Creativity, the slow way

Posted on August 29th, 2007 by Christopher

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein

Guy Claxton’s book, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, is remarkable. It’s a worthwhile read and makes a good case for the practical value of slowing down. He coins a term, “The Undermind.” This is not quite the same as the unconscious, but it is about slow knowing, or intuition. Intuition needs to be nurtured. But intuition is given short shrift in a results-oriented environment.

If it weren’t for science, I would have died at the age of nine from a burst appendix. So I appreciate science. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. But the scientific way of thinking now dominates how we think about everything. We have become myopic. Mathematics and science are the most valued subjects, but the arts are now second-class.

Rational thinking has its place, but when we look at all experience rationally we become lost. We lose the ability of slow knowing. You can’t quantify how much you love someone. You can’t weigh your dreams. And by dreams, I don’t mean aspirations. By dream, I mean the experienced you have when asleep. There are other ways of knowing that reductive science knows nothing about.

Many people agree there is a need for creativity. But the time, effort, and resources to become creative are ignored. The mechanistic goal-oriented results-driven organization is a brute machine. It may be efficient, but it isn’t intelligently creative. People who have had no exposure to the creative process unsurprisingly have a difficult time seeing its value.

Intuition and rationality have been at odds since the dawn of time, but each has its place.

The paradox here is in order to generate new ideas quickly, we need to slow down. Creative ideas need rich soil in which to grow. Ideas need incubating; and that takes time. Claxton cites the mathematician, Henri Pointcaré:

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind… The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident…

See Claxton, Guy, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, (HarperCollins, 2000 , p 60)

The first book I read of Claxon’s is called Wise Up. He writes about the difference between D-mode thinking (deliberate) and a more intuitive way. Like the notion of Slow itself, Wise Up, turns educational theory upside down.

Children understand creativity. They’re good at “making things up,” or “let’s pretend.” I’m convinced all of us are naturally creative, but somewhere along the road, we get educated out of creativity. We are told to stop playing about and grow up.

Understanding and engaging in active play opens the mind to new possibilities. Play for children is not only pure enjoyment, it develops their worldview and abilities. Adults often become rigid, but they can slow down, loosen up, and get creative.

Rushing to judgment is a problem. If you judge an idea too soon, you run the risk of killing it before it’s fully born. When we are in a rush to get things done our view is limited. We need a shift. Here are some creativity killers:

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” -Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” -Popular Mechanics, predicts the future of computing, 1949.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” -Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Ideas need time to be mulled over. They need to be played with.

Can patience become a virtue again?

Laziness is vilified. We are afraid of being thought of as lazy. But not doing anything, and waiting to see what happens is part of the creative way. It’s part of the slow way. If we are to have insight, to change our perspective, then we need to do something differently.

Even though we may be uncomfortable with uncertainty, we need to learn how to manage it and not go looking for unrealistic sure-fire solutions. The reality is we live in a precarious world. Being creative requires us to step out into the unknown, to be willing to fail (or at least reassess what failure might be). And for that we need to slow down now.

Tags: Talk Back //

14 Responses to “Creativity, the slow way”

  1. Matt Ambrose // Aug 30, 2007 at 7:15 am

    In the UK education has become increasingly test driven as the govt seeks to present progress in terms of figures.

    Results improve every year yet employers are complaining at the lack of initiative and poor core skills of today’s school leavers.

    Learning and education shouldn’t be about memorizing facts and figures, but developing the skills needed to solve problems in both the work place and personal life.

    I fear that by gearing education around tests we are stifling creativity and the ability of our future workforce to compete in the global marketplace.

  2. Christopher // Aug 30, 2007 at 7:47 am

    Yes, same here in the US. Math and science get all the attention. It’s so sad that they want to test infants. If you want a robotic workforce, then learning to jump through hoops at an early age will do the trick. But character development, and fostering curiosity seem to me to be prime aims of education.

    I wonder what ever happened to Summerhill. I found this article.

  3. Dan/Peps // Aug 30, 2007 at 11:32 am

    The Modern World is ruled by Fear – fear of the unknown or things we don’t feel we can control: terrorism, environmental catastrophe… or, on a smaller scale, the ASBO teenagers hanging around on the street corners, Road Rage, the random gun-toting psychopath…

    Our politicians promise to protect us from the things we fear, but also we attempt to protect *ourselves* through a shield of control – focus, efficiency, time management, health & safety… and Powerpoint presentations! In getting by, in *surviving*, we have forgotten how to *live*. In peppering our lives with myriad small goals, we have lost sight of the Ultimate Goal – to find true happiness and a deep spiritual purpose to our lives. What is the point of it all? Science and rationality can help us understand the mechanics of day-to-day reality, whereas art and creativity can align us with the yearnings of the soul.

