Inefficiency Breeds Creativity
Inefficiency Breeds Creativity
Res Extensa #68 :: How process and the pursuit of predictability stifles creative work
Think about a time when a spark of creativity hit you. Maybe you had an idea while listening to a podcast on a commute. Or you were playing with your kids and thought up a new concept to write about. Or sitting in a meeting, you thought up a way to solve an unrelated problem.
Much of the time, creativity comes when we least expect it. We actually refer to these as “shower thoughts” — but we don’t hop in the shower for the purpose of generating great ideas.
There's something about the brain’s wiring that fires neurons in unpredictable patterns when we change contexts, when we switch up environments. Of the ideas I often write about, nearly zero of them sprouted during "writing mode". Same thing with new product ideas; they don't reliably come to me when I'm ostensibly doing product work.
Creativity happens up in all sorts of places it seemingly shouldn't. Daydreaming or taking a walk are common sources, the idle brain creatively wandering. But relying on your idling mind to work for you in the background doesn’t lend well to measurable efficiency. Creativity is an inefficient process.
How would you define what it means to work "efficiently"? The definition would probably include notions of process, predictability, measurability. In order for work to become efficient, you remove all the extraneous dead ends and experimentation. You suppress trial and error — in fact, you want to eliminate error entirely. You create predetermined, step-by-step procedures to move through the work.
Premeditated processes are the enemy of creativity. The imposing push to categorize what stage in the process you're at, or to "move to the next step", or to get in front of instrumenting and measuring and selling and all the other things are somewhere downstream of the spark of creativity. These forces applied to early stifle the freedom to explore, try, and fail. Without the breathing room to tinker, creativity has no chance to take root.
The creative process is the search for novelty, and it's hard to conduct this search with a Project Manager looking over your shoulder overmeasuring and overcategorizing each step. Rigid processes are allergic to novelty, because novelty is by definition unpredicted. The Process doesn't have a contingency path for what to do with the New Thing. It certainly doesn’t know how to bring it about.
Procedure hates the unpredictable. But if we could predict creativity it wouldn't be the elusive force that we’re are always attempting to nurture.
At the same time, fostering creativity doesn't require us to give infinite freedom for creative exploration. That doesn't work either. The entire endgame is for the fruits of our creativity to see the light of day. To get shipped, published, bought, and used. Just as rigid process stifles creation, open-ended constraintless environments also tend to leave us struggling with a blank canvas. If we could do anything, with anything, by any time, what forces are left to motivate us?
The best methods balance this tension between freedom and constraint. The concept of Hard Edges and Soft Middle applies anywhere we're balancing a search for novelty with an external need to push forward. Set broad but well-described limiting bounds on time, dollars, resources, or other variables, then leave the space inside open for creative exploration.
Even the greatest creative works of literature didn't develop without boundaries. Many an author wrote their magnum opus while destitute. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to get out of debt. Hugo, Dickens, and Dumas were all burdened with financial demands that pushed them to publish, and they generated some decent output even with forcing functions. Other stories like this abound.
Creativity isn't completely impossible in a world of constraints. But I’ll bet the great authors didn’t use Kanban or Agile as crutches for their creations. Looking to a “system” that can predictably generate novel ideas is looking for creativity in the wrong place.
Efficiency and legibility are requirements with certain kinds of known work, where the need is to punch through the motions — in manufacturing, construction, or dentistry you often don’t want creativity. Predictability and discipline are the order of the day But we should recognize that mechanistic systems suppress the openness to experimentation (and failure) required to come up with something new.