The “God model” is our vernacular term for the historical western approach to creativity. The approach can be traced back to the classical Greeks and early christianity:
The God model of independent ideation and then willing it so is very much the implicit operating model of most of the creativity and innovation consultancy landscape today.
This model has given us a human centered, idea driven, essentialist, and causal approach to creativity. This approach gets everything wrong about creativity: Creativity is not a human attribute but an ongoing worldly phenomenon.
And it is one that we can skillfully participate in, but we are neither the authors nor the controlling agents of its emergence. The God model is a causal model of the most transparent form: the innovator ideates and then makes it so.
This approach to creativity is part of a long “essentialist” approach to understanding action and change that is part of causality. The assumption in this approach is that for something to happen, there must be a cause, and that this cause comes from a deep and singular source.
See also: Creativity, Ideas, Emergence
