Why do we use models of creativity that are anti-creative?
Here's what we know:
The ancient Greeks laid out a plan for creativity that we still follow.
The problem - Greeks did not believe that creativity existed.
They believed they lived in a closed universe, and that humans were given insight into the pre-established truth which we should then copy.
This led to a discovery and ideation focused model:
Insight — Ideate — Plan — Make
Today we know otherwise: reality is dynamic, open and creative. And we understand that genuine novelty is possible and is coming into being all the time.
We also know that ideation is inherently conservative and the new will always be at first unthinkable.
These two facts make the whole “Insight — Ideate — Plan — Make” approach irrelevant to creativity (it is still useful for other things).
So why do we have so many frameworks for creativity and innovation that still follow the anti-creative models of the ancient Greeks?
Other creativity approaches exist and more are possible — it just requires that we question our fundamental assumptions about reality, creativity and what it is to be human that have become so central to the western tradition.
That might sound daunting but a good starting point would begin with these concepts:
Reality is an open, dynamic and emergent process
Creativity is an ongoing process that is occurring everywhere: novelty is an emergent process that we can participate in.
Humans are enactive beings (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective). Thus thinking and human focused creativity processes cannot be reduced to the brain.
Novel ideas always emerge late in any human focused creative process. Doing novelty proceeds knowing novelty
How do you sidestep the legacy of the Greeks?
