Chapter Six

Creativity—Not Manufacturing

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.

—Flannery O’Connor Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Two Stories of Seeing

In 1910, a 23-year-old poet sat down to draft his response to the world around him. He channeled the voice of a middle-aged man straight from Dante’s Inferno, circling round and round the increasingly empty rituals that made up his day. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his narrator was caught up in ambivalence, paralyzed by all action until the very act of consuming toast or drinking tea had become an existential crisis:

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

When I reread this poem—T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—a mood immediately sets in. I see the streets Prufrock walked in my mind; I wrestle with the ghosts in his head. “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?” I know what it is like to live in a Europe on the cusp of modernity. This is a world where the gods have fled, a world without any divine glow of meaning surrounding human action. Prufrock’s world is a place where even the most fundamental of cultural mores are being dismantled; all that is left is an endless and arbitrary assortment of empty rituals—the “taking of a toast and tea.” As he says, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet”: the existential question of “to be or not to be” is rendered irrelevant.

In 1914, only one year after Eliot completed this poem, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary. As Eliot was putting his words down on paper, the world was beginning the process of remaking itself through war. Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Serbia were lining up against Austria-Hungary and Germany. Conflict was everywhere. The city of London—considered the most modern of all European cities—sets the stage for Prufrock’s walk. He questions everything, even the very possibility of articulation:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

The text of the poem itself serves as a portal to another world. Whereas Romantic writers before him endeavored to lose themselves in the idyll of nature, Eliot revealed an entirely new way of understanding poetry. In free verse and stream of consciousness, he undermines his own ability to even interpret his experience: “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.”

Eliot saw what others around him did not. He used fragmented structures, colloquialisms, and references to popular culture together with literary allusions from “high culture.” He could sense that high and low were collapsing in on each other, that a new era was emerging. He gave voice to it. In many ways, he invented it. This is creativity at its most masterful: it is the act of opening up new worlds, of revealing entirely new ways of being in the world. Because of Eliot, our culture has an entirely different conception of the word I in a poem—and the word I in our everyday lives. This innovation alone makes him one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century.

Across the ocean and a world away, a second young man was in the midst of articulating his own vision of the modern age. Unlike Eliot, however, this man’s vision was filled with optimism. Born in 1863 to a community with a tradition of fiercely independent farmers and self-sufficient craftsmen, this man could sense a schism forming in the early twentieth century. As more and more members of his generation moved to the cities and took jobs in the rapidly growing factories or as white-collar workers in the bureaucracies of America’s nascent corporations, the entire notion of “work” was being transformed. The typical day no longer involved waking with the dawn to do chores or following the seasonal demands of agricultural life. Nor did work demand the self-sufficiency, artistry, and inherited knowledge of the independent landowner or tradesman. Work in the factories and corporations of this early twentieth-century world was both more lucrative and more tedious than that of previous generations. This phenomenon—the experience of work—ushered in an era of leisure and mobility as young people focused on spending their newfound time and money in satisfying weekend pursuits. Gone were the days of the Victorian values of thrift, modesty, and social hierarchies. The emerging era was characterized by the exhilarating entertainments of popular culture, such as movies, automobile racing, and boxing. This man saw the potential in all this. As part of this cultural transformation, he dreamed of a “horseless carriage” that would be affordable to all of these leisure-seekers, even the most lowly factory worker. His name, of course, was Henry Ford.

Today, it is easy to forget how unique Ford’s vision for a “universal horseless carriage” was back at the turn of the last century. At the time that he was tinkering with his various models, Detroit was filled with hundreds of other engineers and mechanics just like him, all chasing the same dream of developing the winning prototype for an automobile. In fact, Ford was by no means the most talented engineer, nor was he the most capable manager. Several of his early “horseless carriage” start-ups went belly up because he couldn’t deliver on time to his investors. What characterized Ford’s unique vision—his creative breakthrough—was his awareness of the needs and desires of this emerging leisure class. Several of his wealthiest investors pressured him to create car models that were aimed at the luxury markets. Such vehicles would serve as mere novelties, showpieces for the elite. Ford, a committed populist, refused the needling of his shareholders. He only grew more determined to make a car that would open up mobility—and consumption—for all. Ford saw that in this new America, moving up and out would be a fundamental part of life—and the car would be instrumental in this.

To achieve his vision, he needed to find a less expensive system for assembling cars. Ford, like Eliot, saw what others around him did not. In passing by a slaughterhouse and watching workers on an assembly line cut up pigs into their component parts—he had a flash of insight. This same type of assembly line could work for building cars; it would be cheaper and much faster than making them piecemeal.

When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, there were only about 18,000 miles of paved road in the U.S. His cars were lightweight, easy to repair and maintain and, most importantly, affordable at around $825 each. His company sold 15 million Model Ts before they stopped production in 1927. It was the catalyst for an entirely new lifestyle in America, revolving around the twin values of mobility and consumption.

Although it might seem strange to begin this chapter by drawing a parallel between Eliot and Ford—between one of the greatest poets in the English language and America’s most famous industrialist—they share a similar gift of sensitivity. Both men were able to attune to the mood of modernity. One pessimistic and the other fiercely optimistic, Eliot and Ford revealed entirely new and theretofore unimaginable possibilities for their worlds. Their shared genius was in staying open to insights, and it is exemplary of the creativity that is at the heart of the sensemaking process. Let’s take some time to look more carefully at how this occurs. With phenomenology as our guide, we can ask: How do humans actually experience creativity?

Grace & Will

Grace

How do we talk about creativity in everyday language? We say: I got an idea. It came to me. It dawned on me. We don’t say: I made an idea or I took an idea. This seemingly minor semantic observation is actually quite telling. We experience ideas as phenomena coming to us from the outside rather than something we generate from within.

