There’s an activity that’s been popular in recent years at the d.school. It involves creating a statement of belief or intention — aka a “manifesto” — that is visible to the world around. We have found that it’s a powerful way to help folks synthesize their realizations after a learning experience (hat tip to Charlotte Burgess-Auburn for leading the charge on this amazing exercise!).

Aleta, Bernie, and I are assigning a manifesto to our Transformative Design class this week, and given my hatred of hypocrisy, the assignment’s got me thinking about my own statement of intent. I haven’t made it visual, per se, but I had the chance to make it verbal for a short talk I gave recently, and I’m sharing it here to get feedback and collaboration. Do let me know what you think.

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“I don’t really need any breakthrough thinking in my company, in my work, or in my life.”

- said no one, ever

The truth is, we need more breakthroughs than ever before. And not just in terms of products and services for sale; we need breakthroughs in communication, in policy, in systems, in perspectives, and on and on.

If this is the case, then what stands in the way? This is the question that has obsessed me the last ~12 years I’ve been teaching at the Stanford d.school. And in the dozen or so years I have been marinating on the question, it turns out that the root problem is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of creativity, and even the nature of ideas themselves.

Think about your last breakthrough: where did it come from? When did it occur to you, and how? If you had to diagram the "process," what would it look like? Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, are victims of serendipity, haphazardly if consciously waiting for the muse to bless us.

But what if we understood the nature of serendipity, of creativity? Might we increase our likelihood of breaking through? Might we turn the tables and court the muse?

Allow me to first ask a supremely simple question: what is an idea?

No really, I’ll wait.

How can we possibly proceed if we can’t even define the simplest term?

Here’s the best way I can put it, based on my admittedly layman's understanding of the underlying neuroscience: the brain is not capable of making new stuff from scratch. What seems like a “new idea” is actually just a new connection between two things you already know. You can think of it like lego blocks, coming together to form a new thing, this idea.

So say, for example you know that a company is trying to solve the problem of helping young families climb the hills of San Francisco with overloaded strollers. What if I told you one of the engineers just remembered that the lawn mower of his childhood dreams was self-propelled?

Do you see what just happened? You got a “new idea!” I haven't even told you the engineer's idea, but you already know it. And when it occurred to you, there was that ah ha! But really, all I gave you was a new lego, for you to combine in a new way. Your brain filled in the rest.

A new idea is nothing less than a new connection. But importantly, it's nothing more! As long as “ideas” remain confined to a nebulous, indefinable concept, we will continue to struggle. When we realize new ideas are simply the result of seeking and making new connections, breakthrough thinking comes within reach.

Just the other day, I had a graduate student tell me, "You have NO IDEA how much of a relief it is to learn that ideas are simply new connections. I have always been so intimidated by the prospect of creativity, and I've never known it was this simple..." So an idea is simply a new connection.

What about creativity?

I said we had to start by addressing the profound misunderstandings we hold.

The very best definition of creativity I've ever heard comes from a seventh grader in Ohio, whose teacher recently shared it with a friend. She said, "Creativity is doing more than the first thing that comes to your mind."

Using this inspired definition, having established that an idea is a connection, we could say that creativity is “seeking more than the first connection that comes to your mind.”

This seems simple enough, but our creativity -- our ability to do more than the first thing that comes to mind -- is severely limited by a significant cognitive bias we all hold: the tendency to seek cognitive closure.

As I’ve distilled it, almost everything we do and teach comes down to helping folks resist the tendency towards closed-mindedness (cognitive closure), and to seek and make the kinds of connections they need to fuel fresh thinking. Seeking is one thing, and making is another.

But that’s for another time…

Related: Resist the Need for Cognitive Closure
Related: The Problem With Solving Problems
Related: Allow Time for Incubation

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