Creativity: Theory and Practice

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.

This gives us a roadmap to doing more creative work. What we need to do is, in the exploration phase, raise the perceived value of doing the work, raise the perceived costs of not doing the work, and lower the perceived value of doing other things.

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

Curiosity is voracious–the more you know the more you want to know; the more connections you make between the different bits of knowledge; the more ideas you have. Which is why curiosity is really the wellspring of creativity.

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.

When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.