Ideas are like gifts that the world bestows on us rather than creations we summon through force of will when we need them. Of course, there is labor involved in idea generation. People have to train and focus on their chosen craft—if you haven’t done decades of mathematical proofs, it is unlikely that you will receive an insight into solving a world-famous theorem. After the work is done, however, and the proverbial ten thousand hours of practice have been clocked, we have no active control over our insights.

This is why I choose the word grace when I describe the phenomenon of the creative process. Although the word grace tends to evoke the presence of the divine, my definition has nothing to do with religion or spirituality. For me, grace is a word that characterizes us when we are both active and receptive to our worlds. It acknowledges that insights are about remaining open to our environment, open to understanding other people and other cultures. Creative insights do not come “from us.” Rather, they travel “through us” from the social sphere in which we live. Great artists, writers, musicians, inventors, and entrepreneurs know this already. Famed psychologist Wolfgang Köhler once described the “three Bs” of creativity: the bus, the bath, and the bed. All three are places where creativity reveals itself, because they are environments where we are typically in a receptive state of being.

Heidegger calls this act of revealing or bringing to light phainesthai. Though this ancient Greek verb may strike modern readers as obscure, for Heidegger it was the only word that actually captured the phenomenon of creativity. You see, in ancient Greek, phainesthai uses the “middle voice”; this is a voice in the Greek language that is neither entirely active nor entirely passive. It characterizes us when we are at one with our environment, indistinguishable from the equipment and the chains of meaning that make up our existence. Like grace, phainesthai erases the distinction between subject and object; it is neither what things do on their own nor what we do to them, but rather what happens in our engagement with them. In this way, things are revealed through us, not by us.

Some of you are probably thinking: enough with the semantics. But stay with me. How we conceive of creativity and the words we use to describe it actually do have real-world implications for our everyday lives. When we use the wrong model for the phenomenon of creativity, we begin to value the wrong things. We fail to anticipate nonlinear change; we dull our natural abilities to extract meaning from qualitative information; and we compartmentalize our learning and knowledge into atomized silos. In short, we lose sight of the holistic thinking that characterizes sensemaking.

Still not satisfied? As you read on in this chapter, I will introduce you to some of the most creative minds I know and show you their creative processes—using phenomenology to describe them—to give you a more nuanced description of this final phase of sensemaking.

Before I begin, however, I need to take you on a slight detour to show you how we continue to get creativity wrong.

Will

If grace is an accurate word for how we actually experience creativity, will is the word that is too often associated with creative breakthroughs. Many of us consider ideas the guaranteed outcome of a mental assembly line: by following a rigid process, we can manufacture creativity every single time. When we will ideas into being, we crank them out. We treat ideas as discrete and atomized widgets that we can then fabricate into an existence apart from any context. Will harkens back to our critique of Descartes. It implies that we sit detached from our worlds—subjects apart from objects—in analytical thought.

One of the most egregious examples of this misconception of creativity comes from our current fixation with design thinking. If a Silicon Valley state of mind is dominated by its obsessions with the hard sciences, this alternative Bay Area culture is characterized by its religious devotion to the “design process.” Though this culture conceives of itself as the creative and artsy alternative to the engineers that dominate Silicon Valley, its ideology of willful creativity is no less corrosive to our intellectual values. What is “design thinking” exactly? Despite what its proponents would have us believe, it has nothing to do with humanities thinking. Allow me to give you an anatomy of design thinking, or what I like to call “the bullshit tornado.”

Design Thinking: The Anatomy of a Bullshit Tornado

Over the past twenty years, designers have taken a remarkable leap in status. They used to be craftsmen interested in shapes, materials, and fonts. Today, they are oracles with solutions for everything from social security to crime prevention to the eradication of malaria. What knowledge endows them with the authority to opine on all of these subjects? According to design thinking, no knowledge at all. The ideology claims that it is their lack of expertise that allows them to connect with consumers. Designers believe that they alone are best suited to create user-friendly products because they are unencumbered by an intellectual background in any specific context—economics or political science or anthropology. Even highly complex and historically created ideas like the welfare state are a “design” in this ideology. World hunger? Education reform? Yes, you guessed it: “design problems.” And the solution to them is always the same: design thinking.

The most famous design firm—a mecca for design thinking—is IDEO, founded by David Kelley, the current head of Stanford’s Institute of Design, or d-school. IDEO is the oft-cited design firm behind ubiquitous household items such as the Apple mouse, PalmPilot’s Palm V, and stand-up toothpaste tubes. The firm was featured in a profile on Nightline in 1999, and the eight-minute segment manages to touch on almost every aspect of design thinking that makes it unhelpful to authentic creative endeavors.

1. Innovation without Any Social Context

“We’re not actually experts at any given area,” David Kelley tells Nightline. “We are experts on the process of how you design stuff. So we don’t care if you give us a toothbrush, a toothpaste tube, a tractor, a space shuttle, a chair.… it’s all the same to us. We want to figure out how to innovate by using our process and applying it.”

Let’s step back and consider these words for just one moment: a toothbrush, a toothpaste tube, a tractor, a space shuttle, a chair.… it’s all the same to us. Is it, though? Should it be? Do you really want the designers of NASA’s next space shuttle to use the same roadmap as the designers of a tube of toothpaste? In IDEO’s design-thinking model, ideas are conceived of as modular pieces, completely separate from the person having the idea and the social world in which that idea was created. These types of ideas—atomized and modular—are not painful to change or explain because they carry such a low bandwidth of information. Having an idea is free, and killing an idea carries no risk.

But humans exist in worlds, and the objects within those worlds are always context-dependent and layered with meaning, so David Kelley’s statement is misguided at best. It is impossible to extract a space shuttle from the context of travel into outer space and the bounty of knowledge necessary to design it. Space travel—including astronauts and rocket scientists along with all the other engineers and objects that make up their world—has a completely different culture from that of farmers and tractors, or the culture of an American family standing around their bathroom sink at bedtime. Unless we know what truly matters to astronauts, farmers, or children attempting to brush their teeth, we cannot really understand anything at all about the objects—or equipment—that they use. And we certainly cannot presume to know what might make that equipment serve them better.

