“Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
— Charles Mingus
The business world is inundated with marketing gurus, business coaches, accelerator programs, etc.
All of them (hopefully), focused on providing you with the right guidance to grow your business.
The three main factors all business tools and help rely on, is planning, executing, and improving over time.
While that is perfectly good advice, research on creativity has actually uncovered that this can be considered part of the creative process.
Even though most people see creativity as something completely different, artists and businesses all rely on the same cues. Planning, execution, and improvement over time.
Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of Neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine, tells us that,
“Creativity is really the ability to take existing elements from the physical world or from the thought world, if you will, or from any domain of life, mood, thinking and information. And to reorder those into novel combinations that are useful for something.“
The creative process, a term I attribute to Rick Rubin, has two main modes to unleash creativity.
Discovery mode, which is coming up with an idea by reorganizing existing ideas into novel combinations.
And an implementation mode, where we take the ideas and make them useful for something.
But before we get into each mode, we need to talk about a section that doesn’t get enough attention but is equally important for creativity, understanding where we are pointing our creative juices towards.
The problem with the problem
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”
— Charles “Boss” Kettering
If we want to do things that haven’t been done or learn things that have never been learned (being more creative) we must learn to ask the right questions, ones so good that they basically start answering themselves.
All creativity starts with a question worth solving.
The problem with most entrepreneurs is that they don’t spend enough time questioning the problem they’re trying to solve.
“How do I improve my social media?”
“How do I get more clients?”
These questions may be relevant to your business, but they don’t spark creativity and innovation because they’re too simple. Too surface level.
A question that sparks creativity is often a deep rooted one, one that has no direct answer or solution.
Asking good questions is actually an art unto itself, and from my experience, there are multiple depths of questions.
First are questions that help us learn more about the world. Questions like how does it work, or what is it.
Then, we ask questions to learn more about each other. Questions like who are you, where are you from.
The last level of questions are where creativity lies. Questions that have no wrong answers. They’re deep, open ended, they require thought and vulnerability.
Questions like what if, and why.
In business, instead of asking questions about what we should do, we should be asking questions about what we could do.
“Top performers ask questions that demystify the unknown, and in doing so, open an ocean of possibilities.”
— Mike Vaughan
If we want to start the engine of creativity, we need to ask better questions.
Questions that are profound, that give us room to think, and are so exciting to us that we immediately start thinking of ideas for it.
I’ll repeat it again, all creativity starts with a question worth solving.
Here are some questions to help you think about what you could do:
- What if I started my business all over again from scratch? What would I do or stop doing?
- Why do I feel like I don’t have time for the things I know are important? What if I made the time?
- What if I only focused on improving the things that are currently working?
- What can I do that would make the rest of what I have to do easier to do or irrelevant?
- What would I choose to do in my business if I knew I couldn’t fail?
Discovery Mode
Once we have the right question to work on, we can start practicing the creative process.
The first mode is what everybody has trouble with that not many people speak about in a business setting, the discovery mode.
Whether you have caught on to it yet or not based on the creativity definition above, discovery mode has three main sections as well.
Gathering ideas, reorganizing ideas, and experimenting with them to arrive at the right one.
In this mode we are trying to come up with ideas, reorganize them, and make sure they are what we want to do, so we can move it into implementation mode.
You might be surprised to see that what we are doing here is mostly reorganizing ideas, not necessarily coming up with things you’ve never thought before.
And that’s because through combination of ideas is where the original ones come from.
Like how Netflix started as a video rental business that operated like a monthly gym membership, or how AirBnb is a combination of travel agency, social media platform, and bed and breakfast.
Even the iPhone was a combination of multiple pre-existing functions and features packaged in a tiny tablet with a phone antenna.
Once we have a combination of ideas that we are excited about, we experiment with it and see if it can be done with the resources we have.
If not, we go back to combining more ideas until we find one that can do it all. Then we move into the next mode.
Implementation Mode
Once someone arrives at the right idea, the only way it becomes creative is by executing on it and putting it out there in the world.
Creative ideas aren’t creative if other people can’t see it.
So when you put it all together, creativity follows a fairly robust system.
Most businesses rely only on the bottom portion of the hourglass, and that’s exactly the reason why we spend so much time trying to find ideas to stand out and separate from the competition.
We are missing the top portion of the creative way of being.
We are missing context.
Much like a fiction story, if you remove the context of how the world works in the story, you’re left with a shell that is confusing and looks very similar to the million stories currently out there.
It’s not that what we are doing is wrong, it’s that we haven’t been giving people the full picture.
Being creative is how we separate ourselves from everybody else. Because nobody will be able to have ideas and think like you do.
It’s what makes us unique.
Which leads us to Part III. The business of creativity…