A blank slate can be an idea killer. Trying to find the right words for your first sentence. The right sentence for the first paragraph of the first chapter. Tooth marks on the back of the pencil in your hand. All beginning is tough. So you break your pencil. You shout, you scream, you rage. You’re blocked. A dead-end, a cul-de-sac of words. Where’s the creativity when you need it? Simple. It’s in the paper: fold it once, twice, do your magic and you’ve got an origami-swan. Maybe it’s not the bestseller you wanted, but then again, it just might be. Writing a book on origami can be a lucrative business, but the chances of it being so are odd. The point I’m trying to make however is that solving the problem is best done outside of the problem-space. The best solutions are often the ones for problems you had no idea existed.
I believe there are two kinds of creativity: bending the box and breaking the box. The design-thinking approach is a way to bend the box. It’s about finding a solution within a framework. There’s a given set of rules and restrictions and the job is to bend the limitations —the material, time, space, money, whatever— to your advantage. Like a puzzle waiting to be solved. Writing a book is always done with the letters of the alphabet and the restrictions of language, but the imagination words can evoke is unrestrained. It’s often exactly that restriction that causes us to come up with new ideas and styles that we would not have been able to come up with without restrictions. Sometimes we need a given set of rules to bend them.
The other kind of creativity is breaking the box. Looking at the box, or what’s left of it, from the outside, from a different perspective. Turning a blank page into a swan. Turning the box into a building block, using the broken pieces of your box to turn it into a sphere. This is the kind of creativity that questions your world, your perspective. It gives you new dimensions, makes you see new things even though they’ve always been there right in front of you. This wonderfully illustrated by the following short film by Léonard Cohen, Plato.