2. Ignorance Is Bliss

Another salient aspect of design thinking is highlighted on a 60 Minutes segment from 2013 featuring IDEO: expertise and experience hinder innovation. IDEO likes to “throw doctors, opera singers, and engineers into a room and get them to brainstorm.” In design thinking, anyone can have an idea and ideas can come from anywhere. They favor diversity in the group brainstorming sessions because they feel that different perspectives will come up with more of their signature “wild ideas.” But in what world will these wild ideas be relevant? They might appear innovative to the world of designers, but how will they have any resonance without knowledge of the actual social contexts in which these products and services will be used? Process is clearly more important than product.

Process is so sacred at IDEO, in fact, that they like to repeat the mantra “Defer judgment.” According to the Nightline feature, someone dings a bell when another member of the group is criticizing a brainstorm idea early on. In this way, expertise is seen as a potential creativity blocker. The priority is a process where “ideas pour out and are posted on the walls.” Less important, it seems, is what is actually written on all those Post-it notes.

3. Get Under the Skin of Consumers

Being “customer-centric” is paramount for design thinkers like IDEO. Not that they have any real interest in leaving their studios in hip cities to go out and explore other worlds. But they love to talk about empathy and how it is necessary for the design of exciting products. They will tell you that by getting “under the skin” of the consumer, “you can learn how they ‘tick and click’ and then get them to love [not just like or buy] your brand, your idea, and your soul.” Then they will go back upstairs to their studios and get back to their passionate work.

The proponents of design thinking defend the ideology by saying that they spend time with people, observing and empathizing with their circumstances. But I liken this to “drive-by” anthropology. The time they spend is quite limited—often only an afternoon—and they approach their period of observation with a predetermined goal: How can I “improve” the design of this one individual object? With this narrow goal in mind, design thinkers never fully immerse themselves in the world of the subjects. It is no surprise, then, that everything coming out of design firms looks alike today. It’s a San Francisco designers’ world—soft shapes in varying shades of white—and the rest of us are just living in it. Only when we give ourselves over to our shared social context will different worlds and their practices reveal themselves.

4. Remove All Pain

Design thinking at firms like IDEO claims to map out all the “pain points” a consumer might have using a product or a service. If you want to make a better yogurt, for example, designers look at all the problems someone might have in finding, choosing, opening, and eating a yogurt. Though this might at first strike you as a relatively painless process, designers would disagree. There are pains around finding the yogurt in the supermarket, pains around a lack of emotional connection with the yogurt, and pains around opening the yogurt package without getting yogurt all over your hands. Once all the pains have been mapped out, design thinking follows a process to redesign the experience to make it entirely anesthetizing. Designers might suggest, for example, adding a sensor to the yogurt so that you can find it immediately with your yogurt app, or a personalization of the yogurt so that it carries your name and your uploaded profile picture on it. Design thinking might discover a new way to design the packaging of the yogurt so that any mess is efficiently whisked away by a cutting-edge polymer scrim.

Through this exact same process, design thinking promises to eliminate pain points in all of the social structures in our worlds: government, the economy, mass transit. Perhaps there is a polymer scrim to eliminate pain points in our electoral system? Design thinking’s ultimate goal is to identify all of life’s pains and remove them through a nirvana of better design.

5. The Wall of Warm Words

As design thinking conceives of itself as the warm and fuzzy alternative to the hard-nosed scientific culture in Silicon Valley, proponents like to throw around humanities-inspired words to describe their “vibe.” You will likely hear some combination of the following words and phrases in any design-thinking conversation: holistic, creative, team-oriented, people-centric, visionary, disruptive, agile, fast. You will hear that we can change the world—but, unlike the engineering conversation down the hall, this change will “put humans back at the center.” You will hear that the future belongs to crowds and that we must let go of the notion of the lonely genius. There will almost certainly be some reference to a salmon swimming upstream, and “passion” will be evoked throughout the conversation.

In the world of wine, there are rules for what you can say about yourself and your products. Only wine made from grapes grown in Burgundy can be called Burgundy wine. In farming, only organically grown English peas can be labeled organic. In the world of design thinking, however, regulations and restraining rules are nonexistent. The wall of warm words serves, instead, to connote authority. As expertise carries little value, anyone and everyone can claim to be a “strategist,” an “experience designer,” or a “keynote speaker.” These various phrases and titles all have the same underlying meaning in design thinking: If you don’t want to be Ubered, you need to listen to designers.

6. The Return to the B-school Parking Lot

Lest this wall of warm words become too warm, design thinking also requires casual references from the world of business: “leverage,” “ROI,” or “business model.” The idea is that the creative process might be a wild and crazy joyride, but the stolen car will always return to the business school parking lot. Throwing around concepts like “the four Ps” and “five forces” reassures everyone that pragmatism and reason are really at the heart of the work.

Of course it’s not just IDEO. The tyranny of “willed” creativity that comes from design thinking is all around us and it now forms a prevalent part of the business culture’s conversation around innovation. Robert Sutton, the author of Weird Ideas That Work, tells his readers: “In the creative process, ignorance is bliss.”

One might even go so far as to argue that this particular model of creativity takes its inspiration from Rousseau’s philosophy: we are at our most creative when we are naïve and innocent, unfettered by pesky rules and authoritarian expertise. “It’s now time to party,” writes the author of the book How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, Chris Baréz-Brown, as he draws a direct connection between playfulness and creative genius. “So the message is, when in doubt, say ‘Na na na-na na’ and laugh at the world.”

Baréz-Brown’s book—representative of much of the literature today on creative thinking—is written like a storybook for preschool children. The enemy of playfulness, in the author’s view, is the collection of experts and people who claim to “know a lot.” He calls them “clever clever thinky thinky” people.

