREATE

All creativity involves some form of shot in the dark.

Discovering consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

A leap from A to B, often via a somewhat unexpected C.

Small, incremental development of something that is already well established usually fails to provide sufficient differentiation.

So an element of destruction is needed.

Start by utterly ‘destroying’ the current version, solution, product, or whatever it is you are grappling with.

Clear the decks and try starting again.

Approach the challenge from two very different directions.

What do I know about it?

What don’t I know about it?

Somewhere in the answers to those two questions lies a new originality.