Deconstructing Creativity

The concept of ‘creativity’ has been on my mind lately, especially since I now work in an industry where agencies compete with one another on the basis of ingenuity and strategy; it really boils down to a battle of the creative minds.

I went in search of info/knowledge on ‘creativity’ because I was curious to deconstruct the concept. What is creativity really? Does it always have to come from inspiration, or can it be produced artificially? I stumbled upon this book by James Webb Young called “A Technique for Producing Ideas.” It’s a small, thin book with content that’s absolutely fascinating. So short of re-typing the whole book, here are the highlights. Basically, the author explains that the mind can be trained to think creatively and if you follow the process that he describes, you will be able to create Ideas. After all, an idea is simply a new combination of old/existing elements. Makes sense right? Here are the 5 stages of idea production:

Stage 1: Gather raw materials (with regards to immediate problem and also materials that enrich your current knowledge bank).

Stage 2: Work over materials in your mind.

Stage 3: AKA incubation: let something beside the conscious mind to synthesize info.

Stage 4: The actual birth of the Idea.

Stage 5: Final shaping and development of the Idea to practical usefulness.

It sounds easy, but takes practice and work. Even though ideas are really just combinations of old elements, the production of these new combinations depends largely on a person’s ability to see relationships. This is probably what truly sets ‘creative’ people apart from the average person. To some minds, pieces of info are seen as separate bits of knowledge. To other minds, these pieces of info are linked together to form a chain of knowledge that enables these people to see correlations between completely different topics and make something worthwhile with the discovery.

The example given by the author really supports my personal endeavor to apply psychology to advertising. He mentioned that psychologists discovered the profound influence words have on the lives of their patients, which led to the discovery of words as symbols of emotional experiences. This led to the use of word-symbols to create an emotional force first in political propaganda and later in advertising campaigns.

Mr. Young taught extensively in business and advertising courses and was the VP of Creative Work for JWT ad agency. After reading through the book (and especially the example he gave above), I suddenly felt very validated in my vocational aspirations :)