Creativity and creating: what's the difference?

Thanks to Mark W for an interesting question.  Mark had been reading this post about opportunity-led thinking.  He asks:

I found your article where you reference Robert Fritz's work, notably his book CREATING, and was wondering how your work relates to his.  You talk about 'opportunity-led thinking', and I'm seeking to understand how this interfaces with creating and creativity. Can you please clarify? How does it help a person create?

Simple answer:  the difference between creating and creativity is the difference between a process and a set of techniques. 

How does opportunity-led thinking help a person create?  By developing our ability to find opportunities to resolve a tension: the tension between what exists and what we want to create.

I want to create a really special meal.  I have no time to go to the food store.  What do I do?  I look around and seek out the possibilities suggested by what I have in the house.  That’s opportunity-led thinking.  I could use one or more creativity techniques to help me (morphological analysis springs to mind); but more likely, I’ll find some useful-looking core ingredients and try to build up a meal from them in some way.

(Another name for this is design thinking.  I’m designing the meal with the components available to me.  The more creative I am in my thinking, the more unusual or elegant the meal might turn out.)

Now for the less simple answer.

I came across Robert Fritz’s work some years ago.  I had been following the well trodden creativity route, which uses different techniques to generate new ideas.  Most of these techniques can be clustered under one of two categories:  metaphorical techniques and reversal techniques. 

Metaphorical techniques seek to create lateral connections between unconnected or dissimilar things.  How is a cat like a refrigerator?  (They can both contain milk.)  How is a hoverfly like a pizza?  (Pizzas can hover if you spin them quickly enough.  Maybe hoverflies like olives...)

These techniques employ our powerful sense of metaphor to spark new cognitive connections.  Those connections are new ideas.

Reversal techniques, in contrast, operate by turning ideas inside out, or back to front, or upside down?  How can we make our customer experience truly terrible?  If we wanted to make our systems as inefficient as possible, what would we have to do?  By conjuring ‘intermediate impossibles’, we can generate new ideas.

Now, Fritz stands aloof from all this lateral thinking.  He dislikes the word ‘creativity’, preferring to talk about creating.

Indeed, he's openly scornful of most creativity techniques.  "Can you imagine," he writes, "Mozart brainstorming alternatives for the overture to The Marriage of Figaro?"  (Fritz is a composer.) 

For Fritz, these techniques ignore the vital question:  "What do I want to create?" 

He insists that creativity only makes sense in the context of a desire to create something.  It's not a matter of 'liberating' creativity, of 'taking risks' or 'manufacturing commitment'; creating brings something new into existence for its own sake.

Opportunity-led thinking is how we think when we respond to the desire to create.  We perceive a tension between current reality and the vision of what we want to create.  We look for opportunities to resolve that tension.  (My earlier post explains this bit in more detail.)

 

 

Fritz suggests that the creating process follows five identifiable steps.

1.  Conceive.  Have an idea of what you want to create. It may be general or specific.  Before you can start to create, you must know what you want to bring into being.
2. Know what currently exists.  This may be surprisingly hard to do.  We tend to view reality with various biases - assumptions, values, beliefs - that distort the truth of what actually exists.  But unless you know what currently exists in relation to your ambition, you cannot take action towards creating it.
3. Take action.  What do you do?  Fritz suggests some deceptively simple answers.  "Make it up."  "Trial and error."  His point is that you do whatever you think is necessary to bring the creation nearer to existence.  Some of the actions you take will move directly towards the desired result, and most will not.  "The art of creating is often found in your ability to adjust or correct what you have done so far."  The 'right first time' philosophy is extremely unhelpful when trying to create something new.  Creating involves learning as you go: and that, suggests Fritz, is a skill to be practised and learnt.
4. Learn the rhythms of the creative process.  These are: germination; assimilation; completion.  Germination is begins with the excitement of the new; assimilation is living with your ideas and actions and helping them to pull together; completion is the final stage when you can see the end result and are re-energised to push for its full realisation.
5. Create momentum.  The creative process contains the seeds of its own development.  Produce one creation and you will be better prepared to create the next.

How does my work relate to that of Robert Fritz?  Well, he has inspired me to think differently about what we do when we create.  All those creativity techniques have their uses (especially if we're not feeling particularly creative to begin with); but creating puts everything in context.  What do we want to create?  What have we got to start with?  Where are the opportunities? 

Those are good life questions.

 

Comments

[Charles Ndung'u]

very insightful and enlightening post.

[josephine wangutusi]

wow. Thanks for the differentiation.

[josephine wangutusi]

The process and the technical are inseparable.

[Martin Buuri Kaburia]

Great argument