Such language connotes playfulness with liberation. It implies that work is enslaving our thoughts: the office is a place where we are treated like faceless bureaucrats while our expertise and knowledge is blinding us. To be creative, we need to free ourselves from the bonds of corporate bureaucracy, expertise, and rational analysis. True liberation exists in the world of a child: open, playful, curious, and spontaneous.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend the day with one of these “childlike” creatives: “Martin.” I wish I could say that I had never met a “Martin” before but, unfortunately, in my world they show up in almost any conversation that involves creative thinking. Martins are people who eschew the painstakingly hard work of observing reality for easy buzzwords and empty status plays. Martins prey on fear: when everyone in the room is anxious about their careers, about their industries, and about the general state of “disruptive innovation,” Martins waltz in and play shaman.

More than anything, Martins remind me that creative thinking and brilliant innovation require engaging with a process that is extremely hard and, honestly, quite unsettling. There is no money-back guarantee, no predetermined roadmap; in fact, getting lost is the whole point. The Martins of my world represent procrastination because the actual work—the truth of making sense of the world—requires good old-fashioned thinking. This is something the Martins stopped doing long ago.

Martin Solves the Problems

I was working with a strategy team for a global clothing company and we were all on the last leg of a whirlwind trip from Paris to London and, now, New York. Over the course of five days, all of us—twenty different executives and our consulting group—had been exposed to the cultures in each of the different cities. We had just one day left to finish outlining the contours of their new strategy and to complete the future product profile for the upcoming year.

Then entered Martin.

Martin was a new but senior recruit to the company’s local design outpost in New York. He showed up in perfectly distressed dark jeans with tattoos up his arms; he was probably in his early thirties and exuded a calm charisma. The rest of us had all started at 9 AM on that final day, but Martin floated in at two in the afternoon.

The company’s leader, Axel, a man responsible for all of the company’s global strategy, interrupted our discussion to welcome Martin. Axel was genuinely worried about his job. His company was number two in the category, but losing market share every month. They were especially out of touch with the youth in big cities of Western Europe and the United States, and Axel needed to understand why. One of his bets was to bring in Martin, a star designer recruited from their competitor.

“We are so happy to have local representatives help us shape our new strategy,” Axel told all of us in the group.

“Well, I’m certainly also honored to be here today,” Martin responded. Now that he had the informal permission to speak, he felt compelled to go on. “What I sense in this room is intensity and passion. Passion for the brand you are part of. Passion is important; passion is what drives our brand forward. You as a group have that passion, but also as individuals. Appreciate what you have here. It’s energy. And it’s an important energy. An energy that drives the brand forward. Without having the time and commitment to have these intense, passionate discussions about the brand, we cannot develop it. It cannot evolve. You are here as a team, with dedicated time to shape the future of our brand. And you each contribute with passion and energy. I hope you appreciate this. I feel you appreciate this. Because it’s important.”

The atmosphere in the room was welcoming, open. Martin continued: “I am here to contribute. But in order for me to do so I need to know who you are, where you’re from, what’s your story. Could we do a quick round of introductions?”

Everybody in the room introduced themselves; the entire process took probably twenty minutes. The facilitator nervously looked at his watch. The schedule for this session was already a bit delayed, but the new member of the team did not seem concerned with time. Every time a member of the team introduced him-or herself, Martin followed up with a question.

“Now,” Martin said after the round of introductions. “I get you now. I get you as individuals, I get you as a group, and I understand why each of you is passionate about our brand. But I don’t get your journey. You’ve seen places. Paris, London, New York. You’ve met people shaping your view on things during this journey. Help me onboard this journey. If I’m supposed to contribute constructively, I need to understand your context. I need to understand the unmet needs of people, their pain points. Could you please take me through your experiences so far? Who did you meet, what did you discuss with them, what did you take away from your encounters?”

The facilitator suggested that someone fill Martin in on all of this in the next break. Axel, the leader, agreed: “It is great to have you on board. We appreciate you taking the time to be with us and your willingness to contribute. I think we need to continue with what we were doing before you came. Please help us the best you can and someone from the team will give you a more in-depth update in a break.”

Martin ignored the plea to get the program of the day back on track from the leader. “Don’t forget the intensity it takes to bring the brand forward. Don’t forget how much it means that you are here, assembled as a team, working together as a team. We can change the lives of the consumers. We can design for their pain points and surprise and delight them. If we don’t, we will be left behind.”

Most of the team in the room looked at Martin with smiles. He instinctively took the role of the charismatic priest. With his face tilted upward in calm reflection, he communicated to all of us that he accepted his role as coach for the collective.

A few people, however, including Axel, were growing uncomfortable. They wanted to remain polite, but they were getting restless to shift the focus away from Martin and back to strategic thinking.

“Our brand is more than ninety years old,” Martin said. “And what our old colleagues have built, they have built with passion and dedication. We are standing on their shoulders and our mission is to bring the brand forward. That is why we are all here. We touch millions of people every day with our brand, we have the power to touch and change the lives of millions. But the times have changed. We live in the age of crowds and sharing economy. The revolution of the economy—the fourth revolution—is bigger than what anyone has ever seen. We will have digital highways and more money will be made in the coming years than in the past decades.”

Martin took a pause for dramatic effect. He seemed to summon the next phrases from a deeply soulful place inside himself. “The millennial generation and data lakes will change everything we know. Just look at Apple or Uber. We don’t want to be like the taxi drivers that have been disrupted, do we guys?”

It all sounded somehow both tantalizing and scary, but what did it mean in practice? Axel couldn’t help taking a few notes despite his fears about the time. He wrote down “data lakes” and “disrupted taxi drivers” with thick underlines in his notebook.

“Let’s continue building on that foundation and take it into a new era,” Martin seemed poised to go on indefinitely.

“Time for group work, guys,” the facilitator interrupted him. “Think about what Martin shared with us in your next exercise, and Martin, you will join team two.”