    Re intuition… we don’t have to *know* everything. On many occasions, I have found myself in a conversation where I am asked to explain, rationalise and quantify my thoughts… Why do you think that? Why do you believe what you believe? There is, of course, a value in digging deep into the archaeological layers of knowledge, in questioning and examining - but sometimes, in the end, something just *feels* a certain way. And, of course, intuition has been shown to have a real, practical, scientific value! (see, for example, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”).

    Finally, I couldn’t agree more that we need to re-learn how to play. Not in a “leisure” sense – not in the sense of corporate team-building go-karting, army assault courses, paint-balling and other such goal-focused tosh. We need to play without a reason or a purpose… except to simply *have fun*! Children have been doing it for years, so there must be something in it…

  4. Christopher // Aug 30, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    Dan,

    I read Gladwells’ The Tipping Point and liked it. But when Blink came out, I skimmed it and didn’t think much of it. I may need to take another look.

  5. Bob Leckridge // Aug 31, 2007 at 6:15 am

    You’re so right Christopher about this imbalance between science and other ways of knowing. Way back to High School I was the only kid to take English Literature, Physics, Maths and Biology in my final year. So even by the age of 17 people had picked up that you should choose between sciences and arts. I’ve really been getting irritated recently by those who claim to champion science as an exclusively “right” way to know things. Yet surely the greatest scientists are those who are never satisfied that they know something for definite. Poor old Lord Kelvin and his proclamation about flying machines!
    I’ve just started reading Solomon’s “Joy of Philosophy” where he argues for passion and pleasure in philosophical enquiry instead of what he calls the “thin-ness” of logical positivism and analytic philosophy. Strikes me that fits well with your slow approach. And it strikes me science should be like that too - passionate and joyous rather than pompous and arrogant.
    The other book that has popped into my head on reading this post is “Whole New Mind” by Daniel H Pink which is also a call to use both rational and non-rational processes of the brain rather than only one or the other.

  6. Keith // Aug 31, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    You are on the right path. After finishing my book GROUP GENIUS (www.groupgenius.net), I am thinking about writing a book called RELAX: THE SURPRISING SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL GENIUSES. The basic idea is based in a finding from creativity research: that insights always come to people when they take time off, when they stop working hard. That’s why I advocate afternoon breaks, and long vacations. However, the insights only come during time off if you were working hard for a period of time BEFORE the break, so you can’t relax ALL of the time. But most professionals in America fail to relax enough.

  7. Christopher // Aug 31, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    Keith,

    I was at a meeting of management consultants not that long ago. I asked them how many people schedule unstructured time in their day, none did.

    When you are writing, you know that you have to put your work down for a while. You need to let your ideas incubate. Some time has to pass before you get a new perspective. Or at least that’s my experience. I wouldn’t advocate relaxing all the time, well I might on the IINDM site (International Institute of Not Doing Much).

  8. Phil Wilson // Sep 2, 2007 at 4:57 pm

    As a professional mathematician I can certainly affirm Poincare’s (no t!) quote about the role of the unconscious in mathematical work. Most of us have our best ideas in the shower or walking the dog. Moreover play is essential. We often tell our students to “play” with a problem, trying out anything that comes to mind. This helps to set the boundaries on the problem, and to eliminate fruitless directions. When we begin researching a new problem, we often over-simplify it on puprose in order to extract the main feature; we call this over-simplified thing a “toy model”. Some of our greatest mathematicians spend most of their time playing and thinking about games like chess and go, and are most creative when they do so.

    I don’t think it is any surprise that the Poincare Conjecture was recently proved by a maverick mathematician outside of publish-or-perish academe, nor that Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved in the 90’s by a tenured mathematician who was able to lock himself in his attic for seven years without fear of reprisal.

  9. Dan/Peps // Sep 4, 2007 at 11:14 am

    Gaahhh!! I have to stop myself getting inconsolably frustrated by this issue! – i.e. the apparent blindness of so many large corporations with respect of the value of time off, play, “unstructured time.” The desperate need for the Powers That Be to be *in control* seems to overshadow the illogicality of the means by which they retain that “control” – well, okay, maybe in a psychological sense, in encouraging us all to be constantly “loyal,” hard-working and always be aware that, when we are at work, our time is not our own, they achieve their goal – we *do* end up feeling powerless and beholden to our employers. But… even in the base, materialistic sense that a company’s purpose is to make money (and I don’t personally believe that it should be, but that’s a whole different Kettle of Kontroversy), is this approach – this instilling of a feeling of powerlessness and beholden-ness – actually beneficial to the company? In not allowing space for creativity, we create a workforce of drones. This may be appropriate for a beehive or an anthill, but in the world of humans, the freedom that creativity brings and the creativity than freedom brings, can only be a good thing for all persons involved. Creativity leads to insights leads to better ways of doing things leads to (surely!) greater profit. It seems so obvious, and yet…… :-/

  10. Christopher // Sep 4, 2007 at 11:24 am

    Dan,

    I think corporate power is a different topic. But on the subject of time off, are you familiar with John De Graff’s book of essays on the subject? It makes interesting reading. http://www.timeday.org/

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