By Tanner CHristensen
Like any toolbox, our minds have an
assortment of tools available for us to utilize whenever we need to.
Included in our mental toolbox are cognitive
processes, clusters of which compose of three primary ones involved in
ideation: imagination, creativity, and innovative thinking.
Unless we know the differences between the
tools at our disposal, we may find ourselves attempting to hammer in a nail
using a screwdriver. It might get the job done, but it’s definitely not ideal.
Imagination is about seeing the impossible,
or unreal. Creativity is using imagination to unleash the potential of existing
ideas in order to create new and valuable ones. Innovation is taking existing,
reliable systems and ideas and improving them.
Typically, we often confuse these three for
one or the other.
Dreams at night are a type of imaginative
thinking; what you see when you dream isn’t really happening, and in most
instances what you dream cannot physically happen. A great example of this is a
recurring dream I have, where a blue-colored cat teaches me how to fly.
When solving a novel problem at work or
school, we rely on creativity to generate an answer or idea for overcoming the
problem. We might know what the problem entails, but we can only solve it by
combining ideas or diverging from our focus in order to see what we couldn’t
see before. Creativity very much deals with reality, but the solutions we
generate as a result of creativity are difficult to measure.
Lastly, innovation is what takes place when
we look at an existing system or process and find a way to improve it, often
utilizing both imagination and creativity.
The biggest difference between each of these
is the frame of focus we have when attempting to utilize
each.
With imagination, our focus can be on things
that are impossible. Creativity requires our focus to be on things that might be
possible, but we can’t be sure until we explore them further. While innovation
entails being focused on what is right in front of us, something that can be
measurably improved in the here and now.
It’s important to know the differences, and
to know when you’re using one mode of thinking as opposed to the other, and
what the context is for that reasoning.
Where imagination simply requires that we
have some context from which to envision an idea, creativity requires
that we have knowledge of the idea, motivation and freedom to explore and
tinker, intelligence to see what makes the convergence of any set of ideas
possible, and then the energy to see the process through.
Innovation takes both creativity and
imagination further, focusing on existing systems or ideas that can be evolved
naturally.
Where imagination can tell a remarkable
story, creativity can make imagination possible. Innovation uses imagination
and the power of creativity to measurable improve on what exists today.
If you’re trying to improve a process or
idea at work or school, you should focus on thinking with innovation in mind. Innovation
is the way to see how something might work in the future.
If, alternatively, you’re looking to
generate a new way to solve a problem in your life, utilizing creative thinking
is the way to go. Be sure, in those instances, you have everything you need to think creatively.
Lastly, if you want to see things from an
entirely different perspective, work to build your imagination.
A Frame
For Focus Before Making Any Creative Effort
Thinking that creativity comes from nothing,
that grand ideas either pop into our heads like magic or they don’t, hurts your
ability to truly think creatively.
That’s not how creative thinking works.
In actuality, ideas come from a collision of
everything we already know or are experiencing. This point is important to
really try and understand, because without it our creative efforts are often
futile.
How often have you run into this scenario:
you want to do something creative, so you set out in an effort to do just that
only to end up feeling overwhelmed or producing less-than-great work –
paintings of sporadic brush strokes, writing that leads to nowhere, or ideas
that we know are subpar. All of these things are more often than not the result
of not defining the context from which our ideas will flow, of believing
creativity is out of our control.
We should do our best not to confuse the
complexities of creativity with sheer magic. Creativity may very well be
partially magic, but there’s a lot about creativity that we do know
with some confidence (thanks to science!). One such thing is that creative
ideas are always, always, always a result of knowledge or existing ideas
colliding together in our minds.
To produce truly creative results in
anything we do (artistic or otherwise) requires that we first have a clear
understanding of what’s expected. When we set specific expectations or goals
for ourselves before we approach any creative endeavor, we are giving our minds
the context for which they can seek out related ideas.
That’s the meat of being able to really
think creatively: you establish some level of context from which to move
forward.
Without that context, your brain is going to
fire in every possible way it can, which is going to lead to fewer insights (or
no insights) or dull work.
Instead, give yourself a frame of focus
before you sit down to make any creative effort.
Creativity doesn’t work in a vacuum, it
works in a space – sometimes large and sometimes small – that we define,
sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
How To Build Your Imagination
A crucial aspect of creative thinking is the
capacity to imagine. As author and educational advisor Sir Ken Robinson once
said: “Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement.”Or
perhaps a more inspirational quote would be this one from Albert Einstein:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Without imagination, our ability to blend
ideas, to see things not as they are but as they might be, is greatly hindered.
If we cannot imagine new possibilities, our ability to think creatively is
limited. How can we think of ways that generate novel and worthwhile ideas if
we keep coming back to existing and proven ideas?
To improve our imagination we must look to
the source of our perceptions: our knowledge.