And with that, Martin let go of his grip of the group and joined the program. But his willingness to obey the rules was short-lived. Every time the teams assembled again as a whole after teamwork, Martin was never shy about speaking up.

At 6:30 PM, everyone was tired. It was the fifth day in a row with workshops and heated debates, and time to wrap up and go for dinner. The facilitator thanked everybody for the hard work and the achievements so far.

“I also want to thank you,” Martin told the room while people were packing their bags. Everyone was desperate to get out of the cluttered workshop room with the stale air, but the urgency didn’t stop Martin from speaking. “I want to thank you for letting me join these important discussions. Discussions about our future. Discussions about where we are going. Passionate discussions where the team gets together and talks. The passion I sense in this room, on this day, should not just wither away and die. It should be kept alive. Because it is discussions like these that keep the brand alive.”

Most of us have probably met at least one or two Martins in our careers: so-called big shots with shortsighted assumptions, superficial mastery of jargon, and an inexhaustible hubris for hijacking creative discourse. For those of us in the business of trying to discover the truth about the world, Martin’s nonsense is an infuriating waste of time.

But if creativity has nothing to do with gurus like Martin or the guaranteed delivery of the design-thinking factory, how do we develop a relationship to a sustained creative process? What is sensemaking if we have no control over the results? After all, I am running a company filled with people. At a certain point, I need to achieve meaningful insights for myself and for my clients. We try to live in a receptive state of being, but we also need to develop a way to articulate our process to ourselves as well as to our clients.

I asked my colleagues and partners to share how they arrived at their most creative thinking. The following descriptions are strikingly different in procedure but they all contain an element of immersion: an empathic dive into another world. Instead of forgoing context, they embrace it. This thick data—stories, anecdotes, and analysis—characterizes the phenomenon I call grace.

1. Charlie

I need to be deeply immersed in the phenomenon I am dealing with for each and every project. For example, right now I need to understand tea in China. What does tea mean to the Chinese? What are their everyday relationships to tea? How are they treating it, talking about it, paying for it, giving it to each other? This immersion is not one directed effort; it is more like walking in the landscape of tea rather than memorizing everything about tea.

After I have read, talked, observed, and listened for long enough (it never is, but when I am hearing things for the third time, I am okay with stopping the discovery process), I always do the following: I leave my notes, my computer, and the data behind. I wait a day while I allow my thoughts to drift elsewhere. I go to the movies or meet friends. This seems strange at the most intense point of the project, but without a short break, I always fail. Then, after a day and a night of good sleep without once letting myself think about tea, I just take one piece of paper and a pen. I like Bic pens and white sheets of paper. I go to a place that’s loud and crowded. Coffee shops work. So do bars or very busy restaurants. I sit down in the public place and I write down whatever comes to mind.

The strange thing about this process is that the enforced break filters the thousands of ideas I have been studying. I don’t think about order or importance. I just write down what my pen seems to want to write. What comes out always ends up being the strongest ideas and the most organized thoughts. It seems like the body or the subconscious or whatever organizes everything for me and cuts through all the clutter. On that one piece of paper is a condensed version, the essence of an idea. I can then take that idea and move it in any direction I need to explain it in great fidelity. But the core of it always comes out. It seems haphazard to have multimillion-dollar projects work like this, but that is actually how I work.

It has nothing to do with me, by the way. It doesn’t feel like I’m the one writing things down. I am not some kind of lone genius. I just respect my body and know that it will do this if I am open and let it. I wouldn’t know any other way to arrive at creative ideas.

2. Mikkel

I have a painful relationship with the process of generating ideas. I always panic. I feel like I am sure to fail every time a deadline is getting close. Which it always is. It feels like I have knives in my stomach, like I am going to show the world that I really am a failure and not creative at all. My sleep gets disturbed. I feel nauseous. Even when I am working on things that aren’t as important to me, I am afraid that it will finally be obvious to everyone that I am worthless.

Eventually, the knives get worse and worse. Then I start producing, circling around the idea over and over again. I am wearing myself down, trying this and then trying that. I overproduce. I panic and try and try again. I go at the problem with such force that I hope I can break it. It is very unpleasant for everyone around me. They can see it is existential for me. I have lost a lot of great employees this way. I am still waiting for the time when it doesn’t work and the world will see that I am a loser.

Somehow, while I have been distracted by all of this misery, an idea appears. It usually comes right at the moment when I feel like I am going to vomit up these knives. This idea didn’t come from me. It simply arrived when I was too weak and distracted to shut it out.

I then describe the idea over and over again to others. It’s nuts. I talk and talk at people, not with them. I could talk to a wall, but people are better for me. Those poor people. From there, I use people with other skills to describe the idea. After all this pain and torture, my sleep returns and my stomach is okay again.

3. Charlotte

I get all my ideas when I am running. Not during, but right after. Running somehow empties my head. I have tried cycling and long walks and they’re okay, but not as good. I need running to completely empty my mind of thoughts. When I have been working on a problem for a long time, I am immersed in the topic up to my chin. Somehow the emptying of the mind makes everything fall into place. It feels like something sends me the idea in a clear format. It doesn’t feel like it’s me. It is more like someone else is organizing my thoughts. It’s so strange, and it doesn’t always work. I guess some people say they sleep on ideas or decisions; I run on them.

4. Jun

I am tormented by my clients. I am so afraid of losing them or letting them down. They are the ones with the real risk, and I am just their best bet at some kind of help.

I have never thought about my process in this way before, but in reality I am trying to think like my clients. How would they react? When I do this for a while, and especially when I am close to a deadline, I somehow turn into them. It isn’t just that I try to think about what they would think or do. I am them. I react emotionally to ideas and thoughts like they would; I feel the world like they feel it. It’s like being a ghost or something. My body, my soul, is no longer mine; it has been occupied by the people I am trying to help. It’s not about help anymore—more of a complete immersion. I see their ghosts, I feel their fear of failure. It’s a little like what shamans do. Perhaps it’s that experience.

