The subject of creativity—where it comes from, what triggers it, what inhibits it, and how it relates to other processes such as innovation and invention—is an important one, especially on a blog devoted to exploring passion-inspired, adventurous, and uncharted roads and approaches to life. After all, some creative thinking is absolutely essential to finding your way forward with no map and no guide.
Creativity is also a huge subject. So it’s one I expect I’ll be pondering and chipping away at in pieces, over the course of my writing career. But I stumbled across a podcast on the subject the other day by Stanford professor Bob Sutton, whose ideas on life and entrepreneurship often resonate with me. This particular six-minute podcast video laid out Sutton’s theory that creativity is really just repackaging existing ideas in a new way.
Sutton gave the example of Play-Doh, which found a new use (as a children’s clay) for a pliable goo that had been marketed as a way to remove soot from wallpaper in the age of coal-fired furnaces. He also talked about how Apple’s iPod used mostly off-the-shelf technology repackaged to perform a completely new and better function. In addition, he told the story of Andrew Wiles, the professor who managed to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem—a problem long considered unsolvable. It took Wiles seven years of effort to come up with a solution, piecing together techniques from various branches of mathematics.
The video led me to ponder Sutton’s theory a bit. Certainly much of innovation is looking at existing objects and finding new ways of recombining elements to do something better, faster, or differently. I keep thinking of the guy that invented the pop-top for soda cans, and became a multi-millionaire in the process. How many times did he look at the problem of glass soda bottles and ponder the problems with packaging the drink in an aluminum can before he figured out that what was needed to make the idea work was a removable tab of aluminum on the top? Then, of course, there would have been the problem of making something like that workable, and producible in large quantities.
Perhaps there was existing technology that made that invention or innovation easier for that particular inventor to see. But what about an artist, from Picasso to Jackson Pollack? Are they repackaging existing elements in new ways? Or what about Alan Paton, whose book Cry the Beloved Country is one of my all-time favorites? Is that kind of creativity just repackaging existing elements?
I suppose, if you consider colors and paintbrushes elements, then Picasso and Pollack found new ways of using those elements to create something entirely new and different. And if one takes the view that the last really new idea was articulated around the time of Cicero (a thought I heard somewhere along the line that I agree with more and more, as time goes on), then perhaps all of us writers are taking existing themes and words and just retelling them in new forms, no matter how “new” a piece of work may seem.
Certainly, in the same way as Andrew Wiles pondered all he knew about mathematics and how that might inform his ability to see a creative solution to Fermat’s Theorem, an artist takes what they know about the world and ponders whether or how that knowledge allows them to see some new piece, angle, perspective, or way to express some little corner of it. For that matter, Mozart’s legendary symphonies and compositions were just the repackaging of 12 already-known notes and a handful of rhythm options.
And yet, I think back to Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country—a work of creative fiction that is redemptive and heartbreaking all at the same time. It is not derivative, as “genre” pieces of writing (e.g. spy novel, historical romance) often are. It was a reaction to the heartbreak Paton experienced as a headmaster in a reform school in South Africa, watching his country’s racial tragedy evolve. From his life experience and pain, a story emerged in his head, complete with realistic, complex characters and plot lines, that he began writing down in a flood of emotion in a hotel room one night and finished a mere three months later.
Is that the repackaging of existing elements? Only if you consider Paton’s knowledge of daily events in his country, and his knowledge and insight as to the pain and hopes and motivations of humans “existing elements” he recombined in creating fictional characters and story lines.
Clearly, creativity is seeing something—combination of notes, an expression of an idea, a new way to look at a problem, a better way to package and deliver recorded music, or a new use for old products, that nobody else sees, or saw. Sutton’s point was that it doesn’t come like lightning, out of the blue. But then, again, even lightning doesn’t come out of the blue.
I suspect, however, that there’s a difference between creativity as it applies to innovation or problem solving, and creativity as it applies to the arts. Exactly what that difference is, I’m not sure. I’ll have to ponder that one some more … and hope I get hit with a little creative inspiration along the way.
This page contains an affiliate link.
Looking at the result of a creative process could give rise to seeing the activity as rearranging what exists. In a general sense that could be quite accurate. The question I always like to work with though is why or how the creativity occurred. What was the inspiration that led to change or discovery? Why this person and not another? As an example the elements of a sail and a wing can have a commonality of wood and fabric. On the water the sail is more or less perpendicular to the horizon while a wing runs parallel. A difference of 90 degrees and a few thousand years separates sailing from flying. Perhaps the question expands to include rearrangement along with the how/why.
I haven’t yet seen the video but I doubt that all creativity is repackaging. The guy at 3M who invented the post-it note had quite a story. First convincing people of the use for it and even more importantly finding just the right glue formula that would stick – yet not stick.
Interesting stuff Lane.
Mr.Sutton sounds like a cynical sort to me.
While I suppose his argument has merit, about any position if put forth by a gifted word smith or speaker can be persuasive.