What fuels imagination is
everything we already know.
Our minds always come back around to what we
already know. It’s in our nature to compare new experiences to ones we’ve
already had, without that comparison we cannot begin to understand new ideas.
For example: try imagining a color that
doesn’t exist. The harder you try to do so, the more likely you are to keep
envisioning colors that readily come to mind: blue, red, yellow, green, white,
black, and so on. If you try really hard you might blend colors together,
forming off-shades of violet, teal, etc.
Where our knowledge fail our imaginations, our perspectives
can encourage them.
We can easily turn our knowledge on its head
in order to come up with more imaginative answers to the question at-hand: What
if we were to imagine sounds as colors? Not literally, of course, but
metaphorically. Who’s to say the ping of a door closing or the hum of a
flapping wing cannot be types of colors? Or what about textures, or tastes, or
entire experiences? Suddenly unimaginable colors are imaginable…but again: only
in the context of what we already know.
How to increase your
imagination.
To build a bridge between what we know and
what’s possible, we must do two things.
First, we must build knowledge and gain new
understandings of the world. If our minds can only imagine possibilities within
the context of what we already know, then it’s clear we must increase that
knowledge if we want to increase what we can imagine.
Thankfully, knowledge is easily gained if
you dedicate even a small amount of time to it.
Reading, not merely books or blogs you are
drawn to, but the ones you initially disagree with or find boring as well, is
one way to build knowledge. Travel can open your mind to new cultures, often
ones that will do things in surprising or backwards ways than you’re used to,
as a way of spurring knowledge and ideas. Trying out new things, like a new
type of food or a new store in your neighborhood, helps to build knowledge as
well. Conversations with acquaintances can be a surprisingly powerful source of
new knowledge too.
The second thing we must do to increase our
imaginations, once we have begun to build our knowledge, is to remain
powerfully curious about that knowledge, even humorously so.
We can do this by asking questions
constantly, not only about new things we experience, but about everything old
and true as well.
Imagining the improbable.
Back to the question of imagining new types
of colors: of course a sound is not acolor, and we are wise to not
think of the two as one in the same most of the time, but to use our
imaginations is to ask: what if sounds were types of colors? How would that
influence our ability to imagine new ones? What if, when someone asked us for
our favorite color, we shared a favorite memory instead? How can the concept of
“color” become enhanced by merely changing what we mean when we say the word?
For those who live with synesthesia, this
concept of combining typically unrelated themes is more than just a
hypothetical situation. The mental phenomenon of synesthesia is a cognitive
experience where stimulation in the brain connects to unusual neural networks.
That is to say: those who experience synesthesia mighttaste different
colors or see smells, in very real and concrete ways.
When looking at words on a page, for
example, a synesthete (as they’re called) might see each individual letter as
having a distinct color. Rather than merely reading paragraphs, the synesthete
would be – quite literally – reading a rainbow.
Researchers Peter Grossenbacheremail of
Naropa University and Christopher Lovelace of the Wake Forest University School
of Medicine write in their 2001 report titled:
Mechanisms of synesthesia: cognitive and physiological
constraints: “Synesthesia probably obeys the same rule as other conscious
experience: conscious experience of concurrent phenomena depends on neural
activity in appropriate sensory cortical areas.”
That is to say: the brain perceives
stimulation from the senses and tries to recall information related to that
perception, but somewhere along the lines other tidbits of information (say: a
color or sound) gets crossed along the way.
For those of us who don’t experience
synesthesia, we must imagine criss-crossing cognitive signals in order
to see the world any other way than what it really is.
To do that: constantly ask questions and
play dumb.
Why is the sun yellow? Why is a rock called
a “rock”? What happens when a bucket of water is poured out from 5,000 ft in
the air? What would the color of your favorite memory look like?
These are possibly improbable questions, but
if we are not asking them, we are not imagining.
The importance of cognitive
conflict.
It seems as though our imagination is best
drawn-out when we are faced with improbabilities and cognitive conflicts.
“The imagination is not meek–it doesn’t wilt in the face of
conflict. Instead, it is drawn out, pulled from its usual hiding place.”
The reason these types of improbable and
arguably silly questions provoke imagination goes back to the origin statement
of this article: our minds are drawn to what we already know, without doing so
the world is a strange and unfathomable place. To ask new questions, to
experience new things, our imagination grows because our very nature is to
understand that which we do not understand.
To
improve your imagination, build your knowledge and stay remarkably curious.
That’s all there is to it.
Three articles orginally published in CREATIVE SOMETHING here, here and here. All images are from CREATIVE SOMETHING.
Tanner
Christensen: Product
designer at Facebook, author of The Creativity Challenge, founder of Creative
Something, developer of some of the top creativity apps, contributing
author for Inc, former writer for Adobe's 99u. Living in the San
Francisco bay area, California.