Getting ideas doesn’t make me happy. It’s work. It’s deep, intense, and hard work.

For all their differences in process, what these descriptions of graceful creativity share is the same experience of receptivity, the openness, the being at one with the world. I hear and see these same characterizations every time I speak or read about a genuinely creative process. This state of grace is a universal experience for sensemaking insights.

Consider just a few other examples from across business, literature, and the arts:

I don’t know where great ideas come from. I am not sure anyone does. I am not even sure how I come up with my ideas. The brain does its thing, and out pops an idea.

While you are waiting for the brain to get its act together, do what you can do. Do the doable. Meet with people, schmooze, have a laugh or two. Build mockups and prototypes. At the very least, collect other people’s problems. That’s always a guaranteed doable.

The deep idea here is that action has a creative aspect distinct from thinking. And thinking need not come first. Mostly it doesn’t.

—Saras D. Sarasvathy, professor of Business Administration at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business

Why is it I always get my best ideas while shaving?

—Albert Einstein

Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, “Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.” Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book.

—Agatha Christie

I drive people crazy, but I need to feel it. Leadership is what happens when management models and linear thinking ends. I need to feel what is right. Sometimes that takes time, but I am okay with that. I can move very fast when I feel something is right.

Often when I have done my thinking, I just know something needs to be done. We have invested in computer science and data analytics without having a clear business goal. It turns out that that might be the best investment we have made in a long time. But when we did it, it was because it felt important and necessary. Not because we had a business case. It is obvious now, but wasn’t when we did it.

Clarity comes when I wake up. What I have been pondering for a while is suddenly clear. It really is not very well understood how this happens, but I wake up, and can clearly see what was murky yesterday. You basically just know.

—Mark Fields, CEO of Ford

The participant enters into the mind of the market and tries to understand it from the inside… I assumed the market felt the same way as I did, and by keeping myself detached from other personal feelings I could sense changes in its mood. This was a hard discipline. It meant subordinating my own emotions to those of the market.

—George Soros

I would say to her, “This time don’t go full throttle,” and before you knew it, she was on the floor with tears coming down her cheeks—it was like she has some open conduit where the themes and ideas of the play come through her, and you just can’t stop it.

—Theater director Tina Landau’s description of working with actress Phylicia Rashad

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

—Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

When the mind is occupied with a monotonous task, it can stimulate the subconscious into a eureka moment. That’s what happened to me. The business model for my company, Clearfit, which provides an easy way for companies to find employees and predict job fit, hatched in the back of my mind while I was driving 80 miles an hour, not thinking about work at all.

The subconscious mind runs in the background, silently affecting the outcome of many thoughts. So, take a break and smell the flowers, because while you’re out doing that, your mind may very well solve the problem that you are trying to solve or spark a solution to a problem you hadn’t considered before.

—Ben Baldwin, co-founder and CEO, Clearfit

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

—George Saunders, “The Braindead Megaphone”

What do creative geniuses like writer George Saunders mean when they say “open”? This receptive state requires remaining unattached to preconceptions, expectations, and biases. This is no small order. Ancient Buddhists in Japan found that young monks had such difficulty staying open that they created a whole philosophical discipline around it. Buddhist priest Zenkei Blanche Hartman referred to this concept of the “beginner’s mind” in one of her lectures from 2001:

It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices. I think of beginner’s mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. “I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?” Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgment, just asking, “What is it?”

Whether it is the experience of running, the ritual of putting pen to paper, or the tortured exercise of imagining knives, creative thinkers all develop techniques to keep themselves open to ideas. Needless to say, it is incredibly difficult for us as humans to stay receptive. Our minds long to weave patterns, to create order from chaos, and to return to some sense of certainty. But the longer we can sit productively in this place of “not knowing,” the more we make ourselves available to insight.

The concept of abductive reasoning can further illuminate how this works. Charles Sanders Peirce, the nineteenth-century American philosopher and logician, famously defined abduction in relationship to two other types of reasoning we use to problem solve: deduction and induction.

Deduction is essentially the domain of algorithms. You start with a hypothetical set of beliefs and, from there, deduce that X or Y is true. It is often called the “top-down” approach because it goes from the more general to the more specific.

Induction, on the other hand, begins with a collection of multiple premises that then lead to a specific conclusion. This is why it is referred to as “bottom-up”: it goes from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories.

Abduction: Abductive reasoning, however, does not start with any hypothesis or even preconceived notions about what is known or unknown. In this way, it is the only method of reasoning that can incorporate new knowledge and insights. The process begins by casting a wide net for data collection and organization—the “openness” that George Saunders describes. Then the patterns from the data collection are identified. Once these patterns are synthesized, a theory or several theories begin to take shape. From these theories, an insight emerges with explanatory power. Here’s Peirce from his 1903 Harvard lecture on “Pragmatism and Abduction”:

The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash but it is not a flash available to all. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together, which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.

Peirce argued that abductive reasoning is the only appropriate process for messy and evasive data. It is where true creativity lies. Unfortunately, it is also where great fallibility lies. This is why masters who experience “grace” learn how to recognize the sensation of a worthwhile creative insight. The nineteenth-century philosopher William James argued in his seminal book, The Principles of Psychology, that this practice is largely cultivated through the force of our sustained attention:

Attention… is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

In other words, creative thinkers understand that what they are attuned to—what is revealed to them in a state of grace—is what allows them to achieve an understanding in the world. “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience,” James writes. “Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

At the height of her brain injury, Nicole Pollentier described walking through Target, overwhelmed by the chaotic indiscriminateness of her experience. She was incapable of attending to anything, a process she described as “filtering.”

“My working memory was damaged so it was like a waiting room that was overflowing,” she recalled. “Normally, when your brain is working at its normal speed, filtering happens instantaneously. We don’t know most of what we’re filtering all the time.”

