Creative Thinking vs. Creativity

Creative thinking is a mechanical process. There are all kinds of tools, exercises and group activities that make it happen. It's relatively easy. Take three people and say, we need a new name for the product we're launching next year, here's what it does, come up with 50 possible names between you. Half an hour later they have 50. That's creative thinking.

Creativity is the opposite. It isn't about generating things from the inside out. It's about capturing things when they occur to you.

So the most important thing, if you want to be creative at work, is to have a reliable, very low-friction way to capture ideas as they occur, for yourself, or at the team or company level. They will occur, and you will not remember them. Even if you tell yourself, oh, that's really good, that's what we needed to say, I have to remember that. You're driving, or on the phone, and you don't write it down, and it's gone. When you go back to get it, it isn't there. That's just how the mind works. It's processing and baking and chopping all the time, then it comes out at some moment, and if you don't capture it, it's gone, or it comes back two years from now.

Everyone has lost an idea that came to them. Everyone. I have a pretty extensive process for never losing one, and I still lose them from time to time.

You can prime creativity by reading a bunch of stuff or thinking about something and letting it bake for a day or two. Go on a long walk, and tell yourself it's going to be an hour long whether the idea comes in the first five seconds or not. I don't know why this works, but your brain, knowing there's no escape from the next sixty minutes, seems to serve it up. Then you capture it.

Any team, person or company can be taught creative thinking pretty easily. You don't teach people to be creative, because everyone already is. You teach them to capture rigorously. Then at the end of the week you look back and think, I don't even remember thinking that. It turns out I solved this problem two days ago. It's right there in the weekly review.