Creativity is a process by which something new emerges. The question for us as humans is, “By what process do we help make the new emerge?” And the very common answer is that the best process will involve a three step process of Ideating, Planning, and then Making.
But the problem is that thinking—ideating—relies on words, concepts and images. And all of these necessarily refer to existing things. But if something is radically and totally new, there will be no image, concept or word for it. So how could the racially new be ideated? This is the creativity paradox: you cannot ideate the radically new...
If we cannot ideate the radically new, then we need to have very different approaches to creativity than ones that rely on some form of the Ideate-Plan-Make approach. The problem is that most contemporary approaches to creativity follow this model.
See also: Ideation, The God Model, The Creativity Paradox: How Can You Recognize What Has Never Been Seen?
