The First Step:
Freedom
The first step creative people take, whether or not they do it consciously, is to gain the inner freedom to consider new ideas and new possibilities. This step isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Many of us have incorporated within ourselves obstacles and barricades to the consideration of new horizons, particularly when these new vistas involve our own thoughts, our own dreams-our own potentially great ideas. Most of us need help to break the bonds we've placed around our own creativity.
The Second Step:
Expression
One step beyond the freedom to consider new possibilities is the ability to give voice to the problems and questions that the new ideas will address. At the beginning of the idea-generating process, you must feel free to say what's wrong or what's wanted-what's going on in this organization-what do we need. Appeal for help: ask questions.
In the following chapters you'll find ways to make certain that your real questions get asked. Question asking, you'll discover, is an art form, with specific techniques required of the truly creative person. The correct ways of expressing those questions are all-important, for on the questions hinge the answers.
The Third Step:
Creation
Freedom and expression, our first two steps, take you to the point of creation itself. Here's the heart of generating great ideas, and here's much of the fun. The most interesting thing about this process of creation, I believe, is how much fun it really is-how positive and effort free it is, when you understand how it works.
For creating great new ideas is not a process of making something out of nothing-it's not a heroic effort to concentrate one's genius on a problem and somehow conquer it through sheer brilliance. If that's the way problem solving seems to you, you're probably working much too hard-and working against yourself.
Creation is fun because it's play. It literally is play because it involves, most of all, playing with the elements we're given. Rather than make something out of nothing-diamond icicles out of thin air-we're always making something new out of something given. The play is in taking the ingredients of this world and re-creating them-toying with them, imagining new combinations, new forms, new applications. The more fun it becomes for you, the more you're on the track of the highest kind of creative process.
Highly creative people see things differently; their perspective on problems is different from that of most other people. It's different precisely because they have the habit of imaginatively un-creating the world and putting it back together in new ways. It's this different way of looking at problems that distinguishes the highly creative person. But if we look at the way we think when we're at our most creative, then we can begin to change our own perspectives and see more things more of the time in a different light. And see solutions previously hidden from view.
The Fourth Step:
Action
Because action is the step of the creative process least often associated with imagination and invention, it lends itself especially well to application of these attributes. Action-the phase of bringing ideas into reality-requires great ideas to match the ideas being enacted.
Action is the stage of the creative process where innovation meets organization-meets production-meets sales-meets distribution. We need to bring innovation into every step, in order to give it a chance-if our ideas and our organizations are to thrive in the competitive world of the 1990's and beyond.
The creative process is global, in every sense. This is not the machine age, where lock step production and distribution could (if indeed it ever could) just grind out the products of the mind. More and more, every step of the way must be a product of the mind-the open mind, free to imagine, able to feel, empowered to create.
The following chapters help you create and maintain an openness to ideas, within the organization, in your own routines, in meetings, in your home. The purpose: to help your great ideas fulfill their creator's intentions. To bring worthy ideas all the way through the cycle of physical realization is, by another name, fulfillment.
No End, No Limit
Some people think that our civilization is in decline, that we've lost our spark, and that culture as we know it is receding. I believe that what these observers are seeing is merely the evidence of profound, powerful change-change that demonstrates our growth and vitality. The most fundamental change I see occurring is the breaking down of barriers to the human spirit.
The creative human spirit has given notice that it cannot and will not be contained. Now we live in a time when it must be free, in order for us to find a way to live in harmony with our home, the earth. Because necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity for change is so compelling, you can be sure that we're in store for great innovations. And we can see everywhere that the human mind and spirit is rising to the task.
The spark that sustains our creativity could simply be called love, for I believe that the great thinkers, inventors, and artists of this world are really those who love life and who feel free to give to it what they receive from it. In order for that spark to burn, we need to be free, within and without, as Yoshiro NakaMatsu said at the beginning of this book. That's the precondition for creativity-and that's the wave we now see moving over our planet.
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