By contrast, according to James, the experience of a genius on the cusp of a breakthrough is that of a sustained attention: “Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt.” James describes how these minds are “furnished” with materials. These are the nooks and crannies into which their infinite branches might grow. And the more the minds are furnished—the more we have read, experienced, and contemplated—the more material we have to work with when an opportunity arises for a creative breakthrough. Though these breakthroughs might happen “in a flash,” the reality is that they are based on a rich depth of knowledge in pattern recognition.

In his famous book from 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote that the more knowledge we have stored away—the furnishings of our minds—the more adept we are at these so-called fast flashes of intuition, what he dubbed System 1 thinking. As William James put it, geniuses “differ from ordinary men less in the character of their attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed.”

The most creative people in the world, then, are the most open to what is being revealed or shown to them by their world. This is an essential element of grace: the moment when we suddenly understand exactly where to put our attention. Masters are particularly skilled at recognizing it. Take the world-famous architect Bjarke Ingels: he felt a call of creative insight when he witnessed the inner workings of a meticulously crafted Swiss watch.

Flash of Insight: The Click

It was winter 2013, and Bjarke Ingels was driving through the western part of Switzerland, past the ski resorts and then down into the Vallée de Joux of the Jura mountain range. There, amid snow and mountains beside the beautiful Lac de Joux, he arrived at the legendary Swiss watchmaking company Audemars Piguet, the only Swiss watchmaking company still owned by the same family after 150 years. Ingels and his team were preparing a bid to create a structure that would extend the company’s historic buildings as well as add on a new museum to showcase their collection of hundreds of fine watches. Any viable bid would need to honor their traditions as a company of storied artisans as well as create a dynamic conversation with the two historic buildings—each one close to one hundred years old—already in place at the site.

Only in his early forties, Bjarke Ingels initially struck many members of the Audemars Piguet family as the wildcard in the architectural competition. Ingels is not lacking in prestige or experience: between his original offices in Copenhagen and his newer offices in New York City and London, the Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, is in the midst of completing dozens of new buildings all over the world, in cities as diverse as Vancouver; Faroe Islands; Hualien (Taiwan); Shenzhen, China; and New York City. The firm has won a bevy of international prizes and awards. What makes BIG stand out is their approach to the creative process, which is fundamentally different from that of other world-famous studios. Ingels’s work, replete with undulating loops and slopes, often defies all the traditional architectural dimensions and conventions—all the ideas of what a building should be.

Though his team had already put together several possible strategies, Ingels traveled to the headquarters in Switzerland because he needed to experience the context of the site in person. He was looking for something in the visit that would give him the “click,” the sense of everything coming together into a design that would capture what makes a 150-year-old Swiss watchmaking company so special.

“With a click, the left and the right get equally satisfied,” Ingels told me when I asked him about his creative process. “There are so many crossovers that it crystallizes into something that makes sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that it couldn’t be any different. You just couldn’t answer it any other way.”

Considering Switzerland’s relationship to craftsmanship, Ingels knew he could build something of quality. He also had tremendous respect for the precision involved in watchmaking. Despite these more cerebral threads, however, he did not yet have a visceral connection to the project.

In the course of his studio tour, Ingels began chatting with a Catalan watchmaker, a man in his late fifties who worked for Audemars Piguet. The artisan was working on historic timepieces and walking Ingels through the mechanics of his process. As Ingels put it, “After talking with that watchmaker—looking at his hands and his tools and really seeing how precise and meticulous his work was—suddenly, the penny dropped and I got really excited. I could really feel it.” Ingels’s moment of revelation—what Heidegger calls phainesthai—was his feeling for the craft itself: extracting so much performance out of so little material. “First you have to fall in love with the subject you are designing for, and once you have that, you can channel the feeling into all the things you need to deliver. But deliver in a way that manifests aspects of the culture of watchmaking.”

Ingels was particularly intrigued by the engineering involved in the mainspring of the watch. “The anchor swings around and stores the kinetic energy of your body in this mainspring: a piece of metal that is wound up by the anchor swinging around. This is a force that it then delivers back to the clock. And there is a regulator that makes sure it’s not just unfolding in one go but is unwinding in these bursts that you can use to then show you time. I suddenly understood that in watchmaking, as in architecture, the design, or the form, is the content. It’s the way that the material is organized that makes the clock show the time.”

He used this conceit of the mainspring as the metaphor for the entire museum. Watchmakers have to select their materials to maximum effect using a minimum of matter, and he wanted this museum—called the Maison des Fondateurs (home of the founders)—to do the same. The new building needed to take visitors down a long path that showed them the history and the culture of watchmaking. Ingels and his team had initially conceived of this path in the museum as something long and linear. The moment he saw the mainspring in the hands of the Catalan watchmaker, however, he realized he could use a completely different shape for the construction: a double spiral. “The spiral takes you into the beginning of the museum and then takes you out, almost like the coil that stores the energy of the watch.”

Once the strategy was set, it was clear they needed a lightweight steel structure to create the shape of the overlapping spirals. The choice of a lighter material allows the building to rise, seemingly weightless, out of the surrounding landscape of the Vallée de Joux. Taking inspiration from the engineering of the mainspring, the model has no walls or load-bearing structures other than windows. These windows, made of technically advanced glass, hold up the roof.

When Ingels presented the design, there was immediate excitement from Audemars Piguet. BIG is known for audaciousness, but here, as in other projects, the derring-do is actually in service of site constraints. The complications BIG’s building brings to the project—only high-performing glass to hold up the entire structure, for example—resonate with the “grand complications” like moon phases and annual calendars embedded in the mechanics of fine art watches. BIG officially won the competition among five firms invited to submit designs and construction is set to begin in the next few years.

Most world-famous architects have a signature style at the core of their practice. Take modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as an example: his buildings are easy to recognize by their elegant structure and rich, dark brown colors. Mies, like Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, essentially relied on one formula for most of his buildings regardless of the use, context, and economics. These architects arrived at each and every site with a desire to build the beautiful structure they envisioned.

