Creativity: Theory and Practice
Creativity is not a process. creativity is not scripted.
One of the most salient traits of creative visionaries like Walt Disney and Steve jobs is the absence of process.
Process is an organized way of doing things. But they didn’t have a process. They just did the work. No strict adherence to budget or timelines. Just figure things out on the fly.
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against efficiency in creative work
To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.
Dasha Nekrasova • Jon Rafman and Dasha Nekrasova on the Horror We Call Life
In creative work there are two phases: exploration and execution. In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the
... See moreDan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.
Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
Another key aspect of idea generation is to embrace variance. Research shows that, to find good novel ideas, we likely have to come up with many bad novel ideas because most new ideas are pretty bad. Fortunately, we are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, so if we can generate novel ideas quickly and at low cost, we are more likely to generate
... See moreEthan Mollick • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI
As humans are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, generating lots of ideas quickly is a great use for AI
Obviously, collaborations can work with idea generation too, but I think the most important part of idea generation is getting ideas yourself, then talking to people, customers, users to evolve them. Not talking to your teammates how great your team's idea is.
Pieter Levels • Make
The Rules of Brainstorming
Quantity over quality
No such thing as a bad idea
Build on each others ideas
Try writing about why the work is important, or spend some time reflecting on times in the past where you’ve felt most connected to it.