Creativity is not enough.

Theodore Levitt wrote this title in the Harvard Business Review years ago…

And when it comes to the design process, undeniably, competence, knowledge, execution, management, and technical prowess are all important in the production of great design solutions.  But for a very, very long time, for us, creativity was the star, the secret ingredient, the one quality we spent the great majority of our time on trying to capture as the core of our design process.

Levitt on the other hand emphasized,

“The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people in a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves actually have.”

Ouch.

In the eighties we followed the DeBono's of the world.  Experts on creativity they were.  They educated us on how to avoid "groupthink," where common knowledge told us that creativity was suppressed not liberated.  Their strategies were all about brainstorming and looking at things from different angles.  (Or in DeBono's case, as if wearing different hats.)  But it was mostly about how large teams of people could become prolific in idea generation.  More was always better.  Always.  And at the time, access to diverse information was either at the library, or in people's heads.  More people, combining more diverse information, and more experiences, equaled more and better ideas.  Especially more.

Consequently, facilitation of large group processes was born as a skill, the skill, to be mastered.  And the crowds, staff and clients, most of them, loved it.  Who could argue against the warm and fuzzy feelings associated with the ideas of inclusion, openness, and more is better?  It was the American way.

We did have a few doubts back then.  Some felt that the facilitated events denied the reality that creative design occurs not at points in time, or in days at a time, but through an extended process of hard work that, while creative, encompassed all the qualities of a successful project I mentioned above.

And as it turns out, Levitt may be even more right today.  Access to information is obviously different than in the eighties.  Almost any individual has access, through the Internet, to more and more diverse information than they could possibly absorb in an entire lifetime.  We are now bombarded by information, so much so that the challenge is now finding the signal above the noise.  So much so that just avoiding the noise is a stretch for many of us.

John Mariotti, a business consultant and former President of Huffy bicycles, of all things, has identified this in his writings.  He believes that the culture of information that we design in today is radically different, and that unnecessary complexity is born out of the very act of idea proliferation.  The very thing we worked so hard to be good at.

He states that creativity and innovation are not the same thing.

“Proliferation is not innovation, and it leads to complexity – a very wasteful result.”  “Wasteful complexity uses valuable resources needed for innovation.  Drive out unnecessary complexity and the entire organization will breathe a large collective deep breath.”

Complexity, the kind that we are now experiencing, brings complication to the design process.  Of course, creativity and idea generation are still important.  But, creativity and innovation are far from being the same thing.  The ideas spawned by creativity are simply the raw material from which innovation can grow.  Maybe the alchemy, of combining creation and execution, should be the new secret ingredient, the new quality we should be trying to capture on each and every project.  But all in the context of, signal above noise.  Creative idea proliferation was what we needed in the eighties.  Creative focus is what we need now.

Comments

[Greg Zielinski]

The statistical theoretician Emile Borel posited that if you placed a group of monkeys in a room with typewriters and gave them infinite time to bang on the keys, they would eventually generate Shakespeare’s plays. In 2003, a group of University of Plymouth students in Devon, England “tested” this theory with 6 monkeys, a computer, and one month’s time. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter “S”, but the lead male bashed the keyboard with a stone, and the rest of the monkeys finished it off by urinating and defecating on it.
Since we don’t have infinite time to wait on innovation, I think this study is relevant to this question. Simply putting a group of inexperienced, unfocused minds together in a room for “brainstorming” may generate a lot of ideas, but most of them will be crap (or just a bunch of “S”s). Creativity, without an understanding of the problem to be solved or the means by which to execute solutions is useless. These practical touchstones are vital to filtering out the noise and concentrating our efforts on our most promising ideas.
However, the acts of problem definition, solution proposal, and solution implementation are all creative acts, and require us at times to take leaps of faith, ignore convention, and explore ideas with an unbiased (yet still critical) naïveté. Without this approach, we have trouble uncovering unique problems or constraints which provide inspiration to our solutions and we struggle to break free of conventional solutions to find ones which suit our projects exceptionally to their purpose.