Ingels’s process—illustrative of a sensemaking that all masters engage in—is different. BIG doesn’t rely on a codified model. They dive into research around and about the topic or problem at hand. Immersion into the site—including the history, art, literature, philosophy, geography, and language of the site’s culture—gives them a marinade in which to simmer while they wait for ideas to come to them. Ingels takes in impressions of the world, instead of stamping impressions of the world out. There is no Platonic ideal fixed still in time and space, perfect in its universality. Ingels designs dynamically, in constant conversation with the fluid realities—political, environmental, economic, social—of the site itself. By staying open to more diverse sets of data, he is able to reinvent what a building could and should look like in response to the circumstances, or what he calls “the set of criteria.”

One of BIG’s earliest designs was a series of housing projects outside Copenhagen. Embarking on the project, Ingels found the conventions of housing-project architecture to be stultifying, and he knew he had to find a better way of addressing the needs of the residents. “There is a very limited set of criteria in a housing project: something about the daylight orientation and the minimum distance from one house to the next and that’s about it. There is nothing about the diversity of households, what happens between the buildings, climatic diversity, interconnectedness, shelter from the rain and wind.”

These early housing projects helped Ingels understand that the only way to escape standard solutions was to embrace the criteria. Instead of railing against the limitations—whether from clients or context—he began adding on more limitations particular to the site. You might smile when I tell you that—no coincidence—one of his favorite games is Twister. Much like his buildings, participants in Twister start out looking “normal,” standing up straight and tall with both feet on the ground. But then, bit by bit, as the game progresses, the players are forced to bend, twist, and double over. His buildings, like the Twister players, look the way they do because it is the only way to elegantly solve the problems set before them in the game.

This process of integrating many types of input, many types of data, makes BIG unique in the architectural world. Their architecture is driven not by aesthetics per se but by an understanding that synthesizes all aspects of the site: the economics, financials, planning people, historical cultures, restrictions, and environmental issues. “Rather than trying to solve everything from an aesthetic point of view, we use constraints as an invitation to create a surprise or change the design. You can end up refining the design not by adding ornament but by adding performance.”

Consider the way BIG achieved a creative breakthrough in their designs for an ethnographic museum in a major park in Budapest: “We wanted the museum to be ‘Budapest-esque’ so we spent some time there—we went to the bathhouses. It was ten in the evening in the winter and we were swimming outside in these warm baths underneath the winter sky. The city is East and West and borderline Middle East and borderline Russia and the Eastern Roman Empire. There is a certain heaviness there.”

Note the way Ingels uses phenomenology to describe the city (“a certain heaviness…”) and the experience of the bathhouses in the winter. This gets synthesized into his team’s open-ended inquiry of the practical and aesthetic possibilities of the site: “It is on the axis of this long, long boulevard and it arrives at a major park. The master plan dictated some kind of gate-like structure so that was where we started, but what did a gate have to do with the building as an ethnographic museum and a building projecting the culture of Hungary to the world?”

The team worked with designs of a gate using historical vernacular from the Roman baths as well as ceramic tiles on the façade but, as Ingels put it, “There was nothing at the core. We were looking at all these little models but there was still something that did not make sense. You want the gate to be grand but then of course, once you approach it, it also wants to be inviting.”

BIG kept navigating around the challenge of a gate and a monument that would also function as an ethnographic museum. The design needed to embody the tension between something opaque—monumental—and something more transparent and accessible: the living history of Hungary.

“Finally,” Ingels told me, “I said, maybe we slice the gate open? So you see a perfect monolithic material that becomes this beautiful gate. But then when you pass through it, like a tunnel, you realize there are layers. And these layers, the walls of the tunnel, display the ethnographic collection. So as you pass through, you are actually looking into the museum.”

By showcasing the entirety of the museum’s collection behind the glass vitrines in the walls, visitors could walk through the gate and see all of the archives on display. It would be a glimpse into the richness of the collection—a snapshot of Hungary’s history.

“From the park,” Ingels explained, “200 meters down the avenue, you see this beautiful Arc de Triomphe, except that there is something off about it because it rounds at the bottom. And then, once you get closer, you realize that the monument is transforming into something human-scale. It is inviting visitors to pass through the museum and see the collection en masse.”

The moment the BIG team saw the idea in its execution on the computer, the mood in the room shifted. There was sharp intake of air and then spontaneous cheers and high fives. “It was just so clear to everyone on the team that this was going to be amazing,” Ingels told me.

He likened this experience with creative breakthrough to a moment of walking through a managed forest. From a distance, you see nothing but chaos—the trees are clumped together in seemingly random assortments. And then, suddenly, when the insight hits—bam—everything snaps into shape and all the trees are lined up in perfect rows. “We had been circling toward it and it felt right but it didn’t make any sense. And then, with the right idea, suddenly the concept, the program, the park in the city… everything makes sense.”

If this type of abductive reasoning has a pitfall, it is the false signposts, the descent into intuition alone. Ingels, like George Soros, Robert Johnson, and the other masters we will meet in the next chapter, never stops changing perspectives. He never allows his ideas to become static or assumes a linear progression to the process.

“We look at ideas in 3-D in the model; we look at it in the planned section, we evaluate the section, the projection, the physical model. Then we evaluate the square meters—like how does it actually accommodate the program. Each time, we change perspective and look at it with a different set of eyes. And each time we change the perspective, we’ve found a new thing that you need to fix.”

“This frustration that you’ve been feeling.… You know there is something there.… And then suddenly, it’s almost like…” Ingels made a sound to capture the experience of an insight arriving: Click click click click. “I don’t mean it’s like a checklist, but you just feel that it works on all levels and this new idea.… As if all these types of data meet in a shape. Or in a construct.” He landed on just the right phrase: “It’s an inarguable truth.”

The click: This is grace.