People act like creativity is some arcane skill, when they do things like send their employees to special "creativity seminars" that will somehow unlock their ability to be creative. But it's not.
Creativity isn't actually
creating something. It's just connecting the dots. Nothing more, nothing less. You know that puzzle, where there's a grid of dots that looks like this?
. . .
. . .
. . .
The goal is to connect all the dots using four straight lines, without lifting your pen. It's where we get the cliche "thinking outside the box," shorthand for being able to see things in a new way. This is what "creativity seminars" are supposed to help employees with.
But that's all bullshit. The important thing isn't learning some special perspective that allows you to magick original ideas out of the ether. The important thing is
connecting the damn dots.
Nothing is
really new. You can't, say, write an entirely original story, and it's stupid to try. All you can hope to do -- and all you should try to do -- is to connect two unconnected dots, and see what happens.
The easiest example, since we're all
here, is Apple.
Nothing Apple does is
new, per se. Yet they're the most admired company in the world because they know what dots to connect. Jobs isn't known for painting or poetry but he's clearly still creative, and it's in this sense of "everyday" creativity.
Practical creativity, really.
You have to be creative (or, at least, surround yourself with creative people) to run a successful business or charity or political campaign. People too often think of creativity as optional, or at the very least, auxiliary. It's like, you go to your special creativity corner to be creative,
some of the time. If you're an employee, you're creative only at pre-defined creativity sessions, unless you're one of the special "Creatives." It's ridiculous. Having a "creative department" is like having a "competitive department" (*cough* GM
). The entire organization needs to have a creative culture.