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The common assumption is that ideas come from our thinking, and our thinking involves ideas—and all this is happening via representations in our heads (brains). This is a circular logic that fails to reveal to us the creative conditions from which abstract thinking emerges. And ultimately, this exclusively brain-centric approach to thinking is now understood to be false and profoundly misleading (see: Thinking, Enaction).
Thinking is always a distributed process that always involves activities, others, tools, and environments (“no thinking but in making”). And much of the thinking that is happening in these contexts is not something that could be explicitly articulated in any way whatsoever. It is a-conceptual and held in actions and relations between bodies, tools and environment. We can term this extended form of a-conceptual thinking “know how.”
Novel ideas (know-what) do emerge during creative processes – but they are not there at the beginning, nor do they initiate and drive the creative process. What might eventually become the things we call “wow ideas” first emerge as feelings—a “pull” provoked by actions, circumstances, and context. To have a new idea, we first need to do things in new ways—to experimentally probe and co-evolve with a novel ecosystem. New ideas first emerge as “know-how"—as practices that cannot be clearly articulated (and often cannot be articulated whatsoever!). And in this process there is the possibility that some aspects of know-how can be (with great skill) transformed into articulable concepts (or “know-what”).
This background introduction can bring us closer to practices critical to engaging with creative processes. But having an enlarged understanding of thinking alone is not enough. We need to begin to explore explicit practices critical to engaging creative processes. One of the most common and powerful of these is "blocking"...