[kshep]

Agree that execution is important, sometimes ability to execute creativity is based in timing and the audience that can make it click. This is evidence in some early thinkers work where invention and creativity occurred but the audience was not ready to listen or move, therefore delaying the realization of the creativity and sometimes changing the perceived author of the idea. The TV.

On big broad aimless groups: Ideas grow legs when you are bouncing with some people, not all people...it is important to be surrounded with Thoughtfuls, others can also be in the room that may add tweaks but can add background noise. I think some of the best ideas come from a strong mix of people in the room, maybe no more than 4? at a time...not necessarily homogenous types, just strong in their own way. Let the 4 reach out to other people, other sounding boards, to test it in other ways and bring back new realizations to the 4. A selected collaborative process. There is a place for broad conversations, but it doesn't work for all topics and the nature of all projects.

Information economy and collaboration: The uncertainty of the recent economy hinders some forms of collaborative, creative discussion and a result, the end product or idea suffer. Transfer of information and ideas, most recently, has tightened for some feel the need to horde their eggs, knowledge, or personal edge for leverage. On the other hand, perhaps, the creative focus has more leverage than before. We need our best and versatile thinkers now. Conservatism is widespread...how do we ensure that creativity is not thrown out in this climate as a luxury? Determining who is willing to take risks? Solving the execution to conform to this conservatism will be important. What if you can take that conservatism and create a new asset from it?

The uncertainty of our way, forces a desire to flexible into unknown areas (good thing), conservative or preservative, or find a new magic (optimistic). All are visible right now.

[Aaron Herring]

•is there, or has there been, a perception that architects invent?

•don't architects navigate complexity on behalf of the laymen?

•While architects are operationally generalist, isn't architecture a specialty practice focusing on a uniquely defined premise, problem, opportunity, or observation?

•aren't architects actually artist, activists, pragmatists, advocates for clients, places, spaces, and species of which the architectural 'product' intends positive social change?

•idea proliferation for proliferation sake is gratuitous. (ie - largely material on the internet absent of palpable content)

•creative focus has always been what architecture is and needs to be. Have we ever preferred the un-orchestrated built environment? would we accept chaos, and/ or subsequently build that way?

[Janet Majure]

Your post meshes well with "Better off Ted," a TV show I happened to watch last night in which by encouraging everyone's ideas the company wound up developing an MRE (meal, ready to eat) that fit in a shipping box as big as a microwave oven.

Being the practical sort, I tend to be skeptical of any approach that purports to hold the "secret ingredient" or that results in design that is merely novel, not innovative (or good). There's rarely a single, best design solution to any problem. You need only as many ideas as it takes to develop a solution that is doable, esthetically acceptable and, yes, within budget.

[Steve]

Stephen, may I use that quote? "Every time you start with a poor idea you end up with a poor result. Every time you start with a brilliant idea, at least you've got a shot." Love it.

[Stephen Hopkins]

2.5 thoughts -

1/2 thought.......innovation is so 2009. collaboration or maybe efficiency is in. i'm no expert, but we're over innovation.

full thought (1)........filtering is more important than accumulating. We are certainly empowered by the amount of information available to us, but quantity and quality are rarely positively correlated. Finding sources we trust and sifting through the piles to get what we want is the new challenge.

full thought (2)........Again the inverse relationship of quantity and quality - more ideas does not equal better ideas. To discount creativity in favor of implementation too much, we risk running down a path that delivers products brilliantly but fails to realize its potential b/c of poor creativity. This is not an either/or situation and creativity must always be balanced with the ability to execute. Every time you start with a poor idea you end up with a poor result. Every time you start with a brilliant idea, at least you've got a shot.

[Randy Gerdes]

Yeah, too much talk and not enough action. I used to think people would take my good ideas; then I figured out the winners are those who can implement. There are probably more good ideas than good implementers -- too much noise.

Lately I have been thinking about a book I used to have and lost track of. With the emphasis on green, it seems this book should be even more relevant, and that there is room for creativity in updating/adapting buildings for today's purpose.

http://tinyurl.com/y9gvamd