Westerners are often amazed at the unstructured nature of Japanese meetings but maybe it's just that very lack of structure, that absence of time pressure, that frees them to solve problems so creatively. And how clever of the Japanese sometimes to plan that un-structured-ness by, for example, insisting that the first people to give their views are... See more

Having an idea, a new idea, is exactly the same thing. It's connecting two hitherto separate ideas in a way that generates new meaning.

“We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come.” Alfred Hitchcock

In fact, the only thing from the research that I could tell you about how to be creative is the sort of childhood that you should have had..

The reason why it is futile for me to talk about creativity is that it simply cannot be explained...It is literally inexplicable.

You can't become playful and therefore creative if you're under your usual pressures, because to cope with them you've got to be in the closed mode...You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.

once we've taken a decision we should narrow our focus while we're implementing it, and then after it's been carried out we should once again switch back to the open mode to review the feedback rising from our action, in order to decide whether the course that we have taken is successful, or whether we should continue with the next stage of our pla... See more

Time. It's not enough to create space, you have to create your space for a specific period of time...And it's only by having a specific moment when your space starts and an equally specific moment when your space stops that you can seal yourself off from the every day closed mode in which we all habitually operate.

What I am suggesting to you is that before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself the question, “When does this decision have to be taken?” And having answered that, you defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time, which will lead you to the most creative solution.